History by the Numbers: A Quantitative Approach to Teaching the Importance of Conflicting Evidence

Students encounter difficulties when entering into the fog of historical analysis, a place where evidence rarely lines up neatly and contradictions abound. Too often, novices conveniently ignore any sort of counterevidence that could muddy a clean explanation, thus reverting to safe truisms that sidestep key problems. Meanwhile, professional historians revel in uncertainty, understanding that it is evidentiary ambiguity and conflict that offer opportunities to ponder, to grapple, and to explain. How does one bridge the gap? How can instructors start their classes down that admittedly long, difficult road toward a more genuine understanding of past peoples and events--one that, most importantly, embraces conflicting evidence? This article reports on a unique approach to these problems, one that forced learners to come face-to-face with contradictory information. Students did not just confront incongruous evidence; they actually measured and weighed it by applying a quantitative method to textual analysis. Their findings, as well as their experiences with the technique, indicate that this unusual research approach has the potential not only to better deal with ambiguous evidence, but also to change learners' perceptions of history itself.