Doing History

This textbook provides a guide to how to 'do' historical research. It explains how historians generate questions and position themselves in the scholarly debate, and demonstrates how they define empirical cases and locate primary sources. It introduces readers to source critique and presents them with different techniques of interpretation. Accounting for the inevitable presence of theory in historians' work, the book shows how general assumptions may be used for critically engaging with relevant scholarship. Four chapters on research questions and historiography, theory, method, and sources are framed by two chapters that define academic history vis-à-vis other forms of storytelling about the past to show what historians know better than others and how that expertise may be useful for society This book addresses the pitfalls and frustrations that budding historians might encounter, and acknowledges the challenges of doing history by stressing that historians craft their stories from movable parts. In contrast to scholars in most other fields, historians do not have a canon of theories or a toolbox of methods that may be applied like spanners; they can, in principle, study everything and use any remnant of the past as a source. Three features distinguish this book from other introductions to history: 1. To counter the common expectation that history is all about excavating truthful information from sources, it places the chapter on how to pose relevant questions at the beginning and devotes more space to that than others; 2. To counter the common view that history is not a theoretical discipline and can rely on 'common sense', it devotes a whole chapter to theory; 3. To counter the common belief that research aims at consensual findings through 'unbiased' scrutiny, it is more argumentative than other guides to history and is open about the fact that the problem-led approach ('questions, not sources, first') is only one of the ways historians study the past.