Researching History: An Amateur Historian’s First Forays into Fieldwork
by Fathie Abdat
As an undergraduate in the National University of Singapore striving to get the highest classification for a “paper†degree, I honestly thought that the historical discipline simply entailed getting books from a nearby library, sieving out relevant information, and reshaping them into a coherent form.
After graduating with the basic degree, I decided to pursue my higher education in the same field and in the same institution where we have an excellent world-class history department operating right in the midst of the sleepy neighborhood estate of Clementi. I expected the Masters programme to be a simple linear progression from undergraduate work since I’d be working with the same faculty members. Even when one of my post-graduate supervisors, A/P Michael Feener kept on reiterating the mantra during our seminars that the discipline of history was simply “hardâ€, I never did realized the exact degree of how “hard†it could get until I started my fieldwork.
History in the Masters programme was no longer a field of discipline which entailed reading and writing. It suddenly transformed into a beastly “discipline†in the classic Foucauldian sense of the word during my field trip to Manhattan, New York when I sampled a dash of the hard work put in by professional historians. My research topic is on Malcolm X and his philosophy on religion and race. As such, I had to trace back the footsteps where he walked and found myself boarding an SIA airplane to Manhattan, New York. Here then is a brief but brutally honest of what fieldwork in history is…
On 9 June 2007, I arrived in John F. Kennedy airport weary, dazed and extremely jet-legged after approximately twenty hours of flying across the Pacific. All the excitement I had prior to the trip dissipated with the discomfort and fatigue. At the point of queuing up to get my passport stamped, I received a rude introduction to an important but understated aspect of the historian’s work: globetrotting and traveling to distant unfamiliar countries to conduct research.
After the paperwork and my travel documents have been checked, I traveled to my accommodations in Manhattan, a cheap budget hostel on Upper West Side which is just a few streets away from Columbia University, one of the main sites I intended to scourge for information. The first day was basically spent not in a library or an archive but on my creaking bed as I had to catch a more than a few winks.
The next day, I felt fresh enough to walk a few streets down to begin my research at Columbia University where I literally camp from morning till night for the next few days. More precisely, I had to comb the Butler Library for old newspapers, magazines, rare books, microfilms from the minute the library opened till the minute when the library closed.
Here at this point, I thank A/P Brian Farrell for his invaluable piece of advice while I was having a chat with him in Singapore to actually begin research online before stepping foot in the USA. It was advice which saved me at least two days worth of work such as by having my access to the Butler Library confirmed even before I stepped into their library, checking the availability, exact location and page numbers of the required articles, familiarizing myself with the opening hours and rules of the library etc.
Even then, you can always trust on supposedly available sources to turn up missing when you have traveled around the world to get a look at them! I also remembered one of my undergraduate tutors, A/P Peter Borschberg who once narrated a tale of how his personal research when he traveled to a Moscow library for a particular book only to be told by the librarian that it had been missing ever since the German armies ravaged the site during World War II.
While no such reason was given to me by the staff officers at Butler Library, it was still a great source of frustration to discover missing reels of microfilm or books. Usually, these are the ones which are really crucial to your research. This proved to be another important lesson for me: human errors and unfortunately the actions of some fellow historians play a considerable role in the process of conducting fieldwork.
Frustration aside, I pored over various articles on the microfilm (albeit after irritating one of their student-assistants who sulked while teaching me how to operate a microfilm machine). For five whole days stopping only for a quick lunch and dinner, I pored over the pages of both mainstream and black American newspapers.
Apart from the Butler Library, the whole process was repeated in other nearby sites like the Burke Library in Union Theological Seminary (where they possessed an excellent collection of rare FBI files including those not available online after being released by the Freedom of Information Act);
and in the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
I spent approximately a week in each location where I learned that getting to know the staff at the respective archives really is essential for accelerating the speed of your research. Apart from getting your entrances and membership cards settled as fast as possible, the officials are really useful in hunting down rare materials from other libraries.
They are also extremely helpful in helping you hurdle over the usual rolls of red-tape. For instance, printing out all the required articles is not really a cost-effective or a space-saving devise. As such, a digital camera serves as a useful gadget which I recommend all budding historians to purchase as a long-term investment. Just make sure that the camera has a page-focus feature which makes printed words clear when uploaded onto a computer.
Some libraries or archives do not allow researchers to use such cameras, others do not allow flashes, some have a ban of tripod stands, etc. These are just some of the many legal technicalities and obstacles that researcher-historians have to overcome. As mentioned, getting on the right side of the staff officials never can never fail to yield some benefits including getting over these cumbersome legal technicalities.
When doing research, time really flies and I had to really rush through thousands and thousands of pages of information. By the time I had to conclude my field work and armed with a repository of information stored and stuffed in thumb-drives, CDs and thousands of Xeroxed papers, it then set in that this was not the end of the journey. It was only the first step of the many involved in the tedious historical research process. In fact, it is probably one of the easier steps! After this, the researcher-historian would have to actually process the information gathered and make some sense of it.
Before that happens of course, there is just the task of flying another dreaded twenty hours back to Singapore…
The author is currently pursuing his Masters degree at the Department of History in NUS. Besides learning the craft of being a professional historian, his dissertation is on the controversial historical personality of Malcolm X, an revolutionary intellectual activist struggling in the un-civil America of the 1960s, supervised by A/P Ian Gordon. Upon completion of the Masters programme, he will serve out his bond as a teacher with the Ministry of Education (MOE).
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