Ed. Note: On January 8, 1987, Warren O. Ault, professor emeritus of history at Boston University, was 100 years old. The following reminiscence first appeared in the Washington Post, “Education Review,” November 2, 1986, and is reprinted with their permission. Professor Ault has been an AHA member since 1912.
I began to study history at Baker University in Kansas, where our professor was a retired minister who gave us daily assignments in a textbook. In class we recited. Our textbooks simply set forth the facts in a prosaic way without attempting to enliven them—with one exception. I well remember going to class after the first assignment in the new American history and saying to a seatmate, “That man can write.” The author was Woodrow Wilson, professor of his tory at Wesleyan University.
I graduated from college in 1907 and, having won a Rhodes Scholarship, spent the next three years studying history at Oxford. The program consisted of the whole of English history and a period of European history. We were also required to master certain classics of political science, beginning with Aristotle’s Politics. All this was capped by a series of final examinations, written and oral.
At that time, the educational method at Oxford was a combination of lectures and tutorials. Attendance at lectures was entirely optional and, at most of them, poor. The tutorial was important though. At an hour’s conference once a week, the pupil brought with him an essay that took him two full days to research and write and twenty minutes to read. The tutor then made any comments he might have and assigned the next week’s topic.
My tutor was R. L. Poole, the professor of diplomatic history. He was a member of an upper middle-class family, famous in Tudor times. His constant demeanor was that of an English gentle man combined with the reserve of a scholar. Only once did I see him lose his composure. That was when T. E. Lawrence read his weekly essay.
Lawrence and I were in the same year at Oxford, both pupils of Poole. One week Poole asked us both to come at the same hour. I read my essay first and got by without trouble. When Lawrence finished reading his, Poole spoke sharply. “Your facts are well enough, but you write in the style of a tupenny ha’penny newspaper.” As we mounted our bikes to ride away, Lawrence said to me with a grin, “I thought I would stir the old bag up a bit.” At Oxford Lawrence became a friend; we used to make brass rubbings together at local churches.
After Oxford I attended Yale, where George Burton Adams was chairman of the history department. He had written one of the twelve volumes of The Political History of England of which Poole was a co-editor. Many years later I found in Adams’ papers at Yale a letter Poole had written to him about me. “I am well satisfied with the progress he has made. He is a very good fellow by nature but wants a good deal of polish. That you will give him in New Haven.”
At Yale I was taught the whole craft of the professional historian, working from original source to published monograph. Most of what I learned was in the seminar of Professor Adams. He would give all his students the same problem to be researched in exactly the same source. This was practicable be cause medieval sources are scarce, discontinuous, and brief. Having done our research, we gathered at the appointed hour around a large table with the professor at its head. He called on each of us in turn to state the facts we had learned from the sources and explain their significance. He gave each of us all the time we wanted but never the slightest hint of how well he thought we were doing. Consequently, the pressure to do better than the others was intense. When we had all finished, the professor would straighten up and tell us what facts he had drawn from the same sources and what he thought was their significance. His statement was for us a convincing object-lesson in how to reason about the past.
Professor Adams’ teaching did not end with the seminar. He would take his students to his study, show them his library, and explain how he made and filed his notes. Good private librarianship, he said, accounted for half the success of a scholar.
What I learned from Adams about the craft of the professional historian has served me well. During a half-century of college teaching, I found historical research—into early English history—a stimulating avocation to which I turned when I could, and during my retirement years (since 1962), it has been my principal occupation.
Warren O. Ault is professor emeritus of history at Boston University. He is also the AHA's oldest member.
