An Introduction to Online Historical Research
Looking to do some of your own history research? Have some historical questions that you want to answer? If you are wondering where to start or are curious about where you might find primary sources on the internet, check out Circa’s guide to online research!
The process of historical research—whether you are working on a paper for high school or a best-selling non-fiction book—usually follows a typical pattern. You ask questions about the past to drive what you would like to research, you look for sources that can help you answer those questions, you update your research questions as you learn more, and finally you shape the sources you have discovered into an argument.
Ask a Historical Question
The first place to begin is to think about a question that you would like your research to answer. Maybe you want to know the origins of an idea of place. For instance, you might want to know why a landmark in your town was first built or when humans first used quarantines as a means to control the spread of disease. Perhaps you want to see how things have changed between the past and today. For instance, you might want to know more about how ideas about labor laws have changed from the 1800s to today. Or maybe you have a question about the historical forces that caused particular events. These questions are often puzzling—what really started World War I? Why did the Roman Empire collapse?
Your initial research question does not need to be perfect. It might not end up being related to your final argument—or even the final topic of your project! It just gives you a place to start. And specifically, in a the wide amount of sources related to your particular topic, your research question lets you focus in on the sources that are saying something directly related to your project.
Finding Initial Sources
Once you have a research question ready, you next have to decide where you could locate sources that would help you answer this question. Typically, historians start with archives—collections of primary sources (usually texts) centered around a particular theme or organization, such as a town or a national government. Their holdings are known as archival collections.
It might help to categorize the kind of history project you are working on so that you will know what type of archive is likely to contain useful sources. For instance, you might want to categorize your project along one of the following ideas:
Political history: What country or countries are you working on? Where are their national archives? What has been digitized? Do you have access to political sources through other avenues?
Local histories: What city or state archives might be available? Are records of local events also contained within national archival holdings?
Important events: Did any newspapers report on the event at the time? Are there any eye-witness accounts?
Cultural history: Did any institutions or individuals save their records? Are these objects saved in a museum? Were reviews of these artworks, musical pieces, plays, etc. written at the time?
Additionally, you might want to consult more general resources. Are there any published sources that might help you answer your question? You can check your local library. Would any material culture or artifacts help you answer your question? You can look into museum collections. Secondary sources about your topic can also help you find where to locate primary material—their bibliographies will tell you the particular archives and the types of materials likely to contain useful primary sources.
Finding Secondary Archival Collections
Invariably, as you do your research, you will come across new questions that you will need to answer. And you might not find the answers to all of your questions within one particular archival collection. This is a great opportunity to expand your research base and think about other collections of primary sources that you would like to explore. If you have been looking at mostly political sources, should you include another country? Or some social perspectives? If you have been looking at mostly newspaper reports, should you corroborate their stories with some political documents? And if you have been looking at material culture, perhaps now is the time to see whether written sources offer a similar or a different perspective.
Where should one look for primary sources?
Typically, historians work with archival collections that are housed in archives. Archives might contain collections for an entire country or they might contain collections from just a local area. Historians also work within libraries when working with printed primary sources, like newspapers and books.
Some of this material might be accessible in your school or local library. If not, librarians can often order materials from other libraries. And if you have access to a big city, there are likely even more resources in larger places.
That said, it is often difficult to get to these places to research in person. Therefore, archives and libraries have started digitizing a lot of their materials to make them available to people around the world, not just people who are able to make it to the building.
There are also projects that are collecting primary sources together based on theme or topic, not where they are housed physically. These kinds of resources are really helpful, even to scholars with research budgets, because now everything is in one place.
And of course there are also more and more digitized books available online. Google Books, for instance, makes many older books that are out of copyright available for free online.
If you are looking for particular kinds of primary sources, you can check out Circa’s primary source list here. It is a great guide to some amazing archival collections available on the internet.
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