Why I Write-Keith Livesey
Foreword
Every writer begins, sooner or later, with a deceptively
simple question: Why do I write? It
is a question that appears almost naïve, yet it contains within it the entire
problem of historical consciousness. To write history is never merely to
record; it is to choose, to interpret, to argue, to intervene. It is an act of
intellectual and moral positioning. And yet, despite its importance, very few
historians ever pause long enough to articulate the forces that compel them to
the page.
This collection grew out of that absence. When I first
encountered George Orwell’s essay " Why
I Write, I was struck not only by its clarity but by its courage. Orwell
understood that writing is inseparable from motive, and that motive is
inseparable from the world in which one lives. Later, during a creative-writing
course at the Bishopsgate Institute, I was encouraged to examine my own reasons
for writing. That exercise revealed something surprising: while writers of
fiction, poetry, and journalism have long reflected on their craft,
historians—those who claim to interpret the past for society—have been
curiously silent about their own creative processes.
Marc Bloch, in The
Historian’s Craft, remains one of the few exceptions. His insistence that
the historian must interrogate not only the past but the historian’s own method
is a reminder that historical writing is a human endeavour, shaped by
experience, conviction, and imagination. This book takes Bloch’s insight
seriously. It gathers together a range of voices—new, established,
professional, amateur—to explore the personal and intellectual conditions under
which historical writing emerges.
The predominance of female contributors is deliberate.
History as a discipline remains structurally male, not only in its
institutional composition but in its assumptions about authority and voice.
When invited, women historians and writers responded with enthusiasm, and their
presence here is both a corrective and a celebration. Their reflections
demonstrate that the craft of history is enriched when those long marginalised
are given space to speak.
This book is intended for students at the beginning of their
historical journey. It does not pretend to be exhaustive. Instead, it offers a
set of reflections that may save the reader some of the legwork involved in
discovering what it means to write history—its frustrations, its pleasures, its
responsibilities. Each contributor approaches the question differently, and
that diversity is the strength of the collection. There is no single way to
write history, but there are shared impulses, shared anxieties, and shared
commitments.
If these essays encourage even one new historian to think
more deeply about their craft, then the project has succeeded. All articles
remain the property of their authors. They may be used for non-commercial
purposes; please request permission at Keith_liv@yahoo.com.
Keith Livesey Editor
Dr Kirsteen M.
MacKenzie
The mid-seventeenth century remains one of the most
intellectually demanding and politically volatile periods in the history of
Britain and Ireland. It is an era in which constitutional experimentation,
religious conviction, military conflict, and competing visions of sovereignty
collided across three distinct but deeply entangled kingdoms. Yet for much of
the twentieth century, the historiography of this period was dominated by an
Anglocentric narrative that treated Scotland and Ireland as secondary theatres
in a drama centred on Westminster. The result was a distorted picture: a “civil
war” that was not civil, a revolution that was not singular, and a
constitutional crisis that was not confined to England.
Dr Kirsteen M. MacKenzie’s The Solemn League and Covenant of the Three Kingdoms and the
Cromwellian Union 1643–1663 is a major intervention in this landscape. It
restores the archipelagic complexity of the period and places the Covenanted
interest at the centre of the political transformations that reshaped Britain
and Ireland. Her study is not simply a rebalancing of emphasis; it is a
reorientation of perspective. By examining the Covenant as a transnational
political project—and the Cromwellian Union as a contested, often coercive
response—MacKenzie demonstrates that the constitutional future of the islands
was forged not in one capital but across three.
One of the strengths of this monograph is its refusal to
treat the Covenanters as a monolithic bloc. MacKenzie shows that
Presbyterianism, far from being a uniform ideology, was a broad and internally
diverse movement shaped by local conditions, national priorities, and shifting
political realities. Scottish, English, and Irish
Presbyterians shared common religious commitments, yet their
responses to the Cromwellian regime diverged sharply. These divergences were
not anomalies; they were the product of distinct historical experiences. By
tracing these differences with precision, MacKenzie offers a more nuanced
understanding of how religious and political identities operated across the
kingdoms.
Her analysis of the Cromwellian Union is equally incisive.
Rather than accepting the traditional narrative of Cromwell as a constitutional
innovator or proto-democrat, MacKenzie situates the English Republic within the
broader context of Stuart statecraft. She reveals a regime that frequently
disregarded precedent, legality, and the established customs of the kingdoms it
sought to govern. The Union, in her account, was not a visionary project of
reform but a deeply contested imposition—one that provoked resistance,
negotiation, and adaptation across Britain and Ireland. This interpretation
challenges long-standing assumptions and invites readers to reconsider the
nature of power, authority, and legitimacy in the period.
The book’s chronological breadth—from the forging of the
Solemn League and Covenant in 1643 to the aftermath of the Restoration—allows
MacKenzie to trace the long arc of political change. She shows how ideas born
in crisis endured, mutated, and resurfaced in new forms. The Covenant, far from
being a momentary alliance, became a framework through which Presbyterians
across the kingdoms interpreted events, justified actions, and imagined
constitutional futures. Its legacy, as MacKenzie demonstrates, extended well
beyond the battlefield.
This monograph also reflects the author’s own intellectual
journey. Her shift from a Cromwell-centred perspective to a genuinely
three-kingdoms approach mirrors the evolution of the field itself. It is a
reminder that historians must remain open to challenge, revision, and the
unsettling of long-held assumptions. MacKenzie’s work exemplifies that
openness. It is grounded in meticulous archival research, shaped by a
sensitivity to local contexts, and animated by a commitment to understanding
the period on its own terms rather than through inherited narratives.
The Solemn League and
Covenant of the Three Kingdoms and the Cromwellian Union
1643–1663 is a
significant contribution to the historiography of seventeenth-century Britain
and Ireland. It offers fresh perspectives, restores neglected voices, and
deepens our understanding of the constitutional and religious transformations
that reshaped the archipelago. For students, scholars, and general readers
alike, it provides a compelling and authoritative account of one of the most
complex political experiments in British and Irish history.
The Journey towards
Fresh Perspectives: A Personal Reflection on Historical Writing-Dr Kirsteen M
MacKenzie
First of all, I must thank Keith for the very kind
invitation to contribute to his blog. My
original idea was to write a defence of the three Stuart kingdoms, essentially
assessing the New British histories 20 years after the initial debate. I realise that for many the ‘new British
history’ moment has passed and historians have again retreated into their own
respective national histories. I thought it might be more useful to reflect
upon my own journey in researching and writing my new monograph, The Solemn League and Covenant of the Three
Kingdoms and the Cromwellian Union 1643-1663. I will reveal how my view of
mid-seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland has evolved over the decades.
Historians should not only offer a new perspective on the past but also be
fully open to their deeply held views being challenged, shaped, and influenced
by their own experiences and discoveries.
Before the Three
Stuart Kingdoms
If you had met me twenty years ago, I would have been very
much a Cromwellian. In April 1999, I was in Huntingdon for the 400th
anniversary of Oliver Cromwell’s birth. I had been interested in Cromwell for
almost a decade and had been a member of the Cromwell Association since I was a
teenager. I visited the Cromwell Museum frequently, often while we were
visiting my former childhood home. I had spent my formative years in East
Anglia. I had seen the film Cromwell, starring Richard Harris and Alec
Guinness, at school and had an excellent teacher who encouraged me to read
books on the subject.
I read Antonia Fraser’s Cromwell:
Our Chief of Men when I was in my first year at senior school, which
further fuelled my interest in Cromwell and Cromwellian tendencies. Unsurprisingly, I had a very Anglocentric
view of the civil wars, and Cromwell was undoubtedly the hero. At the time, having recently moved back to
Scotland from East Anglia, Cromwell was a link back to a place I deeply
missed.
My view of the conflict that engulfed Britain and Ireland in
the mid-seventeenth century was firmly shaped by the ‘English Civil War’. Although I was aware of the Scottish origins
of the conflict, the Covenanters and the prayer book riots hardly registered on
the radar! I found the rise of the New Model Army and its radical elements
fascinating, particularly the Levellers and the Diggers, and to this day
Christopher Hill’s The World Turned
Upside Down is one of my favourite history books. I saw Cromwell’s rise to
power as a positive development that was essential to Britain’s transition to
democracy. I was a fully paid-up member
of the Whig school of history without even realising it. Towards the end of my
undergraduate history degree, I contemplated doing a PhD on the Levellers or
the Quakers, but my perspectives on the period were changing.
Wider Horizons: The
Three Stuart Kingdoms
In the sub-honours year of my undergraduate degree, I took
the three-kingdoms course, which examined seventeenth-century Britain and
Ireland from an integrated three-kingdoms perspective. It broadened my horizons immensely, as the
Stuart monarchy had to govern three very diverse yet interconnected kingdoms.
The ‘English Civil War’ very quickly became the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Events in Scotland and Ireland became central
to understanding the conflict and were as important as events in England. One momentous shift in opinion came with the
realisation that Westminster did not hold the monopoly on constitutional
innovation, with important developments taking place in Scotland and Ireland
too.
The Covenanters were eager to establish a Scottish
Parliament which dispensed with the
Royal Prerogative. In Ireland, after the 1641 rebellion, the
Irish Confederation of Kilkenny was formed and evolved into a sophisticated
form of government with a supreme council, a general assembly, and various
committees. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms were an era of constitutional change
across Britain and Ireland. During my
time on the three kingdoms course, constitutional change was also taking place
across Britain and Northern Ireland. Scotland’s own parliament was reinstated
for the first time since 1707, Wales was given its own assembly, and devolved
government was restored in Northern Ireland.
These modern constitutional developments reinforced the three kingdoms
approach to the Stuart monarchy.
My view of Cromwell began to change, and far from being a
harbinger of positive democratic change, Cromwell and the English Republic came
to be seen as a highly dysfunctional form of government within the wider
context of Stuart Britain and Ireland. This became all the more apparent when I
embarked upon my PhD research in 2001 and explored the Covenanters' reaction to
the Cromwellian conquest of Scotland.
Interestingly, over the next few months, within the UK
newspapers, debates raged over the legality of the proposed invasion of Iraq,
citing precedent and international law with reference to military intervention
and the occupation of sovereign states.
To my surprise, Archibald Johnston of Wariston, one of the
leading Covenanters against the Cromwellian invasion of Scotland, was using
arguments similar to those opposing intervention in Iraq! Historians always
write the past within the present, and I doubt I would have taken Wariston’s
arguments so seriously if it were not for the current climate.
During the course of my research, I travelled throughout
Britain and Ireland and began to appreciate the diversity of these islands at
first hand. I also began to understand
that nations, groups and individuals cannot simply be put into fixed
categories. Actions and beliefs are a
Pandora's box shaped by constantly evolving circumstances. Many labels that
historians apply to religious and political groups are overlapping broad
churches of common values and internal conflicts. Throughout my book, I highlight not just the
common religious and political values that Presbyterians and the Covenanted
interest held across the kingdoms, but also the internal divisions. In addition, I drew attention to the
differences of opinion and the distinctive approaches Presbyterians in
Scotland, England and Ireland had towards the Cromwellian government based on
the particular situations they found themselves within their own localities and
kingdoms. Examining events from a new
perspective forced me to view Cromwell and the English Republic with fresh
eyes. Cromwell became a ruthless and
Machiavellian operator, breaking all rules, precedents, laws and customs of
Stuart Britain, a far cry from the man who put Westminster on the road to
democracy.
Jodie Collins’s Essay
One of the aims of this collection is to show that
historians do not emerge fully formed. They are made—slowly, unevenly, and
often unexpectedly—through personal experience, political development, and the
gradual discovery of intellectual tools that make the past legible. Jodie
Collins’s contribution exemplifies this process with unusual clarity. Her essay
is not simply a reflection on writing; it is a record of transformation, of how
a young scholar moved from uncertainty and self-doubt to the beginnings of a
doctoral project grounded in confidence, purpose, and theoretical conviction.
What stands out immediately is the honesty of her
trajectory. Collins does not present herself as a precocious historian who
always knew her path. Quite the opposite. She begins from a position familiar
to many students: struggling with writing, unsure of her abilities, and
convinced that history—despite her interest in politics—was somehow beyond her
reach. That she failed history at college is not treated as a confession but as
a reminder that intellectual development rarely follows a straight line. Her
later success, culminating in a collaborative PhD between Sussex and the British
Library, is not a triumphalist narrative but a demonstration of how political
understanding can unlock academic potential.
The turning point in her journey is the discovery of
historical materialism. For Collins, Marxism is not an abstract doctrine but a
method that renders history intelligible. She describes how, once she grasped
the material forces that shape human societies, writing ceased to be an
excruciating task and became enjoyable. This is significant. Many students
encounter Marxism as a set of conclusions; Collins encountered it as a way of
thinking. Her citation of Lenin’s formulation—emphasising the “objective
conditions of production of material life” and the laws governing their
development—captures the intellectual foundation upon which her writing now
rests.
Her essay also offers a candid account of the practical
challenges of writing. She admits to over-reading as a way of avoiding the
blank page, to using hesitant language that undermines her own arguments, and
to the constant struggle for clarity. These admissions are not weaknesses; they
are the realities of scholarly labour. Her strategies—structuring before
writing, organising notes thematically, striking through rather than deleting,
and using tools like Evernote—are the kinds of practical insights that students
rarely receive but desperately need.
Yet the most compelling part of Collins’s reflection is her
answer to the question of why she
writes. She rejects the celebratory, nationalistic, and often mythologised
narratives that dominate popular history. She writes to challenge them. She
writes because history, properly understood, is a tool for grasping the present
and shaping the future. She writes because distorted accounts of the past
restrict our ability to act in the present. In this sense, her work is not
merely academic; it is political in the best and most serious meaning of the
term.
Collins’s essay reminds us that writing history is not
simply an intellectual exercise but a moral one. It requires clarity,
conviction, and a willingness to confront the ideological distortions that
obscure the real forces shaping human life. Her contribution is a testament to
how a young historian, armed with a materialist method and a commitment to
accessibility, can begin to carve out a voice capable of challenging dominant
narratives.
It is a pleasure to include her work in this collection.
Why I Write and How I
Write Jodie Collins
Up until the age of 19, I was quite certain that I was not a
writer, let alone a historian. Despite my interest in politics and history, I
found writing excruciating, and I failed history in college. I am now, 7 years
later, at the beginning of a PhD in American History, as part of a
collaborative project between the University of Sussex and the British Library,
specifically analysing the political pamphlets of interwar America.
Without going into too much detail, getting to this point
was not straightforward and was owed largely to both personal and political
development. But fundamentally, as I began to understand the concept of
historical materialism, history made much more sense to me, and, in turn, this
not only made writing easier but also more enjoyable. Historical materialism is
concerned with analysing the fundamental forces which drive history forward.
As Lenin put it: By examining … all ideas and all the
various tendencies stem from the condition of the material forces of
production, Marxism indicated the way to an allembracing and comprehensive
study of the process of the rise, development, and decline of socio-economic
systems. People make their own history, but what determines the motives of
people —of the mass of people—i.e., what is the total of all these clashes in
the mass of human societies? What are the objective conditions of production of
material life that form the basis of all human historical activity? What is the
law of development of these conditions? To all these, Marx drew attention and
indicated the way to a scientific study of history as a single process which,
with all its immense variety and contradictoriness, is governed by definite
laws.1
This materialistic approach forms the foundation of my
writing and guides me as I explore new areas of research. Nevertheless, I’m
still hardly confident in my writing abilities. This lack of confidence can
sometimes trap me into overreading to avoid writing, but most of the time it’s
best to get your thoughts down on paper, no matter how rubbish you think they
are. I’m also prone to using uncertain language like ‘perhaps,’ ‘could,’ and
‘possibly’ far more than I should. This sort of language can indicate a lack of
conviction in the ideas you are sharing, so when I’m finished writing, I
sometimes do a ‘find and replace’ to cut them out.
I feel that a central principle of my writing is to be
direct and clear. This is often for my own benefit; when I find something
complex or have difficulty understanding it, I spend time breaking it down into
something more digestible and that I would feel comfortable explaining to
others. This makes me feel more confident in my own knowledge and sure that
what I am writing has solid foundations. I find that complex language is often used
as a distraction to shield unsound ideas. But also, I hope that clarity in my
writing will make my work more accessible to a broader audience, beyond simply
circulating within an academic bubble.
In terms of more practical writing techniques, I usually
write down a brief outline of what I’m about to write (it doesn’t matter if
this is later shifted around), which I find helps motivate me. Often, I will
organise my notes from readings thematically, so that later, when I’m writing
on a topic, I can easily find what I’m looking for. When I go over these notes,
I’ll ‘strikethrough’ sections I’ve covered in my main writing, but never delete
them. There’s nothing worse than losing track of that one quote that would’ve
fitted perfectly. I also use Evernote to organise journal articles and other
texts, which I feel I’d be lost without during this PhD.
Finally, why do I write? I’m drawn to history because it
helps me to understand the conditions of the present day. And as the old saying
goes, ‘Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.’ However, I’d argue
that much popular history is ideologically skewed, focusing on the triumphs of
great men, celebrating nationalistic traditions, and even pushing outright
myths. How can we learn from history or change the future when our popular
perception of the past is distorted and restricted? I write because I want to,
in my own small way, help challenge this dominant narrative and, in turn,
enhance how we study and share history.
1.https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/ch02.htm1
Dr Alun Withey’s
Essay
One of the recurring themes in this collection is the sheer
variety of ways historians come to understand their own writing. Some
contributors emphasise political conviction, others intellectual
transformation, and others still the slow discovery of confidence. Dr Alun
Withey’s reflection adds another dimension: the evolution of a historian who
has written across multiple genres, audiences, and formats, and who has learned
to adapt his voice without losing his scholarly centre.
Withey’s career is itself a testament to the non-linear
paths historians often take. After a decade in the banking sector, he returned
to study, progressed through the Open University, Glamorgan, Cardiff, and
Swansea, and built a research profile spanning early modern medicine,
industrial history, and—most recently—the cultural history of facial hair. His
trajectory reminds us that tidy academic pipelines do not produce historians. They
are shaped by curiosity, opportunity, and the willingness to begin again.
What makes his essay particularly valuable is its appeal to
the audience. Withey understands that writing is not a single skill but a set
of overlapping practices. A 10,000-word journal article demands rigour,
scaffolding, and engagement with existing scholarship. A 1,000-word newspaper
piece requires punch, clarity, and narrative drive. A radio script must
compress argument into rhythm and immediacy. Many academics fear that writing
for popular audiences will dilute their scholarly voice; Withey argues the
opposite. Moving between genres strengthens the historian’s craft, broadens
their expressive range, and sharpens their sense of what truly matters in an
argument.
His practical advice is equally grounded. Withey writes
every day, even if only a few lines. He begins with bullet-point structures
that become the launchpads for paragraphs. He sets daily word targets. He turns
off distractions. He writes as he researches, allowing sources to shape the
argument rather than forcing them into a predetermined mould. He does not
produce multiple drafts; instead, he treats the first version as the final one,
reshaping as he goes. These habits are not prescriptions—they are insights into
one historian’s working rhythm, offered with humility rather than dogma.
What stands out most, however, is his insistence that
writing is a practice, not a performance. When stuck, he writes something
else—a blog post, a short reflection—to keep the momentum alive. He recognises
that writing is not a mystical act but a craft that improves through
repetition. His scepticism toward the “writing about writing” genre is
refreshing. Yet, his own contribution demonstrates precisely why such
reflections matter: they force historians to articulate what they do
instinctively and, in doing so, illuminate the hidden labour behind every
chapter, article, and book.
Withey’s essay is a reminder that historical writing is not
merely the transmission of knowledge but the cultivation of voice. It is shaped
by discipline, experimentation, and the willingness to adapt. His reflections
will be especially valuable to students who imagine that historians write only
in one register, or that academic prose must be stiff, formal, or hermetically
sealed. Withey shows that good writing—whether scholarly or popular—begins with
clarity, structure, and the courage to begin.
Writing About
Writing-Dr Alun Withey
In her post for this site, Penelope Corfield has already
given an excellent set of insights into writing practices and tips for
constructing work. I thought I would take a slightly different line and reflect
on my own writing journey. I’ve been writing as an academic historian for over
10 years and have published three books and more than 10 journal articles to
date. More recently, I’ve also begun to write for a variety of different
outputs, ranging from magazines, newspapers and websites to my own blog.
Writing is at the absolute heart of what I do, and I generally write every day
– even if it's only a few lines. I’m currently finishing off what I hope will
be the fourth book – a study of the history of facial hair.
Whatever I’m writing, I feel it’s important to think about
the audience for the work. This has to do with developing and modifying your
authorial ‘voice’. For example, writing a 1,000-word newspaper article is
completely different to an academic journal article of 10,000 words… or a radio
script of 300 words. Each has its own requirements and constraints, and each
speaks to different people, and in different ways. Whilst academic history
journal articles need a solid grounding in the existing literature and often a
‘scaffold’ of referencing and stylistic conventions, pieces for popular
publications are often much shorter, punchier, and in a ‘looser’ style.
Some academics find it hard to cross from one to the other,
since writing something without referencing it goes against the grain! A
colleague also once mentioned to me that they were afraid of mixing styles and
writing for a popular audience, in case it ‘polluted’ their academic writing. I
actually think the opposite is true: writing different things in different ways
makes for a more well-rounded author.
I’m sometimes asked how and where to start with writing. The
obvious answer is at the beginning, but in fact even that’s not always
necessarily true. Whatever I’m writing, I always need a spark of inspiration –
usually something I’ve come across in a primary source or whilst reading a book
or article. Often, I find that a single source is enough to get the creative
juices flowing, and it’s important to get it down on paper as soon as possible.
Where it might end up in a chapter can be decided later.
When I think about how
I write, though, there are certain things that I always try to do. Whatever I’m
writing, for example, whether a full article or book chapter, or even a blog
post, I always start by making a short list of bullet points, outlining what I
think the main arguments of the piece will be. This obviously helps to map out
the structure of the work. But I also find that by writing the points as prose,
I can use them as launch points for paragraphs or sections. Sometimes, even
just outlining what you want to argue can be a very good way of getting the
writing to flow.
Secondly, I think it’s important to set aside specific time
for writing and to give yourself the space and environment to do it in. For me,
this means turning off social media, email and other distractions. Some people
can write in noisy libraries or with music on, but I need peace to focus on the
task.
Thirdly, I am a strong believer in setting a daily writing
target. I am very lucky to be able to write quickly, generally, so my target is
usually 1000 words per day. It sounds like a lot, but it is only about 2 A4
pages. Once that target is reached, unless it’s really flowing, I often leave
it and move on to other things. This is about as close as I get to discipline
in my own writing! Indeed, in several other ways, my approach is perhaps
unorthodox!
For example, I never write drafts. When I begin writing a
chapter, I consider it the final version. Although it will naturally be shaped
along the way (things are always cut and pasted!), I rarely, if ever, start
over again or have different versions of the same. Some people also like to
amass all their source materials before starting to write.
The benefits of that approach are manifold. But I have
always preferred to write as I research, finding inspiration from the sources
that I’ve just worked on and, to a large extent, letting them dictate the shape
of the argument. In that sense, although I have a broad idea or theory to begin
with, it develops along the way. I’m also a great believer in ‘just’ writing to
see where it can lead. Like so many things, writing needs regular practice to maintain
the momentum. Sometimes when I’m stuck with my academic work, I make a point of
writing a blog post instead, even on a completely different subject, to keep
things ticking over. In fact, one recent blog post actually led directly to an
academic article on the same subject.
In the last analysis, writing is a personal preference, and
what works for one person might not necessarily work for another. That is why
I’m sometimes slightly dubious about the whole ‘writing about writing’
literature, and also loath to give students a prescriptive list of what they
should do, beyond general tips. But writing this piece has actually been very
enlightening, since it’s forced me to reflect on what I do and analyse how I do
it… Something I’ve never really done. Sometimes the best thing to do is… write.
Alison Stuart’s Essay
One of the pleasures of assembling this collection has been
discovering the sheer variety of paths that lead writers—historians, novelists,
and those who straddle both worlds—to the page. Alison Stuart’s reflection is a
reminder that the impulse to write often begins long before formal training,
long before academic discipline, and sometimes long before we even recognise it
as such. Her journey is rooted not in archives or seminars but in childhood
imagination, in the power of stories read aloud, and in the emotional imprint
left by a single historical novel.
Stuart’s love of the English Civil War began not in a
university library but in the intimacy of Sunday afternoons, listening to her
father read from books that opened windows onto a turbulent past. Daphne du
Maurier’s The King’s General did more
than entertain; it ignited a lifelong fascination with the romance, tragedy,
and human drama of the seventeenth century. Many historians begin with
curiosity; Stuart began with enchantment. That enchantment matured into a
passion strong enough to survive school, work, family, and the long stretches
of life in which writing must wait its turn.
Her essay is a testament to the persistence of that passion.
Even as career and circumstance intervened, she continued to collect books, to
write in stolen moments, and to nurture the story that would eventually become By the Sword. The arrival of computers
and the internet—tools unimaginable in her childhood—transformed her ability to
research and write, allowing her to turn decades of private fascination into a
body of published work. Eight novels later, six set in the English Civil War,
Stuart stands as one of the few contemporary writers who have made that period
their imaginative home.
What makes her contribution particularly valuable to this
collection is the way she bridges the worlds of history and fiction. Stuart is
a trained historian, though her academic specialisation lies in ancient history
rather than the seventeenth century. Yet she writes with a historian’s
sensibility: attentive to detail, committed to accuracy, and grounded in a
lifetime of reading. Her novels may be classified as romance, but they are
built on foundations of careful research and deep familiarity with the period.
She demonstrates that historical fiction, when written with integrity, can
illuminate the past as vividly as any monograph.
Her creative process is equally instructive. Stuart writes
organically, allowing characters and situations to grow rather than forcing
them into rigid plots. She uses Scrivener to organise research, keeps her
sources close, and resists the temptation to drown in detail. Her approach is
pragmatic: when research threatens to stall the story, she leaves a note and
moves on. This balance—between accuracy and narrative momentum—is one that many
historians struggle to achieve, and her reflections offer a model for
maintaining it.
Stuart’s essay also reminds us that writing is not merely an
academic exercise but an act of devotion. She writes because she loves the
period, has lived with it since childhood, and wants to bring its people,
conflicts, and textures to life for readers. Her work is a celebration of the
English Civil War’s emotional and imaginative power, and her reflections show
how personal history can shape historical writing in ways that are both
profound and enduring.
It is a pleasure to include her voice in this collection—one
that speaks not only to the craft of writing but to the lifelong relationship
between a writer and the past that first captured her imagination.
Why Do Writers Write?
With Alison Stuart
I know it is hard to imagine, but I was born in a time and
place with no computers and very little television. Every Sunday afternoon, my
father would read to me from his favourite books (some of which, I have to say,
were probably not really suitable for young children). Dad loved English
history, so many of the stories he read us were historical novels, and the one
that stayed with me and fired my imagination for all time was THE KING’S
GENERAL by Daphne Du Maurier. If you don’t know this story, it is set in the
English Civil War and involves the very real-life Sir Richard Grenville.
I was in love… not just with history but in particular with
the English Civil War. The romance and tragedy of that terrible war between the
King and his Parliament, cavaliers and roundheads, captured my imagination. I
kept a scrapbook of articles cut from magazines; I devoured any book or movie I
could find set in that period, and when I ran out of stories to read, I started
writing my own. My best friend at school also loved writing, and we would spend
our lunch hours perched in the willow tree in our school yard, writing away in
shorthand notebooks.
Of course, I grew up, and life, career, and family got in
the way of writing, but I never lost that urge to write. Over the years, I
continued to accumulate a library of books about the English Civil War, and in
my spare time, I kept writing the story of my heart (which is now a published
novel called
BY
THE SWORD).
Then along came computers, the internet, and instant access to resources I
could only have dreamed of. I have now published eight novels, six of which are
set in the English Civil War.
I studied history (and law) at university, so I am,
technically, a historian by training, but unfortunately, living in Australia,
my choice of subjects was limited, and thus my qualification is in ancient
history! That doesn’t matter… I think if I had pursued my love of the English
Civil War academically, I would have lost my passion for writing stories! That
doesn’t prevent me from writing the occasional ‘academic’ type article, and for
many years I posted regularly to a blog called Hoydens and Firebrands (it is
now archived, but you can still find my posts, eg this article on War Crimes
during the English Civil War, which are
still being read regularly).
The books I write are often classified as ‘romance’ because
I like my characters to have a happy-ever-after, but for me historical accuracy
is paramount, and it is gratifying when readers comment on the colour and
accuracy I bring to the story. I have had a lifetime of absorbing every detail
of the English Civil War period, and I find I don’t need to do much research,
but I do go to my favourite books, which often have little details I can’t find
online that bring a story to life. For example, my book THE KING’S MAN came
from a single line in Antonia Fraser’s biography of Cromwell, which notes that
a ‘Miss Granville’ threw a brickbat at the coach bearing Oliver Cromwell to
dine with the Lord Mayor of London. Who was Miss Granville and why was she
hurling brickbats at the Lord Protector? I still don’t know the true story
(don’t tell me!), but I had fun with a fictional explanation!
I am, however, currently writing a series of historical
novels set in Australia in the 1870s, which involves a huge amount of research,
from gold-mining techniques to the lighting they used. The trick I find is not
to get bogged down in the research while you are writing. My priority is the
story, and if I get stuck on a piece of research I don’t know, I write myself a
note to go back and fix it when I come to revise the book.
Now for the practicalities… how do I write? I write all my
books using a project management system for writers called Scrivener, which
enables me to store the research (documents, images and websites) so it is
easily accessible to the story I am writing. I don’t really plot my stories –
they grow organically from an idea, a character or a situation. There is no
right or wrong way, and trust me, I have tried plotting, but it killed the
story for me before I even began. Every writer is different, and whatever works
for the individual is the right way for them.
Claire Canary’s Essay
One of the most striking features of this collection is the
sheer diversity of routes by which writers arrive at history. Some come through
political conviction, some through academic training, some through archival
immersion. Claire Canary’s path is different again: hers is a story of
language, imagination, and the gradual realisation that the past can be
inhabited—not academically, but creatively—through the written word.
Canary begins not with history but with language itself. Her
earliest passion was for words: spoken, written, shaped, and played with.
Comedy sharpened that love, teaching her how a single line, perfectly
delivered, can illuminate character, reveal absurdity, or transform a scene. It
is no accident that she gravitated toward scriptwriting and creative writing.
Her instinct was always toward narrative, dialogue, and the expressive
possibilities of language. Yet her first professional experience—writing
marketing copy— left her doubting her vocation. Many writers experience this
moment: the collision between private creativity and public expectation.
Canary’s honesty about that early crisis is one of the strengths of her
reflection.
Her turn toward history came unexpectedly, through comedy
once again. Blackadder may not be a
conventional gateway into historical study, but it awakened her curiosity about
the Regency and, more importantly, about the past as a space of human
experience. From there, her fascination with the Great Fire of London took
root. She approached the event not as a historian but as a storyteller,
imagining the lives of ordinary Londoners caught in catastrophe. This emotional
engagement—often frowned upon in academic circles—is precisely what fuels
historical fiction. Canary does not claim to be a historian; she claims the
right to feel, to imagine, and to reconstruct. That imaginative empathy is the
foundation of her writing.
Her essay is also a testament to the power of research to
shape fiction. Canary’s exploration of the Great Fire led her into the lives of
Charles II, James, Duke of York, and a host of seventeenth-century figures. She
discovered that studying real people enriched her understanding of her
fictional characters. She recognised that no character—real or invented—exists
in isolation. The political, social, and emotional turbulence of Stuart Britain
shaped every life, and her fiction must reflect that. Her research process,
blending online resources, printed works, museum exhibitions, guided walks, and
anniversary events, demonstrates how historical fiction can be grounded in
serious engagement with the past.
What makes her contribution particularly compelling is the
moment she decided to write. Encouraged by an author she admired, she began her
first scene on a train journey. The carriage's motion contrasted with the
imaginative stillness of 1666, and she found herself transported. That
moment—when writing becomes irresistible—is one that many authors recognise.
From it grew not a single novel but a trilogy, a commitment that speaks to both
ambition and devotion.
Her writing process is pragmatic and personal. She keeps
electronic notes, jots down historical details, and lets plots develop in her
mind rather than through rigid planning. When tangled in complexity, she lists
what her characters have done and why—a technique that reveals her instinct for
psychological coherence. She writes with the hope that readers will care for
her characters, but also with the desire to kindle appreciation for Stuart
Britain itself. Her fiction is not escapism; it is an invitation to engage with
an era of revolution, plague, fire, conflict, and scientific transformation.
Canary’s essay reminds us that historical writing—whether
academic or fictional—begins with curiosity, empathy, and the courage to
imagine. She writes because the seventeenth century speaks to her. After all,
its upheavals resonate across centuries, and the ordinary people of 1666
deserve to be remembered, even if only through the lens of fiction.
Why I Write, How I
Write by Claire Canary
Language was perhaps the initial love of my life. I was a
very vocal baby, speaking early, and I’m sure my nearest and dearest would be
the first to say that I haven’t shut up since. As I got older, though, I found
writing words down had just as much appeal as saying them, and while others at
school tended to favour painting or PE, I was only ever really happy with a pen
in my hand. In my teens, I acquired another love that was set to last. That was
the comedy. I realised quite quickly that this second passion was linked to my
first, mind you, because it was the quotable lines from comedic productions
that really got me obsessed. They were what opened my eyes to the possibilities
language had to offer. Despite my huge admiration for performers, I saw the
script as where the real magic lay, and there was nothing to beat the laughter
it could bring. After leaving school, I took courses in Scriptwriting and
Creative Writing, thinking there was a scribe somewhere inside me. I’m sorry to
say that my first venture into professional writing had me questioning this,
however. I was working on marketing text, so maybe it was the difference in
content. Knowing, rather than just dreaming, that my pieces would be made
public also put pressure on me. For whatever reason, though, I found myself
sweating over every sentence, and back then that didn’t seem the mark of a
skilled individual. It struck me that writing wasn’t my vocation after all. I
went on to concentrate on less creative talents and studied Proofreading, with
the intention of channelling any capability I had with words into the
scribblings of others. While my
enthusiasm for writing was waning, my interest in the past was burgeoning.
Harking back to my enthusiasm for comedy, I cannot deny that
it was the sitcom Blackadder that fuelled it. To satisfy my curiosity, I
started looking into the reality behind the third series' setting, which
focuses on the Regency. Still, if you’d been playing word association with me
and tried me with “history”, I would almost certainly have said “Great Fire of
London”. There was something about this historical event that stood out above
all others in my mind. For it to hit the year following the capital’s famous
plague epidemic seemed almost to add insult to injury, just when the country
thought it had left behind the restrictions of the Interregnum, not to mention
the destruction of the Civil Wars. 1666’s Great Fire appeared to be a climax of
the turmoil the mid-17th century had unleashed. Many claim historians shouldn’t
feel emotional about occurrences from bygone days. All I can say in my defence
is that I’ve never considered myself a historian. Like it or not, I was
mentally putting myself in the place of those poor Londoners. They were mostly
ordinary people. Chandlers, schoolchildren, apothecaries, maids – nobody in
particular, but still somebody. It was only for my imagination to decide.
So ideas were germinating, but what was I to do with them?
By this time, my proofreading and editing had taken me into a real mixture of
texts, and spelling, grammar, and punctuation had become a joyous part of what
writing was about. While I don’t believe they are essential to the creative
process, they open up all sorts of new avenues for expression on the page, many
of which are lost in spoken form. Prose now had a stronger pull on me than
scripts, and there was no doubt I harboured a desire to tell a tale solely by
the written word. But I didn’t think I had it in me. Then I got to meet an
author I’d been lucky enough to work with remotely. I admired him and felt I’d be
a fool to ignore his advice. It was a good job then that his opinion was “just
go for it”. On the train home, I set to work and wrote an opening scene. From
there, I was hooked. While the rocking carriage whisked me through England, my
mind was firmly transported into 1666 and, quite frankly, I didn’t want to
leave.
That isn’t to say it wasn’t challenging. It took me about a
year before I realised I was approaching it from the wrong angle, or at least
in the wrong order. Getting straight into the action was all very well, but my
characters, like anyone in the world, had pasts, and as their earlier lives
developed in my head, another yarn was born. Then there were their futures. I
couldn’t be so cruel as to leave them hanging, could I? Henceforth, the amateur
trying her hand at a little story decided to commit to a trilogy. Now that’s a
lot of words. Without the history, though, her pages would be blank.
The research has been one of the most fascinating tasks I’ve
ever undertaken. With the Great Fire being the central focus, it was my
starting point, but I soon branched out in different directions. The
involvement of the King and the Duke of York led me to read up on them both and
delve a bit into their personal stories. This, in turn, introduced me to all
sorts of 17th-century figures, who were fun to meet but seemed very
distracting. I didn’t want to lose focus on the characters of my own creation.
It was surprising just how much I learned about my protagonists by studying
real people, though. As John Donne pointed out, “No man is an island”. When the
nation was still reeling from bitter, bloody conflict, figures of authority
were despised and revered, while the emerging health crisis endangered society
collectively. Emotions ran high, with events and opinions of those around
shaping every individual. Even my fictional characters couldn’t escape reality,
so to recognise what went on in these 1660s heads, I had to understand
something of Stuart Britain.
I don’t think I’d have attempted this in pre-Internet days,
although printed articles and books can shed light on subjects in greater
detail than online resources alone. It’s amazing how gripping a non-fiction
read can be, by the way. Special mention here goes to Adrian Tinniswood’s “By
Permission of Heaven: The Story of the Great Fire of London” and Rebecca
Rideal’s “1666: Plague, War and Hellfire”. What I’d regard as my best research
experiences came last year through some of the many events commemorating the
350th anniversary of the Great Fire. They weren’t always ideal for
the obscure details. Still, talks by historians, walking tours led by city
guides, charred exhibits on display in museums, and a fascinating new study
into the cause of the fire all the more drove my enthusiasm.
The atmosphere itself was excellent. Strangers exchanged
comments, and I no longer felt weird about sympathising with the victims of the
time. Looking to get a better sense of the period, I remembered that the UK
didn't lack preserved history. Banqueting House is a particularly good one, not
only for its visual resplendence but also for its audio commentary that talks
through some of the events that have taken place in the building.
I’m armed with a notebook if I'm on a visit anywhere of 17th-century
relevance, but most of my jotting down is done electronically. Paper is too
readily lost and overlooked. I mainly confine notes to historical facts, and
the majority of my plot devising is done only in my mind. If I catch myself
tied up in knots over it, I sometimes resort to listing the actions my
characters have taken and why. This can help clarify interlinking storylines
and show me how to proceed if I’m lucky. Thinking up complex plots could well
be my downfall, but it adds a sense of mystery that keeps me guessing myself.
I hope the scenarios will spark some interest, and, of
course, I’d like to see my readers feel for the characters. Yet, if someone
takes nothing more from my work than a little appreciation for Stuart Britain,
I’ll have done a service to an era that has served me well. I may not have
lived through it, but revolution, debauchery, conflagration, combat, mass
perishing and scientific pioneering teach people an awful lot, even 350 years
later.
Claire Canary is still working on her books and is currently
unpublished, but plans to seek literary representation soon. In the meantime,
she freelances as a proofreader/editor, trying to write historical fiction
#GreatPlague #GreatFire. Twitter:
@FlashheartFave
Marcus Rediker’s
Essay
Marcus Rediker’s contribution to this series stands
apart—not only because he is one of the most influential historians of the last
half-century, but because his reflection on why
and how he writes is inseparable from
the political, ethical, and poetic commitments that define his work. Rediker
has spent his career illuminating the lives of those whom traditional
historiography rendered invisible: sailors, enslaved people, rebels, runaways,
mutineers, and the motley proletariat of the Atlantic world. His essay, first
published in 2010, is both a personal testament and a methodological manifesto
for history from below.
Rediker begins with a memory as vivid as any scene in his
books: sitting at a kitchen table in Kentucky, listening to his grandfather,
Fred Robertson—coal miner, storyteller, and the earliest influence on his
historical imagination. The portrait is unforgettable. Robertson holds a Lucky
Strike in one hand and a saucer of Maxwell House coffee in the other, “which he
sipped that way even when it was no longer hot”. In this posture, he delivered
stories filled with “pathos, humour, and quiet heroism of working-class life”.
Rediker’s description of his grandfather’s storytelling—its drama, its
silences, its Biblical cadences, its forbidden curse words—reveals the origins
of his own narrative style: vivid, humane, and attentive to the emotional truth
of lived experience.
This early encounter with oral history shaped Rediker’s
lifelong commitment to recovering voices from below. He recalls an admonition
from graduate school: “Go on reading until you hear voices.” At the time, it
sounded like an invitation to madness, but memories of his grandfather helped
him understand the deeper meaning: “humanise the sources, humanise the story.
Learn to listen”. This ethic of listening—of hearing the speech, rhythms,
metaphors, and silences of ordinary people—has become one of the defining
features of Rediker’s work.
His essay also reveals the extraordinary range of sources he
draws upon. Dictionaries of sailors’ slang, Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,
maritime glossaries, proletarian poetry, and the archives of crime all become
tools for reconstructing the consciousness of working people. Rediker’s
insistence on the poetic dimension of history is particularly striking. He
writes that poetry “can get the historian close to the experience and
consciousness of working people” and cites Christopher Hill’s observation that
imaginative history is “akin to retrospective poetry”. For Rediker, poetry is
not ornament; it is method.
One of the most powerful passages in the essay recounts the
story of the enslaved man aboard the Loyal
George who resisted Captain Timothy Tucker’s violence with a single word: adomma. Rediker calls it “a profound
one-word poem” and shows how this act of defiance sparked an insurrection among
the enslaved. The scene is rendered with the same moral clarity and narrative
force that characterises The Slave Ship
and The ManyHeaded Hydra. It is also
a reminder that history from below is not merely an academic approach but an
ethical stance. As Rediker writes, the historian must ask: “Which side are you
on?”
His closing reflection—on “retrospective solidarity” and the
historian’s duty to “accompany” the oppressed through their history—captures
the essence of his craft. It is a commitment not to neutrality but to justice,
not to abstraction but to humanity. Rediker’s work demonstrates that history
from below is not simply a method; it is a moral project.
Including this essay in the collection is an honour. It
offers students and writers not only a guide to historical practice but a
vision of what history can be when written with empathy, imagination, and
solidarity. Rediker reminds us that the historian, like the storyteller, must
listen deeply, write boldly, and stand with those whose voices have too often
been silenced.
The Poetics of
History from Below-Marcus Rediker, September 2010
In memory of Dennis Brutus (1924–2009)
My grandfather, the late Fred Robertson, influenced how I
think about and write history. He died years before I decided to become a
historian, and he was not an academic, but he was a historian and an
intellectual in his own way. He was a master storyteller.
This Kentucky coal miner was a larger-than-life figure in my
youth. I fondly remember sitting with him at the kitchen table. In one hand, he
held a Lucky Strike. On the other hand, he held a saucer of his beloved Maxwell
House coffee, sipping it that way even when it was no longer hot. In this
posture, he told endless stories to a boy who sat enthralled amid the pathos,
humour, and quiet heroism of working-class life. His mood changed with the
story. He laughed with his whole body, like the then-popular comedian Red
Skelton, at his own funny parts.
His visage grew dark and scary at moments of danger or
injustice. His eyes danced with the drama of his words. I knew something big
was coming when he paused, put the cigarette in the ashtray, and set the saucer
aside, freeing his hands for emphasis. His stories were vivid, complex,
passionate, and somehow always practical. They featured apocalyptic Biblical
language (a lot of hellfire), long silences (with fateful stares), and curse
words that were normally forbidden in our house (son-of-a-bitchin’ this and
that). He always managed to tell a big story within a little story.
One of the stories I remember best concerned a vigilante
hanging of a man in a coal village where he had once worked, Beech Creek,
Kentucky. I don’t remember why the man was hanged. Nor do I remember whether he
was white or black; I don’t think he told me. I do remember my mother walking
into the kitchen, expressing her doubt without saying a word about whether I
should be hearing this particular story.
What I remember most of all was how his telling of the story
made clear how wrong the hanging was, and how a real-life lynching looked
nothing like what we had all seen on television. He described a frantic,
terrifying struggle, with legs flailing, ugly cheers from the crowd, and in the
end, a limp body with dangling eyeballs and wet pants. The storyteller’s
sympathy was firm with the victim, whose deadly ordeal he had made terribly,
hauntingly real.
My grandfather, the poetic storyteller, was perhaps the
oldest and deepest influence on my life’s choice to write “history from below,”
the variety of social history that emerged in the New Left to explore the
experiences and history-making power of working people who had long been left
out of elite, “top-down” historical narratives. He educated me about the ways
of the world and, at the same time, about the fundamentals of storytelling. He
helped me to see and appreciate the poetics of struggle. And he also helped to
shape my sense of the art and craft of history.
Like all good storytellers from Shakespeare to Brecht, my
grandfather was a good listener. He had a canny ear for how people talked; he
was attuned to voices, rich and poor, black and white, male and female, adult
and child. Even animals sometimes talked in his stories; a touch of Uncle
Remus! He spoke metaphorically: a crowd of people might be “as big as Coxey’s
army”; something moving fast “took off like Moody’s goose.” I listened and
learned about Coxey, but I never could figure out who Moody was or why his
goose was in such a hurry.
I remember hearing, while I was in graduate school, an
admonition about archival and primary sources: “Go on reading until you hear
voices.” It seemed an exhortation to schizophrenia at the time, but memories of
my grandfather helped me to grasp the point: humanise the sources, humanise the
story. Learn to listen. And, of course, the recovery of voices has been a
central purpose of history from below from the very beginning, but storytellers
were way ahead of us.
The people I study did not often speak through their own
documents, so it is not easy to hear them. This is the classic challenge of
history from below, and many good books have addressed it. I listen by paying
close attention to the meaning of words. I spend a lot of time looking up
chronologically specific meanings in the Oxford English Dictionary.
As an 18th-century specialist, I am especially fond of the
words and meanings to be found in A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,
compiled by Francis Grose and first published in 1785. In writing Between the
Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a study of deepsea sailors in the first half of
the 18th century, I always had those wondrous things called maritime
dictionaries close at hand to help me grasp the material conditions,
cooperative work, communications, and consciousness of seagoing proletarians. I
also paid close attention to sailors’ speech wherever I could find it, and to
their own tradition of storytelling, or yarn-spinning. In his brilliant essay
“The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin explained that there have historically been
two main types: the peasant storyteller, who had deep knowledge of the locality
and its lore, and the sailor storyteller, who brought exotic tales from afar.
My grandfather was, I suppose, a variant of the former; he helped me to
understand the people I studied, the very embodiment of the latter.1
My grandfather chose his words carefully, showing me how a
word, a phrase, or a quotation can bring a historical moment to life, even sear
it into memory. And what could be more poetic than a note sent by a would-be
arsonist to a gentleman in 1830: “My writing is bad, but my firing is good, my
Lord.” One can almost hear the defiant laughter behind the writing. Such words
were often speech committed to paper and preserved in the archive of “crime”—always
an important place for those who would reconstruct the lives of the
expropriated.
Having heard the power of poetry in stories, I make it a
point to use verse as historical evidence wherever possible. For example,
poetry is central to The Many-Headed Hydra, a book Peter Linebaugh and I wrote
about the motley proletariat of the Atlantic from 1600 to the 1830s. It appears
in almost every chapter, some 50 times throughout a book that begins with
William Shakespeare (The Tempest) and ends with William Blake (“Tyger, Tyger”).
Famous, canonical poets (Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Shelley) rub elbows with
largely unknown proletarian poets (Thomas Spence, Joseph Mather, and the everscribbling
“anonymous,” a preferred female writer’s name for centuries). Contemporary
poets such as the Martinican Aimé Césaire appear to summarise themes and ideas,
for example, about the serpentine continuities of resistance.
Poetry can bring the historian closer to the experience and
consciousness of working people and evoke people, places, and events in
multidimensional, dynamic ways. Sailorpoet James Field Stanfield crafted
memorable, graphic images in his epic poem “The Guinea Voyage” and in his
grimly poetic letters about life aboard a slave ship. He described, for
example, the second mate of his vessel, lying sick, near death, on the medicine
chest, his long hair clotted with filth as it brushed the deck of the ship. He
depicted the nightmarish enslavement, flogging, and eventual death of an
African woman named Abyeda. Such images can arrest the reader as surely as a
surrealist object does, disclosing, in poetic fashion, important connections,
relations, parallels, and unities. Christopher Hill once wrote,
“Good—imaginative—history is akin to retrospective poetry. It is about life as
lived—as much of it as we can recapture.
Poetry written by workers may be rare, but poetry found in
workers' action and resistance is plentiful; it can be found almost everywhere.
My grandfather taught me to look for it. To give an example: I discovered a
profound one-word poem in a memoir by Silas Told, a sailor-turned Methodist
minister who described a drama aboard the slave ship Loyal George in 1727. An
enslaved man had decided to die by hunger strike. Captain Timothy Tucker tried
to force him to eat. He horse-whipped him to a raw and bloody pulp. He
threatened to kill him. The nameless man uttered one word: adomma, so be it.
Captain Tucker placed a loaded pistol to his forehead and repeated the demand
to eat. Again: adomma. The captain fired, and the blood gushed, but the man
stared him directly in the face and refused to fall. The captain cursed, called
for another pistol, and shot the man in the head a second time. Again, he would
not drop, to the astonishment of all who looked on. A third shot killed the
man, but by this time an insurrection had exploded among the enslaved, who were
inspired by the man’s resistance and outraged by his treatment.
It is impossible to know how many of the hundreds of people
who witnessed this incident decided, like Silas Told, to tell the story,
punctuated by the word adomma. I suspect many told it and retold it in several
languages on plantations, in urban workshops, on docks, and on ships over many
years. The nameless African man gives precise expression to a definition of
poetry offered by Ann Lauterbach: “Poetry is the aversion to the assertion of
power. Poetry is that which resists dominance.” This is crucial to history from
below.
All good storytellers tell a big story within a little
story, and so do all good historians. It can be done in many ways. In my work,
the big story has always been the violent, terror-filled rise of capitalism and
the many-sided resistance to it from below, whether from the point-of-view of
an enslaved African woman trapped in the bowels of a fetid slave ship; a common
sailor who mutinied and raised the black flag of piracy aboard a brig on the
wide Atlantic; or a runaway former slave who escaped the plantation for a
Maroon community in a swamp. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz once remarked that
the small fact of sheep-stealing speaks to the big issue of revolution because
the storyteller (in his case, the ethnographer) finds connections between the
two.
Finally, I remember my grandfather and remind myself that
the historian, like the storyteller, is not above the fray. One of the big
questions in the Kentucky coalfields in the 1930s was, which side are you on?
In that spirit, I try to develop an ethical relationship with the oppressed and
exploited people I study. The relationship is imaginary but no less important
for that. In writing The Slave Ship, I asked myself repeatedly, from the
beginning of the project to the end, how I could do justice to the people
aboard the floating dungeons and to what they experienced. The answer is to
show retrospective solidarity and “accompany” them through their history, to
use a term proposed by Staughton Lynd to describe an egalitarian relationship
between historians/intellectuals and movements of working people from below.
John Rees’s Essay
John Rees’s contribution to this collection is distinctive
in both tone and purpose. Where some writers begin with childhood influences,
personal epiphanies, or the slow discovery of craft, Rees begins with politics.
His opening declaration—an insistence that one must either ignore the world’s
injustices or act upon them—captures the animating spirit of his work. Writing,
for Rees, is not a hobby, nor even a profession; it is a form of political
intervention. It is one of the ways he has chosen to “do something about it.”
Rees’s essay is also a rare insight into the intellectual
formation of a writer whose work straddles history, philosophy, journalism, and
activism. He identifies two influences that might appear contradictory but in
fact complement each other: Hegelian dialectics and tabloid journalism. The
first provided him with a methodological framework—drawn from Marx, Engels,
Lukács, Jakubowski, Dunayevskaya, and Labriola—that shapes his approach to evidence,
argument, and contradiction. The second taught him the virtues of clarity,
brevity, and accessibility. It is an unusual combination, but one that explains
the distinctive character of his writing: theoretically informed yet readable,
philosophically grounded yet direct.
His reflections on method are particularly valuable for
students. Rees emphasises that dialectical thinking does not replace empirical
research; it guides it. The method provides hypotheses, highlights essential
facts, and reveals patterns that might otherwise remain hidden. It also forces
the writer to confront contradictions rather than smooth them away. This is not
a method as dogma, but a tool for discovery.
Equally important is his defence of simplicity. Rees’s years
in left-wing journalism and his friendship with Paul Foot taught him that
writing clearly is harder than writing at length. He cites Orwell and Pascal to
underline the point: transparency is a discipline, not a concession. In an age
when academic prose can be needlessly opaque, Rees’s insistence on clarity is refreshing—and
politically significant. If writing is a form of action, it must be understood
by those it hopes to reach.
His practical techniques reveal a writer who works with both
intensity and organisation. Rees reads widely, annotates heavily, and builds
extensive source files. He keeps notebooks—now supplemented by an iPad—for
ideas, formulations, and transcriptions. By the time he begins writing, he has
already mapped the argument in detail. His chapters begin as bullet-point
structures, which he then “fills in” systematically. This methodical approach
contrasts with the spontaneity of his political voice, but it is precisely this
combination that gives his work its force.
Rees also acknowledges the importance of editors and
manuscript readers. His anecdote about Leo Hollis urging him to include more
“sword fights” in The Leveller Revolution
is both humorous and revealing. It shows a writer willing to consider how
narrative energy and scholarly rigour can coexist—and how the demands of
storytelling can sharpen historical argument rather than dilute it.
What makes Rees’s essay especially fitting for this
collection is its reminder that writing is not neutral. It is shaped by
commitments, by method, by political purpose. Rees writes because he believes
writing can change how people understand the world—and therefore how they act
within it. His contribution is a testament to the idea that historical writing,
when grounded in dialectical method and expressed with
clarity, can be both intellectually rigorous and politically transformative.
John Rees on Writing
I approach writing pretty much the same way I approach any
public activity. For the longest time, I seem to have woken up in the morning
with the thought that there is obviously a lot wrong with the world, and that
you can either lie on the sofa and ignore it or do something about it. Writing
is just one important way of doing something about it.
In terms of how I write, I’ve been lucky to have two
seemingly contradictory influences. While I was still a teenager, I learnt
about Hegelian philosophy, and its formative role in the development of Marx
and Engels' thought from a convinced Hegelian tutor on my degree course. I went
on to research this more deeply, and Marx’s early writings and the works of
George Lukacs, Franz Jakubowski, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Antonio Labriola gave
me a powerful methodological framework which has been present in everything
I’ve ever written, long or short, with or without explicit philosophical
content.
The method won’t do all the work for you, of course. There
is no substitute for intense empirical research. But the method will give you a
hypothesis, it will help highlight essential facts and clear away inessential
material, and it will help you to see important connections and patterns, even when,
perhaps especially when, they contradict your initial hypothesis.
The second influence is tabloid journalism. I’ve done a fair
amount of writing and copysubbing for left-wing tabloids in my time, and I was
lucky to be friends with the late, great journalist Paul Foot, including when
he had a weekly column in the Daily
Mirror. From this, I learnt the virtue of brevity, simplicity, and clarity
in written work. Any idiot can write long, but it takes real skill to write
short. Any over-educated simpleton can use long words; the skill lies in
writing transparently. George Orwell’s unsurpassed Politics and the English Language codifies this approach
brilliantly. Blaise Pascal encapsulated it in a phrase when he wrote to a
friend, ‘I’m sorry to have written you a long letter; I didn't have time to
write you a short one.
In terms of immediate technique, it's a fairly standard
procedure. I read extensively in both primary and secondary sources, starting
with the secondary sources. Although in one part of my mind I’m against marking
books, in operational practice I underline and make marginal notes in books I’m
reading. I actually find this very important, and I’m gratified to see from
some of Christopher Hill’s books that I own that he did the same, although he
was tidier and made page notes in the end flyleaf of the book. This means I end
up buying many more books than I can get on the shelves in my study (or
afford)! For The Leveller Revolution,
I also printed off reams of original pamphlets from Early English Books Online
to make notes on them. This also means I have extensive files, broken down into
sub-files, on my PC for any book project.
I also always use a notebook for ideas, formulations, and
transcriptions from original documents and books read in libraries. I used to
use A4 notebooks, but I now always use the steel-edged A5 notebooks from
Manufactum. Although I prefer to write book-length projects on my PC, the iPad
has revolutionised note-taking, so now I move between notebook and iPad, which
is especially useful for photographing original documents.
By the time I come to write, I’ve usually got the argument,
both as a whole and in its individual chapters, clear in my mind. I write a
structure for the book as a whole and for each chapter's subsections as I move
through it. So when I sit down to write, the section headings in each chapter
are laid out like bullet points. I then write the sections in sequence, almost
like filling in a form. I’m surrounded by books, articles, documents, and open
tabs on the computer as this happens. Then I tidy them all away at the end and
move on to the next chapter.
When it's done, I always pay attention to what manuscript
readers and subs say about the text, even if I don’t always follow their
advice. Everyone is a better writer after being subbed. Leo Hollis was a great
editor at Verso for The Leveller
Revolution. He read it chapter by chapter and kept saying ‘When's the next
sword fight?’ I couldn’t always provide one, but it was a good influence,
making the text as exciting as possible whilst also being as scholarly as
necessary (I hope).
Susan Margaret
Cooper’s Essay
One of the most rewarding aspects of assembling this
collection has been the opportunity to showcase writers whose commitment to
history is driven not by academic credentials but by passion, persistence, and
sheer intellectual curiosity. Susan Margaret Cooper’s contribution exemplifies
this spirit. She writes not from the seminar room or the archive reading desk
of a university, but from a lifetime of self-directed study, meticulous
research, and an unwavering fascination with the seventeenth century. Her essay
is a reminder that historical writing is not the exclusive domain of those with
degrees; it belongs equally to those who pursue the past with devotion and
rigour.
Cooper begins by stating plainly that she is “not a
professional” and that formal qualifications “were never an option.” Yet what
follows makes clear that professionalism is not a matter of certificates but of
practice. Her passion for history—particularly the Restoration period—has led
her to produce work of genuine scholarly value, including publications in Notes and Queries and archival
contributions held at Blenheim Palace, Magdalene College, and Trinity College.
Her path demonstrates that historical research is open to anyone willing to
follow its demands wherever they lead.
Her description of research as a “dis-ease” is one of the
most striking lines in her essay. She writes that it “gets into your blood” and
“compels you to delve further and further into your subject.” This is not
romantic exaggeration; it is an accurate depiction of the obsessive curiosity
that drives all serious historians. Cooper’s account of her methods— archiving
digital material, printing documents, photographing manuscripts, using a
Dictaphone and transcription kit, and adopting speech-recognition software—reveals
a researcher who has adapted every available tool to her needs. Her honesty
about the challenges of handwriting (“more scrap metal than fine copperplate”)
adds a touch of humour, but it also underscores her determination to find
methods that work.
The heart of her essay, however, lies in her extraordinary
investigation into Thomas Alcock. What began as a footnote in her research on
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, grew into a full biographical study. Cooper’s
narrative of discovery—tracing Alcock through Nottingham’s Manuscripts and
Special Collections, Bristol Archives, the Royal Society, Northern Illinois
University, and the British Library—is a model of patient, imaginative
research. Her excitement is palpable when she describes reading Alcock’s
inscription in the 1687 manuscript: “Transcribed at Mallets Court In
Shierhampton Decr the 13th 1687. by Me THOs ALCOCK.” That moment, she writes,
is when “my Alcock sleuthing began.”
Her findings are remarkable. She reconstructs Alcock’s life
through indentures, letters, treasury records, ghost stories in Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus, and scientific
reports sent to Robert Hooke. She uncovers Alcock’s presence at the descent
into Pen
Park Hole in 1669, his correspondence on the Monmouth
Rebellion, his role as Jeremy Taylor’s secretary, and his connections to the
Astry and Southwell families. Most impressively, she identifies Alcock as the
author of a manuscript tribute to Henry More held at the Koninklijke
Bibliotheek—an attribution previously uncertain. Her conclusion is decisive:
“There is only one possible author, and that is without doubt Thomas Alcock.”
Cooper’s essay is a testament to what historical research
can achieve when pursued with tenacity and instinct. She writes that instinct
“only comes out with practice,” and her work proves the point. Her discoveries
are not accidents; they are the result of years of reading, searching, cross-referencing,
and following leads wherever they might go. Her dedication has produced a
biography that enriches our understanding of Restoration intellectual culture
and the networks surrounding Rochester, Taylor, Hooke, and the Southwells.
It is a pleasure to include her voice in this collection.
Cooper reminds us that institutions do not own history; it is built by those
who care enough to chase its traces across archives, libraries, and centuries.
Her work honours the craft of research and demonstrates that passion,
discipline, and curiosity can produce scholarship of real significance.
Susan Margaret
Cooper.
I am not a professional; I do not hold a BA, MA, or PhD,
and, in fact, O and A levels were never an option. Leaving school at 15 with
basic typing skills, I am now happy in retirement after many years as a legal
secretary. But what I do possess, and have for as long as I can remember, is a
passion for history. And it wasn’t until later years that the research and
writing of 17th-century history became a reality.
It is the research side of things that really gets into your
blood, and it is not easy to ignore. It nags at you, compelling you to delve
further and further into your subject and seek new material. I call it a
dis-ease, and as I have said on many occasions to date, there is no known cure.
Putting my research in written form, however, I do not relish it as much as the
research itself, but it is a job that must be done for the benefit of readers.
Most of my work is typed on a computer. I am not one for
handwritten notes, to be honest. My handwriting is appalling, more scrap metal
than fine copperplate, and often deciphering my own writing is sometimes a
research project all of its own.
Wherever possible, I will archive found material first in my
computer favourites, then print out the most relevant pieces, with an
ever-growing mountain of A4 appearing on my desk. When researching away from my
desk, I find a modern Dictaphone particularly helpful, especially when used
with a transcription kit. Most record offices and the like now allow
researchers to take digital photos for a nominal fee. This is a real bonus, as
it allows more documents to be perused, especially when travelling some
distance and time is of the essence. Your photos can then be downloaded back
home, and the documents can be scrutinised at your leisure.
My fingers are not as fast or nimble as they used to be on
the keyboard, so I decided to invest in speech recognition software, a
wonderful aid and worth every penny. I
was a little hesitant at first to consider this, but modern speech recognition
is superb. I found it particularly helpful in transcribing lengthy old
documents. Surprisingly, I found it works just as well when I hear it directly
from my Dictaphone, with the added advantage of making a cup of coffee away
from my desk whilst the transcription is being done for you.
I find editing your own manuscript an arduous but necessary
task, and a cross we all have to bear, unless, of course, one has the
wherewithal to employ an editor. The main sources of my research are usually
many excellent, accessible, and free websites. For instance, the Internet
Archive is a good source of digitised old books and other materials from the
libraries and archives of universities worldwide. The National Archives and the
like are a never-ending source of material. Wikipedia is useful, as are
ancestry websites, but most of the latter require a subscription. But instinct
does play a big part, and that is something I fear only comes out with
practice.
Thomas Alcock
For example, my latest book, a non-fiction work on Thomas
Alcock, stemmed from my studies of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester,
culminating in my historical fiction (not a typo, I do mean fiction) novel ‘Of
Ink, Wit and Intrigue’, published in 2014.
All that appeared to be known about Alcock was his
association with Rochester as his servant, his role in Rochester’s incredible
comedic deception in the guise of Dr Alexander Bendo, and the famous portrait
of Alcock, c. 1650, by the celebrated Samuel Cooper, held in the Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford.
With my initial interest in Alcock, my first port of call
was to visit the University of
Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections, which hold
some original works by Rochester together with Alcock’s famous manuscript book,
bound in dark green leather with gilt tooling, of ‘The Famous Pathologist or
the Noble Mountebank '. This was given by Alcock in 1687 as a New Year’s Day
gift to Henry Baynton, Esq., and to Lady Anne, his wife, who was Rochester’s
eldest daughter. At the end of this exquisite book was the following:
‘Transcribed at Mallets Court In Shierhampton Decr the 13th
1687. By Me THOs ALCOCK. And on reading those few words, my Alcock
sleuthing began.
Bristol Archives had only four references to documents
relating to Malletts Court, Shirehampton, near Bristol. The four documents are
Indentures appertaining to the Malletts Court. There is a Bargain and Sale of
the 21st of June 1699, a Release of the 22nd June 1699, and two
further documents regarding the sale of the house to the Governor, Deputy
Governor, Assistants, and Guardians of the Poor in the City of Bristol, dated
the 28th and 29th of July 1701. In the High Street at
Shirehampton stands an old barn, purchased by the church in 2008 and known as
the tithe barn and seemingly unrelated to Malletts Court. But the latter two
Indentures illustrate that the barn would have been part and parcel of the old
manor house at Malletts Court, with the church purchasing the building from
Bristol Charities, originally the Bristol Corporation of the Poor, established
in 1696.
In the earlier documents, there is mention of Malletts Court
being heretofore in the possession of a Mrs Mary Rogers, widow. Earlier, when
she lived at the old manor, Alcock also lived there, and it was there that he
transcribed ‘The Famous Pathologist’ in 1687. Sadly, the manor house, a
beautiful specimen, was demolished in 1937, but thankfully, there are photo
records. It is also interesting to note that two of the signatures on the
earlier deeds are those of the Earl and Countess of Sandwich, the latter being
none other than the former Elizabeth Wilmot, another of Rochester’s daughters.
Alcock’s employment whilst living at Shirehampton appears to
be that of a King’s Waiter at Bristol Port, as evidenced by entries in the
Calendar of Treasury Books from 1685 to 1691. Very few letters written by
Alcock have survived, but these prove that whilst he was living in
Shirehampton, he was friends with the well-known Astry family of Henbury and
with Sir Robert Southwell and his son Edward, whose country seat was at Kings
Weston.
Two of the surviving letters are held at Bristol Archives,
with the third in the private collection of the Marquess of Bath at Longleat
House, Wiltshire. All three letters are of great interest: a social letter to
Elizabeth Astry, one to Sir Robert Southwell regarding the Monmouth Rebellion,
and another to Edward Southwell Esq., in connection with the Gloucester
Parliamentary Elections of 1690.
As I mentioned earlier, instinct is a great asset. As I
trawled the net for the name Thomas Alcock, many surprising facts came to light
that caught my eye, one of which was Joseph Glanvill’s ‘Saducismus triumphatus, or, Full and plain evidence concerning witches
and apparitions’, published posthumously in 1681. Alcock’s name appears on
several occasions in the book, relating to ghost stories, and thus confirms
Alcock’s secretaryship for many years to the celebrated Jeremy Taylor, Bishop
of Down and Connor, in Ireland.
My research then led me to The Royal Society, London, where,
again to my great surprise, Alcock’s name appears in Robert Hooke’s famous ‘Lectiones Cutlerianae, or A collection of
lectures, physical, mechanical, geographical & astronomical’, 1679. He
is mentioned in connection with Captain Samuel Sturmy’s investigations at the
Pen Park Hole, a large natural cave near Bristol, in July 1669. Alcock was
present for his descent into the dark abyss and subsequently wrote Captain
Sturmy’s firsthand account of the exploration verbatim. Alcock sent this to
Hooke for his attention…‘I received it from Mr
Thomas Alcock from Bristol.
Further research then led me to a letter written in Latin by
Alcock to the Duke of Ormonde, on behalf of and signed by Bishop Jeremy Taylor,
in 1662. The letter is archived at Northern Illinois University.
The British Library played its part too. There is a letter
held by them, again in Alcock's hand but signed by Taylor from Dublin, also
dated 1662. This letter is labelled "special access," and many weeks
passed before I was permitted to purchase a copy for transcription and to
include its image in my book.
I conclude with a remarkable, intriguing and unexpected find
that came to light. And what better way than to show its entry, which appears
in my book: 'In the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the
Netherlands in The Hague, shelf mark BPH 151, there is a manuscript booklet, a
tribute to Dr Henry More, who died in September 1687. Sir Robert Southwell
received the document at his home at Kings Weston, near Bristol, from Thomas
Alcock, and, as will be seen, it was written by Alcock at Farley Castle and
dated the 14th of January 1687 (1687/88).
Farley Castle was the home of Lady Anne Baynton, daughter of
Lord Rochester, and her husband Henry Baynton (1664-1691). As already shown
earlier, in this same month Lady Anne and her husband received a New Year’s Day
gift at Farley Castle of Alcock’s leather-bound copy of the Bendo escapade.’
No one until now could categorically say who had written it,
as it was unsigned; some believed it was by Glanvill. But knowing that Glanvill
died in 1680, and from the evidence above, there is only one possible author:
Thomas Alcock.
Susan Margaret Cooper has, for many years, held a curiosity
for England's history, with particular emphasis on the Restoration period. Her
enthusiasm has led her to scholarly research on those times, resulting in the
publication of some of her works in the 2011 and 2013 volumes of the Oxford
University Press Notes and Queries Journal. Sue also has unpublished pieces
archived at Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, Magdalene College in Cambridge, and
in the Library Catalogue of Trinity College in Cambridge.
Gaby Mahlberg’s Essay
When I first conceived this series, my hope was simple: to
give students a candid, practical window into how historians actually write.
Not the polished prose of the finished book, nor the mystique that sometimes
surrounds academic authorship, but the real processes—the habits, the
structures, the anxieties, the rituals—that shape historical work behind the
scenes. Gaby Mahlberg was the first to respond to that invitation, and her
contribution sets the tone for the entire project.
Mahlberg writes with the clarity and directness of someone
who has spent years guiding students through the craft of historical argument.
Her method is not dramatic, nor does it rely on flashes of inspiration.
Instead, it is grounded in discipline, organisation, and the steady
accumulation of knowledge. She begins at the beginning—literally. Where many
writers prefer to leave the introduction until last, Mahlberg insists on
writing it first. For her, the introduction is not a hurdle but a compass: a
way to “get my thoughts straight” before the rest of the work unfolds. It is a
reminder that writing is not merely expression but orientation.
Her research approach is equally systematic. Mahlberg reads
widely, takes extensive notes, and organises her material with meticulous care.
Her digital folders—divided by project, chapter, archive, and author—are the
infrastructure of her writing. Students often ask how much they should read;
Mahlberg’s answer is unequivocal: “The more you read, the better.” She explains
why: reading widely reveals patterns, schools of thought, recurring arguments,
and contested points. It allows the historian to locate themselves within a
debate rather than hovering uncertainly above it. Her advice is not abstract;
it is grounded in years of experience teaching students who fear that too much
reading will confuse them. Mahlberg shows that the opposite is true: reading
clarifies.
Her description of how to structure an argument is one of
the most valuable parts of her essay. She begins with a rough outline—written
out, not merely imagined—and then fills in the gaps with quotations,
references, and further research. She revises, polishes, and returns to the
introduction to ensure that the argument still aligns with the direction the
piece has taken. This iterative process, moving between structure and detail,
is precisely what students need to see. It demystifies writing and reveals it
as a craft rather than an act of inspiration.
Mahlberg also emphasises the importance of distance. Once a
draft is complete, she seeks feedback from trusted colleagues or, when time is
short, steps away long enough to return with fresh eyes. This
practice—detaching oneself from the text—is essential for clarity, yet often
neglected by inexperienced writers. Her honesty about exhaustion, deadlines,
and the realities of revision adds a welcome human dimension to her method.
What makes Mahlberg’s contribution especially fitting for
this collection is its pedagogical generosity. She writes not to impress but to
explain. Her process is transparent, practical, and grounded in the everyday
realities of historical work. Students reading her essay will recognise
themselves in her questions, her uncertainties, and her routines. They will
also see a model of how careful reading, structured thinking, and disciplined
revision can produce scholarship that is both coherent and compelling.
Gaby Mahlberg
Gaby Mahlberg is an independent scholar from Berlin. I wrote
to her and other leading historians asking them to provide a blog article with
the title “ How they write?. Gaby’s was the first reply and has the honour of
being the first blog post. Hopefully, this stimulates further posts. The
purpose of these articles is to provide students with a better understanding of
the writing process.
The way I write has not changed much since my undergraduate
days, although I hope that my arguments have become slightly more sophisticated
over the years. Ignoring the advice of most of my lecturers to leave the
introduction to the end, I usually begin at the beginning. I need to write the
introduction first to get my thoughts straight. Once the introduction is out of
the way, the rest usually flows naturally – if I have done the research, that
is.
When I start on a new project, be it a book, a chapter, a
journal article or even a blog post, I usually do all my reading and primary
research first. I take extensive notes from primary and secondary sources and
store them in my project folder on my computer. If the project is a book, I
might create several subfolders for different chapters and topics to make it
easier to locate notes later. I am currently writing a book on three English
republican exiles in Europe: Edmund Ludlow, Henry Neville and Algernon Sidney.
So I have a folder for the book as a whole and separate subfolders for each
Ludlow, Neville and Sidney. Within the Ludlow, Neville and Sidney subfolders, I
have yet more subfolders for primary and secondary sources. The notes on
primary sources are grouped by archive; the notes on secondary sources are
listed alphabetically by author surname. In the olden days, I even used a card
catalogue to reference the photocopied chapters and articles gathered in my
lever arch files. But even I have gone (almost fully) digital now.
Students always want to know how much they should read. Will
two books and three articles do for a 1,500-word essay? It depends, I would
say; it all depends. The more you read, the better.
Some people think that reading too much will only confuse
them, and they are keen to keep things manageable. But the opposite is the
case. The more you read, the clearer things get. You will come to see that
there are recurring lines of argument. They often follow particular schools of
thought, and you can group authors and arguments by school (Whig, revisionist,
etc.). You will also find that you tend to agree more with one side than the
other, or that both lines of argument have flaws and that a middle way might be
the answer (e.g., post-revisionist). Reading more will help you consider the
arguments from all angles and reassure you that you understand the contested
points.
When I have read enough to have a good sense of the
arguments, debates, and open questions on the subject, I begin to structure my
own argument in my head. Once I know where I want to go with the subject, I put
this rough structure of my argument down on paper, writing out all my thoughts
with brief notes on which sources I might want to quote to back it up.
(Naturally, for a book, I apply this system chapter by chapter. I could never
remember the rough outline of an entire book, although even there you need a
general idea of what the finished work should look like before you start.)
When I have this draft outline done, I start filling in the
gaps: I look up the primary and secondary sources I meant to quote, gather the
quotes, and add the references. Then I usually notice that something does not
quite add up or that something is missing and do another round of reading and
research until the argument sounds coherent and logical – at least to me. When
I am happy with what I have written or, more likely, the submission deadline
approaches, I start polishing the piece. This involves supplying missing
references and editing and fine-tuning the argument by tweaking small details here
and there. Then I go back to the introduction and see whether it still fits the
piece I have written, or whether, after several revisions, I need to rewrite it
to strengthen the argument.
Once I am happy with the piece, or too exhausted to care, I
find a friendly colleague or two to read my first draft, and I use the break to
detach myself from the text long enough to return to it with a fresh look when
I get the manuscript back. If there is not enough time before the deadline, or
the text I am writing is very short, I might skip the personal peer review, but
I will still try to put some distance between me and my writing before I take
another final look at it. When I get the comments back and/or have slept on it,
I make the final revisions and submit the piece.
Simone Hanebaum’s
Essay
Simone Hanebaum’s essay is one of the most candid,
energetic, and pedagogically valuable contributions to this series. It captures
not only how she writes but why she writes, and it does so with a
mixture of honesty, humour, and practical wisdom that will resonate deeply with
students. Her reflection is a reminder that writing history is not a serene,
monastic pursuit but a lived, messy, exhilarating process shaped by deadlines,
passion, exhaustion, and the occasional bout of productive procrastination.
Hanebaum begins with the simple declaration that she has
“wanted to be a historian since my high school history teacher led me to fall
in love with history.” That love is not abstract. She writes because she
“profoundly believe[s] that history matters, not only intellectually or
socially, but on a personal level as well.” This conviction animates her entire
essay. She describes archival work as detective work, writing as storytelling,
and the historian’s task as sharing discoveries with others. Her commitment to
the craft is evident in every line.
One of the strengths of her piece is its honesty about the
realities of student writing. She recalls undergraduate essays produced in “48
hours of mad reading, frantic writing, and very little sleep,” surrounded by
coffee cups and junk-food wrappers. She does not romanticise this; she warns
against it. But she also draws a crucial lesson: writing requires Sitzfleisch—the ability to sit down and
persevere. As she puts it, “You will need to sit down, and get. It. Done.” This
is advice students rarely hear stated so plainly.
Her reflections on research are equally valuable. She
insists that historical writing must be grounded in primary sources and wide
reading: “you are not writing ‘fake news’… you need facts; you need evidence.”
She warns against the embarrassment of thinking one has discovered something
groundbreaking only to find “a historian said the same thing a decade before.”
Her emphasis on reading broadly—both to avoid error and to recognise genuine insight—is
a lesson every student must learn.
Hanebaum’s description of her research journal is one of the
most distinctive parts of her essay. She keeps it with her everywhere, colour-codes
entries, paginates pages, and creates a table of contents. She writes down
ideas “mid-conversation,” even stopping to jot them down while trying to fall
asleep. Her affection for Moleskine notebooks and fountain pens adds a personal
touch, but her underlying message is universal: writing begins long before the
first sentence of the essay. It begins with capturing thoughts, questions, and
uncertainties.
Her advice on writing itself is refreshingly practical. She
acknowledges the paralysis that often accompanies starting a piece: cleaning
the flat, reorganising wardrobes, learning Italian—anything to avoid the blank
page. She calls this “productive procrastination,” but she also insists that
eventually “you will need to write.” Her solution is to start small: 500 words
a day, manageable and achievable. Sometimes those 500 words are painful; sometimes
they unlock a rhythm that produces far more. Either way, the goal is progress.
Hanebaum’s reflections on writing environments are equally
grounded. She knows she cannot write at home without being distracted by
Netflix or food. She prefers offices and libraries, avoids cafés because she
will “invariably eavesdrop,” and uses instrumental music to maintain focus. She
writes in ergonomic chairs, at standing desks, and even on the floor to manage
back pain—an honest acknowledgement of the physical realities of academic
labour.
Her emphasis on community is one of the essay’s most
important contributions. Writing can be lonely, she notes, and having a “buddy”
in the library helps with accountability and morale. She also celebrates the
role of supervisors, deadlines, and peer review. Once the writing is done, she
steps away, prints a hard copy, reads aloud, revises, and finally sends the
work off—followed by a well-earned celebration.
What makes Hanebaum’s essay especially fitting for this
collection is her closing reflection on joy. Writing is easiest, she says,
“when you have passion for what you are writing and when you are driven by the
indescribable excitement you feel when you know the argument.” When that
happens, “the words just flow,” and the marriage between ideas and prose
produces a feeling like no other. But she is equally honest about the fact that
writing is not always like this. Sometimes the goal is simply “getting words on
the page that bear some semblance to English.” And that, she insists, “is okay
too.”
Simone Hanebaum’s contribution is a generous, practical, and
deeply human account of the writing process. It will be invaluable to students
who imagine that historians write effortlessly or that good writing emerges
fully formed. Her essay shows the truth: writing is a craft, a discipline, a
struggle, and—at its best—a joy.
How I Write, Why I
Write by Simone Hanebaum
This is the second blog article in the How I Write series. I have now included a subtitle: "Why I Write?" Simone’s response has already validated the new Question. Not only should these articles give students valuable insight into how to write, but they will hopefully inspire future generations of students to take up the study of history.
I have wanted to be a historian since my high school history
teacher led me to fall in love with history. I profoundly believe that history matters not only intellectually and socially
but also on a personal level. I love the archival work and the detective
sleuthing it involves, and eventually, the storytelling and the sharing of that
story that writing enables. How I have written has evolved as the requirements
of my apprenticeship in the discipline and craft of history have evolved over
the course of my education.
As an undergraduate with a full course load in Canada, I
would often have four large term papers due at the end of the twelve-week
semester, which often meant one essay was written with 48 hours of mad reading,
frantic writing, and very little sleep before I submitted it bleary-eyed,
surrounded by several half-empty coffee cups, and an embarrassing amount of
junk food wrappers just in time for the deadline set by my professor.
I do not recommend this as a writing system at all, nor do I
endorse procrastination as a helpful, sexy habit to develop. What I take away
from my youthful mistakes, though, is that you will sometimes face deadlines.
Whether you have years to write a book or thesis, or a day to hammer out a
statement requested of you by the local newspaper on an issue pertinent to your
research, you will need to sit down and get. It. Done. The Germans call it Sitzfleisch, literally ‘sitflesh’ or ‘the
buttocks,’ and it denotes the ability to sit down and persevere with the
task at hand. It will inevitably be a part of your writing.
It goes without saying that to write anything historical, you should have prepared by examining primary sources after archival work and reading a lot of secondary literature – you are not writing ‘fake news’ or Donald Trump’s speeches. Hence, you need facts, you need evidence, and you need to listen to what other historians are writing. It also prevents the embarrassing situation of thinking you are absolutely brilliant for discovering something extraordinary and groundbreaking, only to realise that a historian had said the same thing a decade earlier. But similarly, it also illuminates where you have found something brilliant and extraordinary, which should hopefully form the basis of whatever piece you are writing.
So you have your brilliant idea, now what? Write it down. Somewhere, wherever works
best for you. I keep a research journal full of my ideas, my notes, and my
archival trips so that I have this information at hand. I also colour-code
entries based on what they are, paginate the pages, and then create a table of
contents elsewhere so I can find these thoughts later. I also write the dates
when I was using a journal, since I have accumulated multiple journals over the
years. I keep my research journal on me in most places I go because I
inevitably have an idea when I am trying to fall asleep, in the shower, or
mid-conversation with someone (yes, I have stopped talking to jot things down).
You do not have to write your essay in the journal, but note
your thoughts about a particular source, the questions you have, the outline of
the paper, and other ideas you might have. This notebook is also a space for
free writing, where I tackle questions I am still hazy on or themes I have not
quite wrapped my head around yet. I have not been paid to endorse them, but I
love Moleskine’s classic black-ruled notebooks for my research journals. I am
an unashamed stationery nerd, so I love the paper's heft and the durability of
the spines and covers. The associations with Ernest Hemingway are nice too, as
I hope in vain that his writing genius will somehow be transported across time
to me. I also use a fountain pen to write in my journal. Whether it is a Moleskine
or a journal with unicorns on it, having good stationery you love and that
makes you feel good will always encourage you to use your notebook.
Once I have my ideas, I create an essay outline that plots
what I will discuss and when – it should always include a statement of my
argument, and I try to articulate the larger ‘so what’ questions – why this
matters, why it's important – on it as well. This argument and the specific
questions you may be answering over the course of a larger work, such as an
honours thesis or a master’s thesis, will serve as anchors for your work.
Now the tricky part – the writing. Nothing is harder than
getting started. You will clean your room or flat. You will try a new recipe.
You will organise your entire wardrobe by colour, alphabetise it, or discover
that it is really time you worked on your Italian. Productive procrastination
has often preceded my writing. Do these things if they will create a space
conducive to writing, but it is procrastination.
You will need to write. Trying to get started can be crippling, even with a
plan.
So I start small. I set a daily writing goal of 500 words
because it is a small, manageable task, and I know it will not take much time
to write. If writing those 500 words is as painful as visiting the dentist, I
do not write any more and step away satisfied that I met a goal. But more often
than not, the ideas and prose start flowing, and I write more, fall into a
rhythm, and before you know it, I have 700-1000 words, and an hour and a half
has passed. I often start writing with the contextual information or
biographical information because it is incredibly easy to write and helps
situate me, even more than it will eventually situate my reader. Making writing
manageable makes it feel far less daunting an endeavour.
Where and when you write can have a huge impact on the
writing process. That postlunch sleepy slump in the afternoon? Forget about it.
I tend to write better in the mornings and after that slump has passed. Some
people are very nocturnal and prefer writing in the wee hours of the morning –
I prefer to be sound asleep by then, but knowing your best rhythm that suits
your lifestyle will help. Where you feel most productive also helps. My success
working from home is unreliable at best because I get distracted by Netflix and
food, so I write when I have access to a computer, in offices or libraries.
Some people love cafes, but the coffees do add up, and my inquisitorial nature
(okay, nosiness – an important trait in the historian) means that I will
invariably eavesdrop rather than work on my writing. Some people love the
chatter and white noise, though, and are not as cheap as I am. I throw on
motivational music that is instrumental or in foreign languages (mostly so I
don’t sing and dance along).
Some instrumental EDM beats can really get my writing going,
or I like listening incredible film or television soundtracks like those from Westworld or The Borgias. When I do write from home, I like to write in a good
ergonomic chair, and I have invested in a laptop tray that converts to a
standing desk when I put it on my desk, or a floor desk when I sit on the
floor; I suffer from a great deal of lower back pain so I have to vary the
positions in which I write (be careful, this is a career hazard for many of us
in sedentary work!). Knowing what sort of environment works best for you will
always help. And when I work in libraries, I like having a buddy, usually a colleague,
who is also in the process of writing. You can hold each other accountable when
Facebook or Reddit are seductive distractions, and writing can be a rather
lonely experience.
Having a cohort of friends you can alongside with means you
have someone to take a break with, or when they study or work on what you do,
you have someone to bounce ideas off of. I also find a cup of coffee or tea, or
a glass of red wine or scotch, when appropriate and in excessive amounts for
the former two and more modest amounts for the latter two, can help make the
writing process much more enjoyable.
Once I have finished writing, I (ideally) step away from it
and forget about it for a couple of days. Writing can be an incredibly personal
experience. It is hard to make the necessary edits and changes – like making
sure you actually have answered your question, that the prose flows properly,
or cutting unnecessary material – when you are too close to your text. I often
do this by printing out a hard copy of my essay so I can read it better and
annotate it, or I read it aloud and listen to how the prose sounds. As a
postgraduate student I have also always set deadlines with my supervisors to
get writing done. They did not require deadlines, but I did; it is a habitual
hangover from my undergraduate days.
Once I have written and revised my writing then it is sent
off to my supervisor for comments, or to a peer for feedback, or to a journal’s
editorial board, and then promptly celebrated with a reward such as dinner with
friends. And then you repeat the process all over again for the next paper, the
chapter, the next article, or the next book, or the eventual revisions to come.
Being honest with myself and my writing process ensures that I can write as effectively as possible. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses and playing to them can help get words on the page, and allow your creativity and ideas to flourish.
Writing is the easiest when you have passion for what you
are writing and when you are driven by the indescribable excitement you feel
when you know the argument, where it is going and everything else falls into
place. When this happens, usually in an ideal writing location and time, the
words just flow and it is incredible how you feel when you know that what you
are writing is not only intellectually excellent but also written well.
There is no feeling like it, and that is real joy of writing, that
marriage between your conceptual ideas and your prose. But it has never been
constant in my writing experience; sometimes your main goal is just getting
words on the page that bear some semblance to English. And that’s okay too.
