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Thinking about Comprehensive Exams

Benjamin Hoy and Keith Carlson

Comprehensive exams are designed to test whether you have mastered a comprehensive
overview of a particular field or subfield of historiography. As such they aim to test not only your
knowledge of past, but your knowledge of how historians have interpreted he past. There are various
kinds of exam questions and we have tried to highlight a few below.

Whether historians are mentioned by name or not in the question, it is very important that you are able
to mention which historians (by name) have written on a topic and how they are similar or different. It is
also important that you understand the basic chronology of events and the basic chronology of
publication dates. And because historians attempt to answer questions that are relevant to the society
in which they live, and they do this with the intellectual tools available at the time, it is also important to
understand the social, economic, and cultural context in which historians have researched and written
their scholarship. Consider, for example, the way in which a historian in 2017 researching Indigenous
people in the fur trade will be working in a different social/political context and with different
methodological tools than a historian who approached the same topic in 1950 or in 1980.

Common Types of Comprehensive Exam Questions

Define an important term and discuss how various historians have used it to understand a topic.

 Eg. How have historians [sometimes specific historians are mentioned] defined “Indigenous”?
How have their definitions shaped the historical narratives written about the 19th and 20th
centuries? Are their definitions similar or different from those writing about the 17th and 18th
centuries? Has the definition of Indigenous shifted between the 1960s and the present?

How have historians [often named] written about [thematic topic/time period]?

 Eg. Arthur Ray, Olive Dickason, Colin Calloway, and Francis Paul Prucha all write sweeping
narratives about the past. What theoretical framework, periodization, geographic focus and
source base does each scholar utilize and how does it impact their resulting narrative?

How does a theorist/s [named individually] change the way that we think about [thematic topic/time
period]?

 Eg. Matthew Hannah argues that federal growth in the United States during the 19th century is
best understood through the lens of governmentality. How does Hannah’s argument change the
way historians think about settler-colonialism? How does Hannah’s framework compare to
other scholars writing about the same topic?

What does the chronology of a specific topic look like?

 Eg. If an undergraduate student asked you to explain how, when, and why the bison
disappeared, how would you respond? Which historians have written about this
transformation? Do they agree or disagree on its cause, intensity, duration, and scope? Why
does disagreement occur?

How has the time period or context in which historians have written impacted their conclusions?
 Eg. Since the 1960s, historians have developed different conclusions, theoretical frameworks,
and methods to research Indigenous history. How are the histories written in the 1960s and
1970s different from those written in the 1980s and 1990s or from those written today? How
has the field developed, and what explains differences in interpretations over time?

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