History is the discipline of researching the past in a rigorous, scholarly manner and reporting on your results in oral and written form. The Researcher’s Manual covers the skills you will need as a researcher of history. It contains pointers on the following:

• setting up and conducting academic historical research;
• preparing and writing a paper or thesis about this research;
• orally presenting the resulting paper or thesis.

These seemingly disparate skills are presented in a single manual because, for today’s scholars, conducting academic research and reporting on it go hand in hand. As a student, you will become aware of this as you begin to write research papers and a thesis. You will start by picking a topic and formulating a main research question and subquestions. To find answers, you will look for monographs, compendiums, articles in academic journals and primary historical sources, both on the Internet and in libraries and archives. You’ll be reading (and reading and reading) and taking notes. Hopefully this will spark your own thoughts, which can contribute to existing knowledge about history. You will try to formulate these thoughts as best you can, explaining them to yourself at first and then to others as well.

Trying to find the right words forces you to think out loud. This will reveal which subquestions your argument answers and which it does not. Many students discover that the main research question needs to be rephrased or split up into more subquestions. At this point, you might have to temporarily suspend the writing process to do more research; later, you can resume writing to incorporate your additional findings. In short, the process of doing research and writing about it is a feedback loop.