"Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts"

I have never thought about how someone should go about studying history before reading this article. In all of my previous years of learning, history was always taught either through text book readings or lecture notes in class. This is the manner which I figured history would always be taught. It never occurred to me that a more intellectual way of figuring out what occurred so many years ago is to uncover details and information from the primary sources themselves. When Alston was trying to deduce whether Lincoln was a racist or not through a series of documents handed to him, "his expertise lay not in his sweeping knowledge of this topic but in his ability to pick himself up after a tumble, to get a fix on what he does not know, and to generate a road map to guide his new learning" (21). Alston did not assume anything, as did other participants, but instead drew questions from words which Lincoln used which he himself did not understand the context of. I myself have never used this technique, but instead assume many things based on my previous knowledge, which I now know is not the smartest tool to use. Also, the majority of the time I have come in contact with historical documents, I have been searching for articles which support some thesis that I have already created. Reading this article has taught me that primary documents should not be used to find information but to search for new knowledge and formulate more questions.

Another idea which I found to be intriguing is the idea that the past should not be looked at as a culture to relate to and is not one that is to look familiar. Instead, the past should be looked at as unfamiliar and unrelatable as if the American culture 100 years ago was a foreign nation to America today. The idea that if you don't study history you are doomed to repeat it, does not ring true for all events. An event in the past may have resulted in terrible consequences then, but just because it didn't work then doesn't mean it will fail now. As we learned in the book How We Decide, the brain is quick to learn from its mistakes and often times our intuition picks up on the bad choice to make before we even realize it with our logical mind. We may see a historical mistake and our mind might steer us away from the same error, but put into a different year is a whole new context for a situation to be in. What might seem like the wrong decision may actually be the right one or the other way around. We can't look at the past through today's eyes and apply the same rules and guidelines to the present.

The biggest question that came to my mind while reading this was the section regarding how history should be presented through writing. I was wondering if addressing the readers in the form of "you" or by using "I" would be more beneficial to the readers in terms of how they interpreted the information they were given. If the text spoke more to you would it be more engaging or too biased?