How did you get interested in your historical fields?

[betwixt&between]

I've always been interested in how religion was able to affect all aspects of civilization. I became interested in Christian-Muslim contact, and focused on the Crusades. Which prompted an interest in religious schism, bringing me to the Reformation. Since then, I've been interested in how the Reformation affected the lives of 'regular' people. After reading 'On Assistance to the Poor' by Juan Luis Vives,  I've focused my thesis on the change in the charitable practices of Reformation England. 

[Neist]

Man, I don't know if I have energy to narrate it.  I'm interested in representation and identity.

I guess the nutshell version is that I've always been interested in history, but I've always been more interested in people rather than events or places. I used to study art history, but I changed disciplines because art historians generally focus on the creation not the creator. 

This general interest in people cultivated an interested in biographies, which cultivated an interest in cultural rhetoric and bias, which cultivated into an interest of identity, in all representational forms.

I guess that was easier than what I expected!

[fortsibut]

As I mentioned in another thread, I grew up in the Central African Republic where my parents worked as medical missionaries.  We ended up doing a lot of road trips out into the bush for a variety of reasons, and there always seemed to be a site of historical value around.  I loved listening to oral histories, and I vividly remember a 5 km hike that ended up at the top of a small, flat-topped mountain with crumbling waist-high rock walls around parts of the perimeter.  One of my parents' friends from a nearby village told us about how the entire village used the mountain as a refuge from slave traders generations earlier; when lookouts saw the slavers coming, the entire village would gather their things and flee the 6+ kilometers to the mountain, where they were able to more easily defend themselves.  According to oral tradition, the village never lost one of their own.  =)  Needless to say, stories like that and my experiences growing up really drew me to the field of history.  I'm still really interested in the history of slavery in the region, although for undergrad I've mostly worked on Central African missions history.  Maybe I'll refocus on slavery for my PhD, if I get the chance to work on one!

[Septerra]

I study modern Russian history with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. This one is not hard to puzzle out, actually. I'm a Russian Lesbian hahahaha

[VAZ]

Please forgive me for pumping an old thread, but I think this topic is fascinating and touching and should be everlasting. It elucidates how we went on the road to the past and why we are doing what we do as historians and humanities scholars. I would like to hear more stories from the newer people and further reflections of the original posters. 

[Concordia]

I did history as an undergrad, and from a little kid was interested in the revolutionary period.  I never went deep enough to figure out what new I could say about that, though.  Flash forward some years, and I did a night-school class on the history of Boston.  Hugely diverse student body in that, from people trying to cure boredom all the way through degree candidates.  The official syllabus had the final two papers (out of 3) to be impossible projects.  One was three dozen myths and old-wives tales about local history and proving/disproving them with sources.  Great stuff but impossible to complete in an adequate way.  Anyway, as an alternative to those 2, we were offered an unstructured project based on primary sources.  Odd stuff-- one topic was Negro League baseball in New England, and there were some even more off most people's radar.  I chose the War of 1812, and stumbled on a more or less unused -- and fantastic -- manuscript, to go along with the newspaper clippings and secondary sources in my frighteningly short paper.

To figure out how to make better use of the document, I entered a master's degree at Cambridge.  Sadly, the big source has limits on what can be explored by one person, but I will be continuing on a few themes of post-1815 history that were suggested in my dissertation research.  It may be that nobody has written about these topics because there is nothing there, but I have a year to find out just how far up the creek I am.

Edited July 8, 2017 by Concordia

[NoirFemme]

American Girl dolls. Samantha and Addy were my favorites (Antebellum to Progressive Era). However, I came to history via anthropology, since I also wanted to be Lara Croft/Indiana Jones. Because of this, I don't consider myself to be an historian! I'm much more interested in how history is created, produced, used, and disseminated by cultures via fashion, food, monuments, memory, and literature. 

Edited July 9, 2017 by NoirFemme

[a.n.d]

I came to history through art. 

My adviser for my undergrad (digital media in the visual arts) was working on an on-going project about LGBT culture during the Weimar period and we would often have long discussions about the progression of art and culture and how it impacted and was impacted in turn, by historical events in and around that period. My primary research interests lay somewhere along the culture of prisoners in concentration camps and how they preserved it as a form of resistance during the Holocaust. I haven't done much research into it yet, so I'm not sure how much there is there to go with, but I suppose I'll see. I do have other interests/questions just in case, but yeah. For me, it all started with art.

[VAZ]

Maybe it's time to share my own experiences.

I have some anthropology/archaeology/literature background before turning to history. And it took me a few years to figure out where my approach, time period and region lay. Not really "I figured out" but "everything flew naturally."

Approach: Like NoirFemme, I never consider myself a proper historian either. I care less about high politics, wars, networks and development, and I failed to understand hard philosophy and big thoughts. Instead, I focus on individuals, emotions, experiences, mentalities, rituals and the daily life. I would actually call myself an anthropologist of the past, wandering around the field and greet people. I would like to see them talk to each other, laugh, cry, suffer and enjoy. I would like to know what they did in the morning, in the afternoon and before sleep, and how they felt about the day and the life in general. My friend said that I'm the "an-old-grandma-washing-clothes-by-the-river" type of historian, and I cannot agree more. Therefore, I choose social and cultural history, and I think it's a good combo. Social history without cultural history becomes very social science-y, and cultural history without social history loses its "from the below" character.

Time period: This really made me struggle, somehow even today. But I'm also most absolute on this part. From the very beginning, I see doing history as an escape. It sends me away from the worsening real contemporary world and places me all the way back to the remote past. So I set myself a watershed: I'm not doing any time period that have been lived by people who had met my great grand parents whom I have seen early in my life. In other words, I try to disassociate the history from today. This did not come from nowhere. Whenever I have a choice to take a course, I always prefer the one covering the earlier period; whenever I have to pick a paper topic, I always write on something around the lower limit year. Maybe someday I will work on the history of the prehistory. On the other end, however, I can only do modern literature and culture (another way to escape from the REAL contemporary world). Modern history just makes me sick, physiologically and mentally. What the heck is the stock market? Why people dressed themselves so ugly in the last two centuries? What's the good about the industrialization and where has the slow, simple life style gone? I'm happy to read what modern historians come up with, maybe I can teach if it's about my own region, but I will never spill any ink on the modern era, not within another 50 years. Moreover, I see the temptation of doing contemporary history (always have something brand new to write on), but there's no way for me to study my own era in my professional career.

Region: I loved a culture, so I learned a language. Then I learned more languages and expanded my territory, and now I belong to the entire area. It becomes my dream land and I spend as much time as I could every year in my land. I feel to be one of the people here and I'm faithful to study their history. I just cannot imagine any area historian / scholar who is detached from his land and people. 

 

Edited July 9, 2017 by VAZ

[nhhistorynut]

I guess I sort of fell into this as my specialization. It started when I had to write a seminar paper on something/anything related to WWII for a methods class and I wanted to do something different. I have been going to Jamaica for 26 years, and began looking into their involvement in the war. After discovering Jamaica's refugee and internment camps, I started digging in deeper and my focus began shifting towards the issues of race inequality and the role the white refugees played in worsening those issues. My MA thesis is on Jamaica's history of race relations and the island's independence movement. It looks specifically at how, when, and why Afro-Jamaicans were able to tackle and overcome their racial inferiority complex and demand self-government and independence.

Through my research on this, I have developed a passion for US race relations in the mid-20th century. I had originally wanted to specialize in German military history (pre-1900), but this topic just completely took over. So there you have it. I managed to get into a school with the POI I wanted (I love his books and may have fan-girled a bit after he called me to chat last winter), and will get to focus on race relations and racism in 20th century New England.