Creative Historical Thinking

This book hopes to remedy the problem of uncreative history education. It is a book about what it means for historians to think creatively and a primer on historical thinking, defining creative thought and writing within the discipline of history and providing key examples of creative interpretation. The book's central argument is that metaphor and analogy are important tools of translation by which to understand and represent history. Author Michael Douma presents methods of visualizing historical thought and encourages readers to develop their own pathways into historical research and writing on a creative model.

The chapters that follow intend to present a useful survey of creativity in historical thinking. The first chapter describes how we think of time in terms of space, so that we can create timelines to order and make sense of the past. The second chapter wrestles with the relationship between metaphor and facts to show how creative historians bring information to life. The third chapter describe the discipine of history in terms of analogies, extended metaphors, that historians may use to explain their discipline to others. Chapter four describes the practical research and writing methods of creative historians. The fifth chapter presents diagrams and metaphorical models that historians use to explain their subject, while the sixth chapter warns about the pitfalls of applying metaphors too rigorously in interpretations of ultimate meaning in history. Chapter seven provides examples of creative historical research projects, and chapter eight explains how history teachers might seek to inspire creative historical thinking in the classroom