#how to judge a history book when you're not an expert in that topic

[jeannereames]

Hello Dr. Reames! When you decide to read a history book on your free time - and a book completely unrelated to your area of expertise - but you know nothing about said topic, you're only interested in learning about it. How do you choose which book you'll read?

FANTASTIC question. Thank you for asking it.

Let’s Talk How to Evaluate the Quality of a Book NOT on/in Your Specialization or Field

I’m going to start with some general bullet points of advice with discussion. Then I’ll give a concrete example of a book (or set of them) that I decided not to buy after a little rummaging.

The Basics

(These may seem obvious, but a lot of folks ignore them, like they skip over reading the introduction. Always read the book’s introduction!)

Who’s the author?

Most books have, on the back cover or inside, a note about the author. Also, google the person. Do they have a professional degree or some form of special training/ experience (e.g., say, they worked on a dig)? If they’re a professor, where do they teach? (But don’t put too much on that; the state of academia today means highly respected scholars could end up in Podunk Mississippi just to find a job.)

What type of book is it and who’s the intended audience?

Is it an academic book meant for other specialists? A book intended for use as a textbook? Something marketed to general audiences: “pop” history, or creative non-fiction? These may all be well-done. Yet if I’m wanting to learn about a topic I’m not familiar with, I specifically seek out a textbook, as they're geared to teach the topic to non-specialists. They won’t go down a research rabbit hole. Specifically in ancient history, those “Companion to…” collections are great, as you get multiple experts weighing in on what they know the most about. And they're intended for interested readers but not specialists in that particular topic. Also they’re curated by an editor who IS a specialist, so you know the chosen authors are respected in the field.

When was it written?

If the publication date is 50 years ago, it’s been superseded. It might be out of date even if it’s 20 years ago—or 10. But newer is not necessarily better.

What press published it?

Princeton, Cambridge, Brill/DeGruyter, Berkeley, Peeters, Harvard, Chicago. Any would be a good sign. But the University of Oklahoma does not mean it’s a bad book. (Beth Carney’s important first monograph on Macedonian women came from UOk.) University presses can corner the market on a particular topic: Univ. of Nebraska does a LOT of native history. Also, it may not be a university press at all. Routledge is perfectly respectable, as are Bloomsbury and Penguin. For local histories or something niche, you may get publication by a historical society, not a major press at all. (I picked up a perfectly fine book about ghost stories in the city of Savannah done by the local historical society.) BUT IF IT’S SELF-PUBLISHED, that’s a big ol’ Red Flag.

Going a Little Deeper

Ask somebody you know, who IS a specialist in the field, if they’ve read the book and what they think

Depending on your personal circle, this may not be possible.

Find a review (or three)

I regularly teach my undergrads (and grad students) to look for reviews.

Look at the bibliography

Probably more important for academic books, but how long is the biblio? Yes, topics can have more or fewer publications, but it should go on for some pages. Also, is it all in just one language? Some fields may tend that way (much American history), but a well-done monograph in, say, Greek or Roman history should not be monolingual in the research.

Actually check (don’t ignore) footnotes

They tell stories. Again, this largely pertains to academic books, but you can find fun (and occasionally catty) scholarly quarrels in them. Very early in my reading on Alexander, I became fascinated by the back-and-forth in footnotes between the “Three Bs” (Badian, Borza, and Bosworth) plus Green and Hammond. BUT some red flags: 1) the author disproportionately citing themself, especially if it’s because 2) the author seems to have quarrels with a large number of colleagues. Maybe the author is just original! But sometimes that tells you their conclusions are questionable. Use your common sense.

Now, for a concrete example … as some of you know, I have American indigenous ancestry, specifically Peoria-Miami (Myaamia). While I know some things about our tribe, I’m far from an expert. On our Facebook page, one of the other members recently dropped mention of a series on the early history of Indiana, and the conflicts between settlers and natives during the French-Indian Wars—including St. Clare’s Defeat, effected by the Myaamia and led by Little Turtle (Mihshihkinaahkwa), the worst defeat [proportionally] ever suffered by American troops.

I thought, Oh, cool, maybe I should pick these up and read them in my “copious” spare time. E.g., probably years from now.

I followed the provided link, and immediately thought, This doesn’t look good. Page ran on forever, not well organized, and I had to hunt for info about the author. Although he was a retired schoolteacher, he didn’t seem to have any specific training in doing historical research; I don’t think he was even a history major in college (probably did education). Additionally, the book-covers and purchasing info made it clear all the books were self-published, and the provided text snippets contained grammar errors.

Yeah, I left that page bookless. Maybe the info in them was perfectly fine and he just couldn’t find a publisher who wanted creative non-fiction about an event most people have never heard of led by a chief with a name most can’t pronounce…. But I’m going to bet the research matched the grammar: slap-dash.

Now, that was a relatively easy one to figure out; I spent all of 10 minutes on the page. (And no, I’m not naming the author nor linking to the books, as this is an example, not an attempt to humiliate the person.) But it gives you some idea how I evaluate books in a field very far from my own specialty.

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* Although that said, they’re starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with new topics for Yet Another “Companion to….” Some I’ve seen would be better just sold as a collection on X topic, not “Companion to….”