my life

What's this, really?

This is the first chapter of my thesis, and I've been working on it all weekend (when I wasn't goofing off all Saturday afternoon watching movies, that is; other than that, I've been very faithful). My deadline for my draft historiography essay section is past now. If you stretch the meaning of "draft," then I met the deadline.

But what is a "historiography," you ask. I'm asking the same thing, which is why my draft has not progressed beyond a rough collection of my thoughts on (virtual) paper.

I understand the basic concept: the idea is to provide chronological coverage of all the scholarly work on one's subject from its start to the present. The histories themselves are listed in chronological order because we are influenced by the times in which we live, to a large degree. When you list the historical work that has been done on a given subject in chronological order, you can see those changes in perception and how they fit into the larger framework of what was important at that time.

I've found some very brief historiographies in professional history journals (I don't read many other types, you see), but they are far more condensed than what I think my adviser and the committee want to see in my thesis itself.

I've run into a couple of problems with this. The first is, I have found no historiography in the theses I've read so far, so I don't have a "thesis model" to work from. Examples of what people want are often crucial to my being able to produce it. My second problem is that my subject is so obscure that any journal article I find that approximates it basically says "little or nothing has been written on this subject."

My adviser has told me to include broader coverages of the temperance movement (a regional one if I can get it; a national one if necessary), and remember that if they don't mention my subject, that "says something too." I realize it says something--namely, that until relatively recently, American history was written by white men and when torn between writing about spectacular legislature wars over state-wide prohibition v. local option laws or writing about how degraded and immoral and helpless with drink the black race is and how it is the responsibility of whites to save him from himself by denying him the right to buy whiskey--which they all more or less considered a foregone conclusion anyway--they write about the making of the laws, and not so much the arguments that were used to frighten and threaten people into voting for prohibition. I'm just not sure how to write "X contributed nothing to the discussion" into my historiographical essay.

So this evening, I'm off to the library to find some more general books on the history of the temperance movement (because clearly, I don't have enough of them) and hopefully, a sample thesis with a historiographical essay in someone's recent thesis. Once I have mine in presentable draft form, I'll get my thesis adviser to...well, shred it mercilessly.

By the time I finish each phase of this thesis, I realize how easy it really was all along, had I but known how to do it to begin with. But then, I'm quite sure that's the point of the exercise. ;)

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