How To Research History: A Guide to Doing It Properly

since i make a lot of videos about history i'm often asked questions like how do i know if a historical source is trustworthy where do i start if i want to look into a historical topic and how do i do my own historical research and i've always had trouble giving them simple answers because i don't really think that it's possible to respond to that sort of thing adequately in just a short off-the-cuff sort of way so in this video i'll be addressing all of those questions and others in detail that means giving a lesson on

something very important that most people who are interested in history outside of an academic context often ignore historiography the study not of the events of the past themselves but rather how their researched and interpreted because if you don't have a good understanding of this it's impossible to even tell what research you can trust let alone do good research yourself i'm gonna go over things like how to critically analyze sources how to find them in the first place how to gauge their reliability and tell which ones are even worth your attention and a whole lot more

the sorts of stuff that anyone looking to get a good grasp on a historical topic should always be considering think of this as a sort of short simple introductory historical research 101 class before we get started i just want to note that this video is sponsored by my supporters on patreon and kofi thanks very much to you guys now let's go we need to begin with the fundamentals the very basis of the study of history the evidence every source whether it's an archaeological artifact an ancient text a newspaper article a modern history book or whatever

can usually be put into one of two categories primary or secondary each of which needs to be evaluated in different ways primary sources are the building blocks of the study of history without them it couldn't exist at all they're where the details come from they're usually contemporary or near contemporary accounts things like diaries recounting what happened a decorative vars that depicts events or practices a recording of an interview with a witness or a news report secondary sources on the other hand provide arguments analysis evaluations commentary etc etc based on both primary and other secondary sources

the prime examples for our purposes here are history books articles documentaries and even youtube videos they're usually made with the benefit of a lot of hindsight the potential to be more critical with their sources and access to a lot of extra context and information that those who produce the primary sources usually would not have had hence they're able to provide a much broader and more accurate picture of history than what you'd be able to get from just reading primary sources alone the key word there is able just because they can doesn't mean they always do

as most youtube history channels make painfully clear keep in mind here that primary and secondary are not valued judgments at all they just refer to the different ways that sources are utilized and that's also very important the difference between a primary and secondary source is not always clear just by looking at the source itself because that classification really depends much more on how it's being used here's some practical examples let's say that we've got a hypothetical clipping from a newspaper from 1810 from uh london bridgeshire ingerland average english town name you know it reads july

7th 1810 baron rees-mogger churchill the 15th was robbed of his family heirlooms in broad daylight this shows just how far our society's morals have fallen if we were to only cite that first sentence and say that on july the 7th 1810 a man with a ridiculous name was robbed then we'd be using the article as a primary source because it's an event that in all likelihood did actually occur if we were to instead say using that second sentence of the article as evidence that in 1810 society's morality was declining then we'd be using it as

a secondary source because that's an argument that's being made by the author of the article they're saying here is my evidence and here is my subjective conclusion based on that evidence that conclusion may very well have been a very good and accurate assessment it might also have been totally wrong or maybe something in between that doesn't matter though because whether something is a secondary source has nothing to do with the quality of the author's argument and everything to do with the fact that the offer is making an argument an analysis an assessment or something like

that and that that part is what's being cited but wait what if we were to instead cite that second part not for its argument but rather as evidence of what people in 1810 england might have thought about their society something like say a newspaper report about a robbery of an aristocrat said this shows just how far our society's morals have fallen which indicates that some people at the time might have felt negatively about the age they lived in then you'd be using that exact same sentence as a primary source because you're not simply citing its

argument as if it's correct but rather using it as evidence of what some people thought a primary source on the mindset of the time you can even cite a source as both primary and secondary at the same time for example on july 7th baron reeves mugger churchill was robbed that's using the article as a primary source however if the sentence then continued with this which as one writer wrote showed just how far society's morality had fallen at the time that bit is using it as a secondary source for all of the reasons that we just

went over because it's approvingly citing the argument itself rather than just its recounting of an event so one single source used in both a primary and secondary manner all in the same sentence i sure hope this isn't too confusing now some sources are definitely more suited to being used as primaries and some others as secondaries often though they can at least be utilized in niche ways that would fall into the other category but the most important thing here is to remember that whether something is a primary or secondary source doesn't particularly depend on the source

itself but rather how you or whoever else is using it analyzing sources how you analyze a source depends on that categorization that we've just gone over for something being used as a primary source you want to ask questions like who offered it what's that background why did they write it what biases ulterior motives or outlook might they have had that could compromise the reliability of their account who was their intended audience and how might this have influenced the content when does the source originate from is it contemporary if not how far removed is it from

the time that it's reporting on what's the wider context surrounding it is it contradicted by other primary sources is there any serious reason to believe that it might not be authentic or a faithful copy of the original and just how valuable is its actual content and for a secondary source you want to ask questions like who offered it what makes them qualified to analyze this topic what biases might they have and do they make an earnest effort to be unbiased despite them what evidence do they use is this evidence sufficient to support the arguments that

they're basing off it are they accurately representing the content and quality of this evidence are they contextualizing it are they leaving out evidence that might be inconvenient for their argument are they adequately addressing other arguments that may contradict theirs especially the academic literature on the topic do their conclusions follow from their argument and make logical sense are they maybe being a bit too certain about something where a lot of doubt still remains or striking too broad of a brush be careful not to take questioning the evidence too far by the way remember that you really

don't need to provide a source for things that are just kind of common knowledge stating that the u.s presidential election of 1856 took place on november 4th for example wouldn't require a source because no one in their right mind is going to argue against that but maybe more specific claims related to it like a quote from a speech that someone gave on the campaign trail would so as you can see two very different types of critique and analysis are required depending on how we're using a source you might have noticed that analyzing secondary sources in

particular also necessarily involves a lot of analyzing their primary sources too but that doesn't mean that primary sources are the best way to learn about history not at all in fact primary does not mean better nor read me first as i touched on very briefly when i was outlining secondary sources they're usually made with the benefit of a lot of hindsight the potential to be more critical with their sources and access to a lot of extra context and information that those who produce the primary sources usually would not have had hence they're able to provide

a much broader and more accurate picture of history than what you'd be able to get from just reading primary sources alone if you just go straight to the primary sources you're going to miss out on all of that and more in fact you're going to have trouble even finding primary sources how are you even gonna know where to start without reading the works that have already put them together and contextualize them the best way to find primary sources is itself by reading secondary literature especially because the study of history is kind of an indirect collaborative

process the history books of today or at least the good ones all draw extensively from the research of other historians gradually building upon it and improving it over time in a lot of cases that means that they're engaging with decades hundreds of years or sometimes even more than a millennia of research to collectively produce the culmination of it all at least for now until others build on their work in the future historians have already discovered and gathered together the primary source material already asked all those questions about it that i outlined earlier and already put

exhaustive amounts of time and effort into discussing how best to piece them together to form a coherent whole so unless you're at the very least like a phd student who's investigating something that's like totally new that no one else has ever looked into before then the best way to learn about a historical topic including its primary source material is through secondary sources history books and articles practical examples a great example of the problems with thinking otherwise is the youtuber knowing better in his video on christopher columbus he implied that there had been some dishonesty about

what christopher columbus had intended to say in his writings so he made a point of going straight to the primary source material instead skipping the secondary scholarship entirely which led him to assert this and that's what the natives were peasants not slaves columbus wanted to subjugate them which means turn them into subjects of the crown not enslave them now that's an interpretation that definitely seems to make sense if we just look at the primary source that he was drawing on by itself columbus did indeed write that he wanted to subjugate the natives which can absolutely

mean turn them into subjects of the crown but the word does also have other more sinister meanings which can mean enslavement or domination so without more context we don't really have a way of knowing for sure and a whole lot of such context exists if knowing better had read the secondary literature on the topic instead of going straight to the primary source he would have found it because historians have put the primary sources together and found that they attest quite extensively to the fact that after writing that columbus then went on to unambiguously enslave many

of the natives which makes what he really meant by subjugate in his earlier writing pretty clear you'll find contexts like that along with tons and tons and tons more in any good secondary source on a topic so you should avoid starting out with the primary sources that doesn't mean that you shouldn't consult them yourself though not remotely whenever you have any doubts you should absolutely check out the primary sources to make sure that a secondary source is representing them properly being sufficiently critical about their contents not overstating their importance all that sort of thing that

we went over earlier but you're not going to have a good grasp of what primary sources even exist let alone their context and the arguments surrounding them and the topic in question without secondary sources i'm going to show you another great example centered around one single primary source just one sometime during the 6th century meaning the years 500 to 599 a.d a british cleric named gildas wrote a sermon called on the ruin of britain regarding the invasions of britain by germanic peoples known as the saxons which had begun following the collapse of roman rule of

the british isles in the previous century he also included some details about events in his own time despite the fact that gildas was writing retrospectively at least a few decades after these conflicts had already died down this work is considered to be an incredibly important primary source on these events because it's one of very very few surviving texts on them written by a near contemporary but while it's clearly very valuable that does not mean that its narrative is objectively true if you were to read it uncritically and just take it at face value you'd probably

come away thinking whatever gildas had wanted the reader to think and there's no need to do that because this source like most important primary sources has been analyzed extensively so much so that there's actually entire books specifically about it and if you were to read the secondary scholarship that criticizes and draws upon it you'd be given a whole lot of context surrounding it you'd also be exposed to arguments that critique this text and show pretty convincingly that gildas was actually quite biased that his book was very clearly written to be a polemic that denounced certain

institutions and rulers blaming them for their perceived failures during the invasions and what followed in an effort to influence contemporary politics he was painting some leaders of the past as bad examples for the present he also praised and centered other figures while presenting them as embellished idealized versions of what he thought a good christian should be claiming that their supposed successes were all thanks to this piousness because being a christian cleric he wanted people to believe that following god in the proper way was the way to go so basically gildas was not an omnipotent objectively

correct source of perfect information but rather a human being with his own biases and motives writing about many events and distorting them in ways that he thought would be useful for his political goals that doesn't mean that his work is useless not even close it's incredibly valuable it just means that we need to be careful about how we use it and good secondary sources already do exactly that with the benefit of tons and tons of refinement thanks to a long history of research and discussion on that topic so there's very little reason to ever really

start out with the primary sources always begin with the secondaries finding good history books and articles you're probably asking at this point okay but how do i even identify and find those good secondary sources then great question identifying scholarly works first you need to know how to make sure that historical research meets scholarly standards this means looking for works that have been reviewed and judged as meeting basic quality standards by qualified historians the way that this is done is through peer review where articles or books go through an editorial process which includes qualified historians reviewing

them on their own merits blindly meaning that they're not told who the offer is if they then give it the thumbs up that usually means that its arguments and methodology at least hold up to a minimum level of scholarly scrutiny a standard that isn't necessarily an endorsement of a work's actual conclusions because there is certainly peer-reviewed work out there that is not very good or just outright bad but this process nonetheless narrows things down quite a bit because it filters out the vast vast majority of the fluff that's out there and there's a whole lot

of it believe me and it's typically a whole lot worse too than even the worst peer-reviewed stuff so by sticking to peer-reviewed works there is a far far lower chance of having your time wasted by complete and out of garbage that doesn't mean that it's not possible that there's value in works that have not been peer reviewed or that don't conform to other standards that i'm outlining here but when you're just learning the ropes like this it's best to be very selective because you still lack the knowledge and practical experience that you need to be

able to make those judgments confidently for yourself so how do you know if something's been peer reviewed for books this is pretty easy the vast majority of serious history books with at least a little bit of academic merit are published by one of two types of publishers a university press which are mostly conveniently named after a university like the duke university press for example making them easy to identify or by a publisher that specializes in academic publishing two examples being routledge or wiley you can always look up publishers and authors on google if you're unsure

books put out by such publishers tend to go through an even more rigorous editorial process than that which i outlined while those released by non-academic publishers don't and to identify peer-reviewed articles look for those that have been published in peer-reviewed journals generally identifying these is pretty easy they have boring names that describe their focus very matter-of-factly like the canadian journal of latin american and caribbean studies search for their name in google check out their website or whatever other source pops up and look for confirmation that they're peer-reviewed you can also just search for the author's

name in google too and usually if you see that they're a professor or have a phd in a relevant field it's pretty likely that the journal is peer-reviewed other things to help you identify these sorts of works are their titles and structure they'll usually have fairly boring and matter-of-fact sorts of names as they're directed to a very very specific audience being other researchers on their topic because the goal of historical research is to contribute to an ongoing synthesis with one's peers to help to achieve the most accurate and complete interpretation of the past as possible

rather than to appeal to a popular audience and make money off them something like the weapons of the late third reich a study of german infantry armaments 1944-1945 is a very characteristic title of a serious work of historical scholarship which i just made up a title followed by a subtitle that provides a fairly detailed description of what the actual contents are of course there are deviations from this but as a general guideline that'll do as for structure articles will start out with an abstract that succinctly summarizes context and arguments along with information on the author

journal and date of publication they usually follow a structure of introduction which is similar to an abstract but more detailed body text where the main argument is made and conclusion where the believed findings are summarized and their potential value evaluated for books they will within the first few pages include their publishing information and information about the authors and date of publication their content can be more fluidly presented than that of the average academic article and they're typically divided into different chapters that might be ordered chronologically or by topic or maybe even by something else both

types of works will usually have footnotes meaning numbered citations on the page which point to a citation at the bottom of that page or endnotes meaning the same thing that points to a citation at the end of the article chapter or book these are used to both cite sources and expand upon the main content this is the preferred citation method for history around the world if they don't have footnotes or endnotes then they'll at least still use a system of inline citation which points to a specific source and page number or paragraph within it additional

stuff to consider before i move on to telling you how to actually find this stuff there's more things that you need to consider while evaluating it first keep in mind that there are non-peer-reviewed works that conform to all of the style and structure that i just went over but that doesn't mean that you should pay them any attention there's a bustling industry of pseudo-history that aims to pass itself off as legitimate historical research by copying the structure of academic history but not submitting itself to the same rigorous editorial process so don't be fooled when you're

starting out look for that sort of structure and peer review together save more complicated judgments when you're more experienced second try to look into the author put their name into a search engine and look at what qualifications they have whatever works they've published etc check whether they have qualifications in history or at least in a related field like anthropology or sociology whether they still actively work in historical research and if they've published other peer-reviewed work in this area of study before that latter thing is actually the most important part while it's very uncommon that someone

without any formal qualifications writes something that's able to pass peer review it does sometimes happen so in the unlikely event that you were able to find an author who's published say five peer-reviewed articles on the topic of um horse worship in ancient rome then even despite their lack of degree that almost certainly be better versed on that topic than an actual history professor with tons of qualifications but who's only ever written one single article on roman horselove and both of them would in all likelihood be infinitely better as starting points than the work of someone

with neither the qualifications nor the history of peer-reviewed publishing third think about scope the strongest conclusions can be drawn from research that is focused on as narrow of a topic and time period as possible an article that covers for example economic policy during the first two years of a government is generally going to be able to cover that topic in more depth than one that covers say all four years of that government's economic policy and both of them will be able to cover it in much more depth than say an article about all four years

of that government in general without a focus on a specific aspect of it the wider the scope of a work the more general it's gonna get the more reliant that it's going to be on citing those more focused works in the first place and the less precise and assured its conclusion can be this hardly means that broader works are invalid or anything not at all it's just something to keep in mind particularly when dealing with works that aim very broadly like those that try to cover the entire history of a region or even the world

without even focusing on a specific part or time period good ones might be able to give you a good general overview on things and would be an okay starting point but they'll inevitably fail to do justice to a lot of the details so keep in mind that most of the best quality historical research is done on a less grand scale than what popular audiences tend to be interested in so you should try to rein in your scope as much as possible fourth keep in mind that the very best historical research acknowledges its flaws and shortcomings

acknowledges uncertainty when appropriate and acknowledges and adequately deals with competing arguments when necessary a historian presenting a new conclusion that conflicts with those of others needs to explain why theirs makes more sense they can't just ignore the contradictions they must directly address them and this applies on a much smaller scale too not just to overarching conclusions a great example of the sort of work that violates basically every principle that i've just gone over is the very popular but also very bad book guns germs and steel by jared diamond i've got a whole longer video on

it too if you're interested in some more detail on its problems in short it's just a mess it's author is a geographer with no academic publishing experience in most of the fields that his book tries to engage with history included let alone experience in the individual topics that he addresses it doesn't even try to conform to an academic structure instead opting to bomb the reader of a bibliography at the end that is not actually cited at all in the text itself making it very difficult to fact check the claims being made it completely misrepresents what

some of its own sources say with its arguments often being entirely reliant on these misinterpretations it acknowledges conflicting arguments against its own arguments but solely does so in a mocking way without actually addressing them directly let alone adequately its scope is absolutely massive to an absurd degree since it claims to literally explain the entirety of human history and delves into about 10 wildly different academic disciplines while doing so that makes it practically impossible to adequately deal with all of the potential caveats let alone properly argue for any sort of sound conclusion and yet it's still

very certain about everything that it claims despite that and because of all those shortcomings it was printed by a non-academic publishing company because there's simply no chance that it would have ever made it past proper peer review it's a great example of the opposite of everything that i've advised you to look for in this video almost without exception any history book that becomes extremely popular among a general audience is exactly the kind of work that you want to avoid if you're serious about your research good historical research simply doesn't have the same sort of wider

appeal as simplistic works of popular history that have absurdly overstated and bombastic sorts of conclusions so keep that in mind as well you're not exactly going to be reading any new york times bestsellers here also as an aside from all of that i'm honestly just putting this here because i couldn't figure out where else to put it in the video you also need to know that the quality and quantity of the evidence available can vary greatly depending on the time and place that you're investigating if it happened 20 years ago there's probably going to be

way more primary sources that have survived and they're also far more likely to be digitized than for something that happened 100 years ago and there'll be more for that than something that happened 300 years ago probably more for that than something that happened 500 years ago more for that than something that happened 2 000 years ago you get the idea quite often there's not even enough evidence to make any surefire conclusions especially when dealing with the more distant past and so the best that historians can do is say well this is what probably happened but

we can't really be sure and that's okay always remember that historical research is not a court of law so things don't need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt and the less evidence that there is the more that occam's razor applies so the best argued and most logical conclusion based on the evidence that is available or perhaps even the lack of evidence tends to be accepted at least until more evidence is found or a better argument is made and also remember that since historical research is a collaborative process that becomes refined over time on average

the more recent that a work is the better that it's going to be chances are that a book on ancient rome from 2020 is gonna be a whole lot more reliable than one from 1850 now with all of this in mind we can finally move on to actually finding stuff to read so now that you know what to look for you just need to know where to find it at the time of making this video the best search tool especially for articles is google scholar which searches most academic databases along with some other places not

every result that it gives you will be a peer-reviewed academic source but many of them are put in keywords for the topic you're interested in like say for brazil's role in world war ii you could put in the keywords brazil and world war ii and if you want to ensure that only results that specifically include all your key terms are shown you can put them into double quotes and add the word and between them all as you can see on the screen here this can help you to narrow things down quite a bit as you

can see here on the very first page we've already found some options the first result is a book on brazil's relations of the usa during world war ii and the second is about brazil's role in general in the war let's check out the article it's from 1995 so it's not that old underneath the title we can see that it was published in a journal called interdisciplinary studies of latin america if we google the journal and check its official website we can confirm that it is indeed a peer-reviewed academic journal and if we look to the

right on google scholar we can see that the article has a pdf version freely available click on it and it'll take us directly to it this won't always be the case though often you're going to need to have access to academic databases to access these articles which is something that's unfortunately mostly limited to university students and researchers but there are also some other ways to gain access to these articles that i can't mention in this video but i mean i guess if you were to search for hubs of science it couldn't hurt if we look

at that pdf we find a 21-page article by frank d mccann of the university of new hampshire when we look him up we find that he was a professor of history at said university who specialized in brazilian history and if we do another search in google scholar for those same two terms but this time with the author's name included as a keyword we can see that he's ridden quite a bit on brazil during world war ii so he definitely seems to be a good source on this topic and his article is likely going to be

a great introduction another great way to find more sources would be to check out the sources that this article cites and it cites a lot so just by discovering this one source and looking into its author we've already found potentially dozens of things to read about our topic which could also potentially lead us to dozens more sources and allow us to look into even more specific subtopics now books are a little bit harder to find than articles we did find some in our google scholar search there and that can be a good way to find

them sometimes but often some of the most important books on a topic won't actually show up in a search for it so one way to find them is as we just went over to check the citations on scholarly articles another is to try and look for academic book reviews which you can also do on google scholar these aren't just any old goodreads or amazon review they're special reviews published by academics for an audience of other academics which aim to assess a book's value to its particular area of study as you can see by adding the

term book review to our earlier search terms a bunch of book reviews have popped up we can then read them at least if a copy is available and then if we like the sound of it we can look up the book that they're reviewing of course you could also just go straight to the book without reading the review if you can't actually get access to the review make sure to then apply the same level of scrutiny to the book's author and publisher as we did with the journal article you know you get it by now

once you've found a book that presses all the buttons you might be able to find it for free somewhere on the internet or you might have to buy it if you do buy books i would recommend digital formats while i think that physical is much easier to read with digital you can do stuff like instantly search the text for keywords and instantly swap between parts of it all while multitasking on your computer or your phone or whatever with a search engine at hand so you can easily do fact checking that's all incredibly valuable for this

sort of research and it's a bit more tedious to do so if you've got a physical copy another though harder way of discovering all kinds of relevant sources is through literature reviews these are reviews of all or most of the prominent literature surrounding a historical topic which assesses the value of different works that cover it weighs their pros and cons etc a literature review is kind of similar to a book review except it more generally covers a lot of the significant research on a topic at the same time and usually they're written by people who

are themselves intimately involved in that field of research too if you can find them they're basically unequaled in their utility but don't count on it too much because for most topics they don't actually exist so that should give you a pretty good idea of how to find some decent sources to help you get started with by far the most important part of doing historical research practical experience the best way to learn now that you know the fundamentals is not going to be through more guides telling you how to research it's going to be through practice

so do that a challenge for you the viewer so now with all of this in mind choose a topic and go and find a book on it for yourself or an article if you don't have time for a book though i do suggest the book as it'll give you a much more thorough introduction once you've found your book or article then read it and put all of this into practice read critically keeping everything that i've said here in mind and when it cites something whether it's a primary or secondary source look into what it's citing

for as many citations as reasonably possible go and search for the source and if you can find it then check it out yourself though keep in mind that you won't be able to find every single source online since many of them simply aren't available to the public or maybe they haven't been digitized for those that you do find though give them a bit of a quick skim and check out these specific parts of them that your book or article is citing and ask all those questions about how it's being used that i outlined earlier depending

on whether it's a primary or secondary source usually you wouldn't need to check the sources that often since it's not super common for peer-reviewed literature to just flagrantly misrepresented sources but since the point of this exercise is to practice you should do so a lot here because this is a golden opportunity to learn it'll really help you also to develop a sense for when things just don't really sound right which is always a great indicator that you should probably check the sources for yourself read your entire book or article do this the whole way through

and keep every little thing that i've outlined in mind and you're gonna come out at the other end knowing both a whole lot more about whatever topic you've researched and a whole lot more about how to do historical research unless you already knew this stuff beforehand of course in which case well don't know why you watched so now go forth and do history for yourself or don't i mean i'm just a random youtuber i'm not your boss either way i hope you like this video i hope it helped you this was actually a very difficult

topic for me to figure out how to talk about which is why it's taken me so long to actually sit down and make a video like this one be on the lookout because after this i'm probably going to make a video where i put this stuff into practice myself which you'll be able to understand a lot better for having watched this first if you like this video then make sure to subscribe to my channel for more and if you really really liked it and you can spare the money consider supporting me on my patreon or

coffee page the latter of which i might be expanding upon soon so if you're watching in the near future be sure to check it out it all really really helps without my support is i would not be able to make these videos at all now it's time to roll the credits see ya you to all of my patrons and especially my 25 plus patrons potty gel cribson led down bride brandon flowers chubb darcius b william tomlinson brosnan eat the rich benny g jessie hosick hugo castellanos my name is pronounced like neve mischief and finns a

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