Below, Prof. Tristan G. Brown describes his personal approach to lecturing.
Since arriving at MIT in 2020, my approach has been simple: to be myself and share why I love history and am passionate about Chinese culture. I try to offer students something they cannot get on TikTok, Instagram, or other forms of social media: sustained engagement with primary sources, cultural context, and the skills to distinguish evidence from assertion. I also want to make complex stories accessible without oversimplifying them.
I try to mix things up: new readings, more emphasis on an era I was looking into over the summer. If I read a great book or watch a good show on the “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms” period (907–979 CE), I’ll probably put it in the next iteration of the class. That keeps the material alive for me, and it means students are encountering a subject that is still being thought through.
If my teaching has changed over the years, it is mostly in how I explain what historians do. In the first week, I now tell students that historians are like lawyers, detectives, and engineers rolled into one.
First, historians are like lawyers in that we represent people who cannot represent themselves. I urge students not to judge too quickly. Hear the evidence, weigh the context, and understand the motives. Most people are neither purely innocent nor purely guilty. As E. H. Carr reminded us, understanding must come before judgment. Even modern juries can spend months weighing evidence before reaching a verdict. Don’t expect to reach a final judgment on Chinggis Khan in a single semester.
Second, historians are like detectives. History can look like a mystery to be solved, but it usually takes years of training, caution, and judgment. Historical thinking means entering a world in which different assumptions once seemed normal, and that is deeply counterintuitive. Historians often face too much evidence in the modern era and too little in antiquity. The challenge is knowing how to separate signal from noise.
Third, historians are like engineers. We work under constraints: evidence is limited, interpretations compete, and multiple things can be true at once. Our materials are sources, and what we build are arguments. The real task is to decide what is structural, what supports the structure, and what is secondary.
Approached as a lawyer, detective, or engineer, history trains us to think across time and nimbly pivot between mens (mind) and manus (hand). That is why it belongs at MIT, an institute devoted to building the future.
