Written by Tiffany Miron in October 2023.
When many think of conducting research, the first things that often come to mind are scientific experiments, and not historians making arguments about various topics. What many don’t realize is how different research looks in the field of history, and that historical research comes with its own set of challenges that I, even as a public history major, wasn’t originally prepared for. Conducting historical research is significantly deeper than deciding a topic you like and learning as much as you can about it. A large, and particularly difficult, part of the process is narrowing down a research topic into something that can be examined through what is considered a historical lens. Historical lenses are a specific way of analyzing a historical topic, such as looking at a subject by looking into gender, economics, politics, etc. This process can be especially frustrating; because it is often difficult to narrow down a subject while also picking something that can be formed into an argument.
My Experience with This Process, and What was So Maddening
During spring semester of 2023, I took my first history research methods course, where I had to pick a topic I would be researching and presenting my claims about at the end of the semester. I went into this course wanting to research piracy, because it is one of my favorite history topics and I figured this would be my main chance to do so given that I didn’t imagine researching piracy to be any more than one of my passion projects. This made it especially difficult for me to narrow the subject down, because I had never researched pirates in a serious research setting or applied historical lenses to the matter. During this period of time, I started to reach out to various history professors from my department to look for any and all advice, because I felt like I had reached my wits end. I had first met with a previous professor of mine to discuss the course, and if it was possible for me to research piracy at all. She had introduced to me the possibility of approaching this research as a case study of a specific pirate figure. Later that same week, I emailed my professor for the research course I was taking, and asked for his thoughts on the subject. I had mentioned the idea of doing a case study of the pirate Blackbeard, and he came back to me with the idea of doing a comparison of both Anne Bonny and Blackbeard. This process led me to decide I would research both of these figures and examine how gender has influenced how historians have written about them over time comparatively. Despite my frustrations, asking different professors for advice revealed several things that helped me grow as a learning historian, and also gave me a solid base for my semester long research project.
Accepting the Challenges of Historical Research and Moving Forward
The process of developing a research project was much more frustrating than I anticipated. I believe a part of why it made me so frustrated was simply the amount of time it took. The fact that I didn’t know what I wanted to research straight away made me feel, admittedly, a little incompetent. I found it really hard to accept that coming up with research ideas simply takes time; and isn’t something that comes overnight. Through this process, I learned that it’s okay to grapple with new things and take time to develop my ideas. Along the way, I also learned that historians are very collaborative, and if you ask someone for advice it can go a long way, as each historian has their own specialties and perspectives. My research methods course gave me many new skills, as well as the project I am now continuing as a McNair scholar. I am very excited to share my research thus far, and continue my work on studying Golden Age Piracy through gendered analysis.
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