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Historical Thinking Skills: A Primer

Merry Wiesner-Hanks David J. Neumann

Distinguished Professor of History, Emerita Assistant Professor of History Education
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

STUDENTS AND ADULTS ALIKE often grumble that history is just a bunch of facts and dates to
memorize. While it’s true that studying history requires data, information, and facts and dates, that’s
this sample.
not the essence of what history is. History is a way of understanding the world by learning about the
Worth Publishers.
past. It is an interpretive reconstruction of the past based on several skills. AP® European History re-
quires students to demonstrate an understanding of these skills. This primer will help you develop the
historical thinking skills and reasoning processes needed to succeed in your AP® European History
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class and exam, as well as improve the critical thinking, reading, and writing skills that will be useful
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in college, in your future career, and in active citizenship. While most of you will not become profes-
sional historians, we hope this course and this book will spark or enhance an interest in history that
will continue throughout your life. Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
by Bedford, Freeman &

Historical Thinking Skills and Reasoning Processes

The AP® European History curriculum introduces you to six historical thinking skills and three rea-
soning processes, which together represent the ways historians approach the past. These skills are
sometimes described as “habits of mind.” This useful phrase should remind you that a skill needs to
be practiced repeatedly until it becomes second nature. Because practice is an integral part of learning
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to think historically, the sections below include exercises to help you develop these “habits of mind.”
Like shooting free throws, rehearsing dance moves, or playing musical scales, historical thinking skills
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need to be exercised regularly until you can use them easily and almost effortlessly.

Although we discuss each skill and process separately below, keep in mind that these skills overlap in
many ways. For example, you can’t make a comparison without also analyzing evidence, and you can
only really understand historical evidence, including artifacts, photographs, speeches, and historical
narratives (secondary sources), when you know something about their context — that is, the time and
place when they came into existence. So as you develop one historical thinking skill, you’ll also be learn-
ing and practicing other skills at the same time.

SKILL 1: DEVELOPMENTS AND PROCESSES

The first historical thinking skill underlies all the rest: gain some knowledge about an historical
event or process and the people who made it happen. Historians generally begin their investigations
with a question. This may be as simple as “what happened?” or it may be a more complex question
involving why or how, like the questions that structure the chapters in this book. The question
might relate to an event or process to which scholars and others have already given a name, such as
the French Revolution, or it might simply be about certain things happening in the past that the
historian thinks are interesting. Events and processes always acquire their names after the fact, and

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