Last week, one of you wonderful Facebook followers posted, “Would you have time to take a stab on...how someone could learn to research and write popular history?”

I’d be happy to return to this topic again, but I’ve been mulling it over and here are my initial thoughts.

1) Ground yourself in historiography. That is NOT as intimidating as it might sound, and it doesn’t need to take years. Historiography is simply “how to write history” (history + graphos)—knowing something about how the enterprise works. You wouldn’t bake a cake for the first time without understanding how the ingredients work together and why you treat them as you do; you wouldn’t enter a triathalon without knowing the proper way to ride a bike, swim, and run. So spend some reading hours investigating the principles of writing history. I have two recommendations: Chapter 7 of The Well-Educated Mind, which offers (if I do say so myself) one of the most succinct summaries of how historical writing has developed from ancient times until the present; and Telling the Truth About History, by Lynn Hunt, Joyce Appleby, and Margaret C. Jacob. The introduction alone lays out exactly what’s at stake.

2) Pick either a time period, or an event and the 50 years before and after it. DO NOT START WITH AN IDEA OR AN ARGUMENT. If you have an idea or argument that you want to pursue, fine, but identify it and then pick an event or time period that incorporates it. Speaking from experience here: if you start with an argument, you will run up against event after event that straight up contradicts your conclusion and then you’ll either have to ignore the facts, or change your argument. Also, the smaller/more limited your time period, the better. (Do as I say, not as I do.)

3) Make a chronology. Go through the time period/years surrounding the event, and list everything major that happens. No interpretation. Just who, what, and when. No why yet. For this stage, you can use any encyclopedic tool, including Wikipedia, as well as checking in with AI. These are useful tools for information gathering (not for assigning meaning). You’ll be double checking EVERY fact that you accumulate at this stage, so you don’t need to worry too much about accuracy at this point.

4) When some particular fact or story sparks your interest, branch off from your information-gathering bots and make use of actual histories. I use Google Books and JSTOR to search for particular terms and phrases to find out what other historians have written on the subject. I have my antennae out for something that stands out. (For an example, I just recently did additional work on the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578 because it involved the rulers of Portugal, Morocco, and the Ottoman Empire—three different parts of the world, all intersecting in one event.)

5) Go back through your chronology and list out the bits of it that struck you as worthy of further investigation.

Folks, that’s as far as I can take you. From this point on, you build a story. You look at those “bits,” and then you try to look through them, past them, and at them. You look for the narrative arc (who or what is the main actor? what problem did they face? how did they solve it?). You look for the human drama (who loved, risked, lost, died?). You look for what is the same in our own day, and what is different. You look for your primary sources—words written or otherwise left, recorded, by the people who lived in the time you’re honoring. You check every single fact and quote to make sure that it’s based either in a primary source, or in a secondary source that has been judged reliable by at least five other historians. You make sure that your story, even if others can quarrel with it, is true according to the very best work that you can put behind it.

History is both research and creativity, both fact and novelistic detail, both chronology and interpretation.

History is both real, and contested.

That’s how it should be. ... See MoreSee Less

1 day ago