Seems like we agree on a lot! I don’t think I wrote my summaries and your re-phrasings seem to me to be very similar to what I intended.
I agree that looking at causes and factors influencing “beneficial outcomes” is interesting and useful, just a slightly different purpose from looking at the causes and factors influencing the successes of ally-based movements.
<<I’d also love to hear other constructive feedback/advice for doing better historical work in the future, if you have any off the top of your head.>>
Some more “practical” tips which may or may not be useful and may or may not be obvious:
a few times I’ve come across numerous people asserting that a particular change was highly influential or that that X led to Y, but the citations trace back to inference from chronological order of events and maybe one or two supporting anecdotal comments. I’m generally pretty hesitant to make strong causal claims or to repeat causal claims made by others.
typing in the name of the movement you’re looking at plus the word “history” into Google Scholar and then going through the results seems to be a decent way to start.
I think you’ll often hit pretty rapidly diminishing returns on time invested after the first 2-5 books/articles you read on a particular topic, but you’ll keep finding useful information (of strategic importance) and occasionally changing your view on something you were quite confident about earlier for quite a long time after that.
sometimes research gets a little siloed by discipline, but historians, legal scholars, sociologists, political scientists, and economists often each have something to add to the understanding of a particular movement or case study.
Seems like we agree on a lot! I don’t think I wrote my summaries and your re-phrasings seem to me to be very similar to what I intended.
I agree that looking at causes and factors influencing “beneficial outcomes” is interesting and useful, just a slightly different purpose from looking at the causes and factors influencing the successes of ally-based movements.
<<I’d also love to hear other constructive feedback/advice for doing better historical work in the future, if you have any off the top of your head.>>
I’m no expert and am hoping to start doing some more synthesis / comparison of our case studies so far soon, which is where some of these methodological considerations will come into play. Ive written about some of the methodological considerations here in some depth. https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/what-can-the-farmed-animal-movement-learn-from-history
Some more “practical” tips which may or may not be useful and may or may not be obvious:
a few times I’ve come across numerous people asserting that a particular change was highly influential or that that X led to Y, but the citations trace back to inference from chronological order of events and maybe one or two supporting anecdotal comments. I’m generally pretty hesitant to make strong causal claims or to repeat causal claims made by others.
typing in the name of the movement you’re looking at plus the word “history” into Google Scholar and then going through the results seems to be a decent way to start.
I think you’ll often hit pretty rapidly diminishing returns on time invested after the first 2-5 books/articles you read on a particular topic, but you’ll keep finding useful information (of strategic importance) and occasionally changing your view on something you were quite confident about earlier for quite a long time after that.
sometimes research gets a little siloed by discipline, but historians, legal scholars, sociologists, political scientists, and economists often each have something to add to the understanding of a particular movement or case study.