Look for the potential strengths and insights offered by alternative points of view on or in the past, even or especially when they conflict with your own or conventional understandings.
Empathy is an intellectual and imaginative skill that is required both when reading sources created in the past and when reading secondary sources created by other historians. Though often confused with "sympathy" or "positive feeling," empathy means understanding and entertaining even those points of view with which you disagree; it does not require or necessarily imply agreement.
A novice historian who lacks this skill tends to judge the decisions and ideas of historical actors according to his or her own present-day opinions, which are sometimes conflated in the novice's mind with "common sense" or "just the way it is." Beginners are typically not very interested in seeking out multiple perspectives on an issue; they identify the actor or historian whose perspective they most agree with, and then discount or ignore other perspectives. At times, they may not even show awareness that an alternative perspective exists, even when presented with evidence to the contrary. Judgments are typically unjustifiably premature and absolute; even without much consideration, beginners decide a historical person or idea is all good or all bad.
As you develop the skill of historical empathy, you will be able to demonstrate your awareness that multiple perspectives exist in the past, though you may still be quick to judge different perspectives as unaccountably strange or unacceptable. On the other hand, when you do begin to entertain a historical actor's perspective as plausible, it may still be based on present-day assumptions about what you or someone you know would do in a similar situation today. When discussing other historians' or students' perspectives, you are able to identify differences of opinion and see the strengths and weakness of other views, though you may require coaching or specific feedback in order to be persuaded that a view you dislike has some merit, or that one you like has some problems.
Mastery of historical empathy is defined by an ability to "see and judge the past in its own terms by trying to understand the mentality, frames of reference, beliefs, values, intentions, and actions of historical agents using a variety of historical evidence."1 Put more simply, empathy means understanding historical actors and ideas in the context of their times, which is accessed by the consideration of multiple perspectives and sources from the past. By acknowledging the distance between the present and the past, you are able to make even strange or outdated views comprehensible to contemporary minds. You are not only sensitive to multiple perspectives on an issue that exist in the historical record, but also can imagine relevant perspectives that may not have been included in the record at all. When articulating your own positions about the past, you are able to encompass and account for plausible alternative views without abandoning entirely your point of view. Because you can see both the good and the bad in perspectives other than your own, your own conclusions are well-grounded but tentative and your criticisms of others are charitable and constructive.
Footnotes
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This definition is drawn from Kaya Yilmaz, "Historical Empathy and Its Implications for Classroom Practices in Schools," The History Teacher 40, no. 3 (May 2007), 331. ↩
Caleb, this is so very helpful, both for my own practice and for communicating with students. Thanks. I also wanted to share a phrase I picked up from Stuart Clark, in his book on early modern demonology (of all things!). He writes about “historical symmetry,” which he describes as “the paying of equal attention to past beliefs that we ourselves would reject and to those we might accept." He's attempting to locate those beliefs or practices that, to us, are puzzling or offensive in a coherent mental world in which they are plausible and comprehensible--first to historical subjects, and then to us. Source: Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), x.