Going to the Sources
by Anthony Brundage · Anthony Brundage
Anthony Brundage's short guide to historical research, explaining how historians use primary and secondary sources, how to navigate libraries, archives and online databases, and how to turn research into a historiographical essay or research paper with proper citation.
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More resources on Historical Writing
The Historian's Craft
Unfinished methodological essay by a founder of the Annales school, left incomplete when the Nazis executed him in 1944. Bloch defines history as the study of people in time and examines evidence, source criticism, bias and causation.
#AHRSyllabus
Open-access modules published in the American Historical Review since 2023, each showing how a historian works a specific body of evidence — Soviet archives, material objects, sensory sources, oral testimony, Holocaust historiography — with the documents and exercises included. Shows method being applied to real evidence rather than described in the abstract.
Learning to Do Historical Research: A Primer for Environmental Historians and Others
Free multi-part primer covering framing a question, locating documents, searching, note-taking, building argument and narrative, positioning against existing literature, and revision, plus sections on archives, periodicals, government documents, maps, images, oral history, and quantitative evidence. Written by a working historian of the first rank.
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Gaddis compares writing history to making maps: choosing scale, compressing time, and deciding what to leave out. Defends narrative representation of the past against social-science modeling, and explains contingency and multiple causation. It is about historical method but argues its case through how history gets written and represented.
What Is History?
Carr's 1961 Trevelyan Lectures argue that historical facts are selected and shaped by the historian rather than found, working through objectivity, causation, and progress. The mental model that determines which evidence a historian even counts as evidence. This Penguin edition carries an introduction by Richard J. Evans.
Writing History: A Guide for Students
Compact Oxford University Press handbook by historian William Kelleher Storey on writing undergraduate history papers: choosing a topic, reading primary and secondary sources critically, building an argument, crafting narrative, citing in Chicago style, and avoiding plagiarism.