Ghost of Andrew Eaton said:
I apologize that I was less articulate than normal after midnight. Would you happen to know of a book that can help with how to analyze history or approach it from a better viewpoint? Honestly, I don't know where to begin to search for a way to improve how I approach the events I read about and try to study. Thanks.
Andrew Eaton, I realize that you were asking aalan, but if you will permit, I'd like to take a stab at partially answering your question.
I don't know of a specific book, either, but I do have a methodology that was taught to me by my dad, who had a PhD in Early American History from William & Mary and taught collegiate-level history as a second career. I took a bunch of courses from him in obtaining my own degree in history.
What he taught about analyzing a work of history is first to identify the author's bias. Bias is not being used here in a pejorative sense. Instead, it means to try to determine what "lens" the author is using to analyze history that may bias her perspective. For example, most historians fall into a few broad groups in how they analyze history: Marxist (i.e., economic), geographic determinist, Idealism, Great Man, etc. By determining the historian's particular lens, it helps in understanding what the historian may be over- or under-emphasizing. Marxist, in the context of history, does not necessarily mean a political marxist. It means someone who believes that economics drives almost all of history. A classic example is Charles Beard's
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" may be the most famous example of geographic determinism. Almost all historical biographies are written through the lens of the "great man/woman" perspective.
Second, if there's a topic of interest or importance to you, read multiple historians from multiple perspectives. That will give you a better sense of how each individual historian is interpreting history and what facts they are omitting, or perhaps over- or under-emphasizing.
Next, think critically. A great example of the need to do so is reading biographies. It's almost impossible for biographers to resist becoming admirers of the person they're writing about, so their work tends to become hagiographic. As a reader, it's very easy to get swept up in a biography and finish it thinking that the subject was the greatest man or woman who ever lived. A solution to that problem is to read a biography of the enemy or opponent of the subject to get an alternative point of view.
Finally, it seems that academia today is the most biased that I've ever seen. As a contrast to today's environment, my dad obtained his PhD in the early 70s after retiring from the US Army and having just returned from Vietnam. College campuses were not a friendly place for military folks at that time. Nevertheless, my dad said that one of his biggest supporters on the W&M faculty was a political Marxist whose personal views on just about every issue were diametrically opposed to my dad's. My dad's advisor was a very famous historian who also had much different political views from my dad. But the one thing that they all shared was a commitment to intellectual honesty and their best efforts to find the truth in history. Not to write history to fit an agenda, but to try to write history as accurately as possible. That no longer seems to be the case. Many historians today seem committed to forcing history into a pre-determined mold that is shaped by their political and social views. In other words, you should be doubly vigilant in determining author bias and how it effects their scholarship when reading current historical work.
Just some thoughts that I hope help you.