Bringing together practical methods from both history and composition, Writing History provides a wealth of tips and advice to help students research and write essays for history classes. The book covers all aspects of writing about history, including finding topics and researching them, interpreting source materials, drawing inferences from sources, and constructing arguments. It concludes with three chapters that discuss writing effective sentences, using precise wording, and revising. Using numerous examples from the works of cultural, political, and social historians, Writing History serves as an ideal supplement to history courses that require students to conduct research. The third edition includes expanded sections on peer editing and topic selection, as well as new sections on searching and using the Internet.
William Kelleher Storey is Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Millsaps College, where he has taught since 1999. Storey teaches classes about African History, World History, and the British Empire.
Storey was born in New York City in 1965 and grew up on Long Island. He graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1983 and went on to earn his bachelor's degree in history at Harvard University in 1987. He completed his master's degree in history in 1990 at the Johns Hopkins University, where he received his doctorate in 1993. After finishing his formal studies in history, Bill received further training during two postdoctoral fellowships. In 1994-5 he was an NSF Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. From 1995 to 1997 he was a Preceptor in Expository Writing at Harvard University.
Professor Storey has a special interest in the history of environmental change, science, and technology. He is the author of four books. Two of them are based on research about environmental and technological aspects of imperialism: Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Science and Power in Colonial Mauritius (University of Rochester Press, 1997). He is also the author of Writing History: A Guide for Students (Oxford University Press, 1999; 2nd ed. 2003; 3rd ed. 2009), which draws on his undergraduate teaching about historical writing. His most recent book, The First World War: A Concise Global History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) is based on a class that he teaches in the Core Curriculum at Millsaps. Storey is currently in the early stages of writing a biography of Cecil Rhodes from an environmental and technological perspective.
Storey has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship (1992), plus grants from the American Historical Association (1993); the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1997); the Mellon Foundation (2005); and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2004). The Society for the History of Technology has awarded him the Abbot Payson Usher Prize for the year's best journal article (2005) and the Sidney M. Edelstein Prize for the year's best book (2009). He has also received the Outstanding Young Faculty Award from Millsaps College (2003) and a Teaching Award from the Mississippi Humanities Council (2006).
