MEMORIZATION 1301 | history-with-hagan

MEMORIZATION PAGE

Even in cases where you can access notes or sources, memorization can still be incredibly useful. And certain fields, like medicine and nursing, still require this skill.

These are the techniques I've used over the years to memorize a lot of history. What you'll find here is a written description of the techniques, and a video that offers a chance to practice and then test yourself over some information covered in the video.

TECHNIQUE #1:

SIMPLE REPETITION: This technique will lock in the facts you need for understanding. If you have trouble with dates, specifics, people, historical order or other factual issues, this one is for you. This technique got me through doctoral exams, and has been quite useful for helping others with things like certification/licensing exams.

There's nothing to it.

Simple repetition works best with two or more people. In this class, what you want to do is take the study guide and get the who/what/why/when/significance for each item. Then have one person ask questions while the others answer out loud. Don't read the answers. Say them. If you're wrong with an answer, have the questioner make the correction. Then keep the question-and-answer exchange going until the information comes back without hesitation. That often takes up to four repeats.

Questions should look like this:

What are the dates of the Civil War?
The Age of Ambition unfolded after the conclusion of what war?
What is the date of the most deadly hurricane in recorded history?
Abraham Lincoln unleashed hard war in what year of the Civil War?
What year did Preston Brooks cane Charles Sumner?
The American Republic existed from when to when?
Who was elected president in 1824?

That's what you want - factual questions asked by one person and answered by others. Keep the back and forth going down the study guide until the answers come easily. Mix up the order. Skip around if you're asking the questions. If the people answering get something wrong, correct them and ask the question again and again until they've got it. Return to that question on occasion to be sure it's locked in.

Simple recitation is the best way to learn facts permanently. It's fantastic. If this technique is performed correctly, the data stays with you forever. It's very useful for fields other than history, including nursing, pharmacology, anatomy, chemistry, geography. It's great for any field in which you have to KNOW your information on the spot. Like I said, it's been quite useful in certification exams.

TECHNIQUE #2:

FAKE TEACHING:

Simple recitation is great for programming information into your mind. Fake teaching will tell you exactly how well you know how all that information fits together. This technique is more useful for testing how well you understand complex subjects and concepts.

And it's simple. Just pretend you are explaining an event, concept, or the interplay of information. Explain it by speaking it out loud.

This doesn't mean just relating the facts. For this technique, provide a thorough explanation, including (in history) relevant dates, historical context, the individuals involved and their contributions. When you put it altogether, you want to turn the complex into an understandable story.

In history, this technique is extremely useful for complex historical connections like the German city of Nuremberg's contribution to British colonization. That's a good one because the relationship between a landlocked German town and a completely different country's colonization efforts is not obvious. It has to be teased out of the information.

To fake teach this, you're going to have to know the relationship between the people of Nuremberg and oceanic exploration. That means studying background information first, then bringing the story forward.

NUREMBERG:

The Nuremberg/Britain story is typical of how complicated history works. You tap a subject just a little, and that tiny blow exposes a massive spiderweb of connections that branch out all over the place. Moments of clarity about how one historical event influences another soon appear.

So let's look. Here's Nuremberg, Germany, a place pretty far from Britain. What do we know about it? We know that in the 1400s, Nuremberg's people had a reputation for specializing in high-quality, precise metalwork. They made clocks. More importantly, though, they made the precise tools used in oceanic navigation. A man from Nuremberg even made the first globe in European history in 1492.

Why? Why would some little landlocked place in Germany make the tools used by ocean explorers? Why didn't Portugal do this? Because of the Renaissance. With the opening of Asian trade in the Renaissance, a lot of the new business happened to come into Europe through Nuremberg. In the 1400s, therefore, the town got rich. Its people were thus able to invest in expensive industries like smelters and furnaces. And they were able to spend the time necessary to learn the exact techniques needed to make perfect telescopes, rulers, compasses, and such.

Because of their excellence as clock and toolmakers, Germans from Nuremberg were welcome in exploration hotspots like Portugal and Spain. There, the Germans sold their fine navigation tools and watched explorers bring in riches.

In 1492, one of the toolmakers in Nuremberg, Martin Behaim, shaped Europe's the first globe, using everything that was known about the world at the time. Looking at the sphere, it dawned on him that a northern route across the Atlantic might be an improvement. That route was shorter on the globe than the equator routes followed by Spain and Portugal. And it was northern, which meant it might funnel money and riches into the German states. Behaim and another German brought the idea to Portugal in the 1490s and were rejected.

THE BRITISH RELATIONSHIP:

Now we get to the connection with Britain. In Portugal, the Nuremberg Germans didn't just talk to the government. They also interacted with the explorers themselves. As they talked about the northern route with these men, one of them - John Cabot - saw a huge opportunity. Cabot took the Germans' idea to Britain, knowing the British were as interested as any country in what Columbus had found in 1492. Cabot had the connections and the celebrity to sell the Germans' idea to the British, and so he did.

In 1497, Cabot sailed from Britain with two ships, on a mission to map the northern route and see where it lead. That northern route would become the pathway Britain used to colonize North America. So, in the end, when the British colonized North America, they used a German idea to cross the ocean - an idea that originated in Nuremberg, got tossed about in Portugal, and came to Britain by way of Cabot.

So if you were asked a question about what drove the British colonization of North America, you could cite all the normal explanations - the desire to catch up with Spain, greed, fear of falling behind the rest of Europe - but you could also point out that Nuremberg, Germany played a significant role in shaping British colonization as well.

See how this became a story? Stories and narratives are easy for us humans to remember. We're wired for storytelling. If you can turn the complex into a story and fake teach it to someone, you'll have it.

Fake teaching works with every subject. Back when I was a music major, I once fake taught nearly an entire semester of music theory to myself just to make absolutely sure I had all the progressions, resolutions, chords and such on the final. I went a little overboard and even wrote up a little textbook, which I recited out loud. That was kind of nuts, to be sure, but I was really into the subject. And I actually enjoyed taking the final.

Have a mathematical equation you're not getting? Use simple recitation to memorize what's in the equation and then fake teach the solution until you can do it in your sleep.

Anatomy and Physiology getting to be too much? Simple recitation and fake teaching will make it so much simpler.

In this class, fake teaching works well with big complex questions like these:

The question of why the Civil War didn't occur in the 1830s during the Nullification crisis.
The question of how racism started in Europe and the role Prince Henry's family played in its origins.
The question of why the American people elected Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828. What were they hoping to get from this guy?
The question of why the Constitution is sometimes considered a miraculous document.
The question of why the American Republic failed in 1786 and had to be replaced by a new American nation.
The question of how American colonists sustained a revolutionary movement for two decades prior to the Revolutionary War.
The question of whether the Civil War was inevitable.

There are all kind of things for which you can use this technique. Have fun with it!