926 Te Journal of American History March 2021 doi: 10.1093/jahist/jaaa464 © Te Author 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. Must History Students Write History Essays? Lendol Calder and Robert Williams “Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.” —Jill Lepore quoted in Maia R. Silber, “Jill Lepore: A Historian’s History,” Harvard Crimson, March 6, 2014 “Undergraduate students are not interested in becoming professional historians and one should not teach undergraduates as if they were trying to learn the techniques of professional historical inquiry.” —Hayden White quoted in Ewa Domanska, “A Conversation with Hayden White,” Rethinking History, 12 (March 2008), 12–13 “For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. Te diference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.” —C. S. Lewis, Te Horse and His Boy, vol. V: Te Chronicles of Narnia (New York, 1975), 32 Te authors of this essay went to college thirty-four years apart. One of us attended a large state university in the late 1970s; the other graduated recently from a small, pri- vate liberal arts college. Despite the diferences in our ages and the type of schools we attended, both of us can testify that in the college history courses we took, the gold standard for advancing and assessing our achievement was the same: the history essay. For us and our peers, studying history meant writing history essays—loads and loads of them, fall and spring. Some were hurriedly scribbled responses to blue book prompts that typically began: “Write an essay explaining/ analyzing/critiquing/defending/etc.” Oth- ers were longer, more carefully prepared compositions, or “papers” as we called them, in which we analyzed primary documents; reviewed books, articles, or flms; and took Lendol Calder is professor of American history at Augustana College. Readers may contact Calder at LendolCalder@Augustana.edu. Robert Williams teaches social studies and U.S. history at Fremont Middle School in Mundelein, Illinois. Tey thank Augustana College for support from the Student-Faculty Partnership Grant Program; and the JAH Textbooks and Teaching editors for their gracious and incisive comments, questions, and editing that improved this article. Readers may contact Williams at rwilliams@fsd79.org. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/107/4/926/6157170 by guest on 23 December 2021