What Do Historians Do? – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

For this week, I want to take a step back (we’ll be back to our series on Rings of Power next week!) and talk about the craft of history: we’ve talked about “How Your History Gets Made” from the perspective of the different people who do it – research historians, public historians, educators and so on – but this week I want to talk, in very broad terms about how historical research works, about the process of discovering things about the past.

Naturally this is going to be a very broad overview. “Historical Methods” or some equivalent is typically a full semester-long advanced undergraduate course in most history programs, while “Historical Theory” is typically an early graduate course and we’re covering the broad sweep of both of them here. But I want to outline some of the basics because there is a lot of misunderstanding, sometimes willful but frequently unknowing, about how historians go about uncovering the past.

In particular, I want to take a crack at the mental model many folks have of historians that imagines history as a basically static and known set of data, which does not change or improve over time, such that the main job of historians is to read history textbooks really hard and memorize the names and dates and then regurgitate them in a particular form. I sometimes term this the “history as scripture” understanding. And it comes with a corollary assuming that historians do not require any particular specialized skills or training.

Now, of course, few people if asked will offer this as their mental model of history straight. But the model emerges in many of the assumptions they make about what historians do. History as Scripture is how you get the folks offended at the idea that their favorite 18th or 19th century historian’s work might not be particularly useful anymore; the only way Edward Gibbon (d. 1794) is going to help you understand the Fall of the Roman Empire is if our understanding of that all is unchanged over the last two centuries. History as Scripture also shows up in demands that historians demonstrate their expertise through recall, reciting lots of facts; it assumes the main skill of the historian is remembering details in our heads. History as Scripture sits behind the assumption that our historical knowledge can never (or ought never) to change and that all such change is thus just politically motivated ‘revisionism’ – because it assumes all of the evidence is already known, the ‘correct’ conclusions long ago drawn.

In short, ‘History as Scripture’ is actually a really common view of how the field works. And that is, perhaps, not surprising: if your only experience with history was a high school classroom or an introductory college lecture, your learning mostly focused only on what we know not how we know it. And its a seductive vision of history too, because it is comforting to imagine that the past is fully known and that its fully known form conforms perfectly to what you were taught as a child…but this is the same false comfort of imagining all of physics is the simple version of Newtonian mechanics you learned in a high school physics class: the closer you look, the clearer it will be that this model does not describe the world as we actually experience it.

So: what do research historians actually do? How do we discover the past? To demonstrate this, we can effective walk through the lifecycle of a single research project, a discrete ‘unit’ of research, as it were, from concept to publication and review.

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Training and Theory

We actually have to start before our sample research project begins, because of course to start you generally need a historian.

And here we run into one of the frequent misconceptions, which is that because history is a field carried out in plain English (or the language of your choice), it doesn’t require specialist training or knowledge. But history research generally does require specialist training. Of course every so often you will get self-taught historians making significant contributions to the field, but I’ll say both that this tends to be quite rare and that often one finds those scholars did, in fact, start working with a trained, credentialed historian. So, for instance, in my field (ancient warfare) the contributions of the late Peter Connolly (1935-2012) were considerable, despite his background being initially in art. But then if one knows how Peter Connolly got started, they’d know he initially worked quite heavily with H. Russel Robinson (1920-1978, Keeper of Armour in the Tower Armouries and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries), beginning as Robinson’s illustrator and establishing a firm base of knowledge that way before moving into his own scholarship. So this happens, but its uncommon.

And before we go further I want to lay out some terms. I am mostly focused here on historians doing original research – discovering the past. Mostly these are going to be academic historians (that is, historians working in history departments in universities or similar institutions), but some folks doing this work are independent researchers, historians employed by other organizations, public historians who also do research and so on. So to capture that whole group, I am going to use the phrase ‘research historians.’ Again, most research historians are academic historians, but by no means all of them are. But this is distinct from most (though not all) history teachers and many (though not all) public historians whose work focuses on transmitting historical knowledge, rather than discovering it; I consider all three groups to be within the broad profession of the historian, just in different parts of that profession.

Back to the question of training.

We can break down training in the historian’s craft into three groups, two of which are of general use to all historians and the last of which is a field specific package of skills. First, we have what often gets termed “historical methods” (or indeed, the Historical Method), which is focused on source criticism and historical reasoning; often, paired with writing, this is offered as an advanced undergraduate course in history departments (usually in the form of a supervised research project). Second, we have “historical theory,” which we’ll come back to in a moment, but which relates to how we frame and understand the questions are are asking, as well as avoiding common pitfalls in historical research; this is invariably taught early in graduate study.

Finally, after that, historians will invariably need a package of field-specific training. An ancient Mediterranean historian needs to read both Latin and Greek, to be able to parse a site report, to understand archaeological methods, decipher inscriptions (and possibly ancient handwriting), and so on. By contrast, a historian of, say, 19th century Europe may not need Greek or Latin, but will certainly need French and be able to read 19th century cursive writing, along with knowing how to navigate European documentary archives and records. A historian whose work touches on law may need legal training for the laws and legal terminology of their period, to – for instance – avoid accidentally inventing hundreds of executions by failing to realize that the phrase “Death Recorded” in 19th century British legal records, when in fact that notation almost always meant the person was not executed. Because historians engage with historical documents, records and artifacts ‘in the raw,’ there’s often special training required to know what one is looking at and understand it fully, beyond the more general historian’s training. At the same time, you’re also learning where your sources are in their raw form, which might be important archives, key reference works, edited texts, important manuscripts and so on. All of that ends up as field-specific specialist training.

But lets loop back for a moment to the two generalist types of training and discuss what you are learning to do.

First, there is the historian’s method, which we can basically subdivide into source criticism and historical analysis or historical reasoning. When we say ‘source criticism,’ this isn’t some newfangled thing; Thucydides is doing it in c. 400 BC, for instance, in the introduction to his history of the Peloponnesian War (we call this section “The Archaeology”) comparing oral histories with physical evidence and plausible deduction and finding the oral histories lacking (Thuc. 1.20, 6.54-55). Source criticism is just the process of trying to evaluate a source of historical evidence for reliability. If this seems such a basic thing that no training is required for it, consider how many people continue to treat Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus as a perfectly reliable source on the Spartans despite the obvious ways that it is clearly unreliable, including but not limited to the fact that the author says it is unreliable in the very first paragraph (Plut. Lyc. 1.1-4).

So we might ask when was the source written or produced (is it, for instance, a much later accounting of an event, when memory might have dimmed or was it produced perhaps before key information about an event was widely known). We ought also ask where, by whom and why it was produced (is the author reliable in other instances or not? does he have an ax to grind we should know about? what sort of work is this and how does that influence its purpose and presentation?). We might also ask what the sources of our source were (eyewitness? or other intermediate sources (perhaps now unavailable – witnesses that have died, works/archives now lost)). How reliably was it transmitted to the present (modifications in storage, lost passages, alteration in copying, etc.). All of that contributes to assessments of the credibility of the source in question.

This is, I should note, a bit more than a yes/no “bias detector,” because in practice all sources are biased. So the historian is not asking “is this biased or not” but how is this biased and how does that impact its credibility and usefulness. Even a source filled with absolute falsehoods can be revealing. But at the same time, your goal is getting to what actually happened, or what people actually thought or experienced, so judging pure reliability (is it likely the things my sources say happened, actually happened – especially if they disagree) is important here.

On the other side is historical reasoning, which is about how we draw conclusions from our sources, once assessed. Because we treat all sources as suspect, historians are rarely operating with full certainty, so the approach, the “argument to best explanation” is generally to find the most ‘parsimonious’ (uses the fewest assumptions, especially inherently improbable assumptions) explanation which best fits the most observed evidence (as compared to other, rival explanations). Now the observed evidence here of course begins with the evidence of our sources, but it can be broader than that: we might, for instance, use comparative evidence (the example of other similar societies or situations) to plausibly fill in gaps. To take an example from my own work, our ancient sources report ‘elders’ as leaders of pre-Roman Celtiberian settlements in Spain, but don’t give a detailed rundown of what these elders do. So I suggest a set of roles consistent with the specific things the sources say they do (that is, which matches the observed evidence) and which also matches quite closely with what Gallic councils of elders – a similar institution in a related, nearby and contemporary set of societies do. The idea being it is more plausible that two similar societies with similar institutions that are related to each other function similarly than that they are radically different. This all sounds very simple and conceptually, of course, it is, but simple things in explanation become complex in application, which neatly leads us into the other category of general training.

Historical Theory. We’ve actually touched a bit on one sort of historical theory, the Annales school, but it is hardly the only one. This is a topic of sufficient complexity (and jargon, sometimes necessary, sometimes…less so) that I am hardly going to explain it fully here. In practice, learning historical theory is the process of learning the ways other historians have broadly conceptualized history: how they understood societies to work, what they thought was most important to study and how they went about studying and understanding it.

The purpose of that learning is twofold: first, historical theory provides a framework to understand your own research topic. It can inform what questions you ask of your sources, as you look for answers which will explain larger historical trends or events. Say, for instance, your source base is a body of diaries and letters from a regiment in the Civil War. A typical Annales framework might approach the documents from the perspective of mentalités (the set of cultural assumptions and worldviews we absorb, unthinkingly, from our society, which change only very slowly): how do these fellows view the world (including in ways that might be alien to me) and how does that influence their actions and experience? Alternately, a critical theory approach is going to want to ask questions about power in this campaign community: who is in charge, really (it might not be the fellow with the notionally highest rank!) and how is their power created and expressed in the group? Meanwhile, a ‘Face of Battle‘ theoretical approach is instead going to look for answers in the experience of campaigning and (especially) battle, which is going to mean probing more at the physical realities of the experience: how did they fight, what did they eat, how did the wash, where did they sleep and so on.

Each of these theoretical models (and there are many, many more) comes with questions it likes to ask, a vision of what motivates historical change and usually its own set of useful terminology to use to categorize and understand the evidence you are observing. I used one of those terms up above – mentalités – and you can see how (so long as everyone involved knows what it means) it compresses down a very big idea into a nice, compact technical term. That’s quite handy when explaining our historical work to other scholars, who will share that vocabulary.

The other reason we study historical theory is because a lot of these theories have quite well known flaws, gaps in their understanding: no single framework or question captures the full complexity of the past. So learning a bunch of them serves to both illuminate the things we didn’t know that we didn’t know, but it also serves to illustrate the pitfalls and potholes in the historical path, by watching how ‘pure’ versions of these theories fail in to one or another of them. For instance, leaders are often important historical focal points, making decisions with big impacts, but if you assume that historical change is always and everywhere the product of super-capable leaders (‘Great Man Theory,’ advanced by Thomas Carlyle), you are going to completely miss the impact of all sorts of other things and be entirely unable to explain some historical events that just lack a single, central figure motivating them at all. On the flipside, an ‘all structural factors, no agency’ framework (such as an extreme version of Marxist historical materialism) is going to fall into the trap of ignoring the very real agency of people making decisions (be they big important leaders or just regular folk). Historians learn a lot of different frameworks because each one exposes the gaps in the others: there is no perfect framework (and no way to proceed without a framework – to attempt this is merely to proceed with an assumed framework you are merely blind to) so one must be aware of the limitations of each approach in turn.

What I want to stress here is that historical theory is not a straight-jacket. (Almost) no historian is out there as a doctrinaire devotee of a single school of historical theory – often not even the historians who pioneered a school. Ferdinand Braudel was one of the most important figures of the Annales school – which de-emphasizes the role of ‘great men’ in favor of structural factors – and yet his great work is The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World In the Age of Philip II (1949); while he isn’t the central element, evidently Philip II matters to this story. You are not going to find – or at least ought not find – historians who only use one school or type of historical theory.

Instead historical theory is a toolbox with many different tools; the mature historian pulls out the tool that best fits the job. Now, naturally we do all tend to end up with some favorite tools, which influence the questions we ask and the way we approach our sources. As you may gather, I tend to reach for my structural Annales wrench first, but also sometimes individuals matter a whole lot and you have to discuss their individual decisions, sometimes you need to think about power and sometimes what we’re trying to get at is the experience of a thing. Part of the reason historians read other historian’s work (and also work from other fields) is to try to broaden our toolbox by seeing the tools other scholars are using and thinking about how they can apply to our own topic.

So, we have our basic set of skills (historical methods), a bunch of more advanced specific skills fit to our period and topic and a toolbox of theoretical approaches (our historical theory), all a product of formal training in history: we now set upon our sources.

Sources and Research

And here it is important to begin by correcting a frequent misconception that historians are mostly engaging in reading and transmitting the work of other historians. Instead, most large history research projects have a similar sort of structure: there is a framework built out of the work of other historians which provides context for the core original research of the historian and this original core is the product of direct engagement with primary sources.

The term ‘primary source’ often gets reduced in introductory classes to something like ‘eyewitness accounts,’ but in a research context, a ‘primary source’ is really a source for an event for which there are no closer available sources. For a modern event, this is almost always a contemporary, often eyewitness source, but for the Middle Ages or Antiquity, the nearest source is often still quite distant from the events. You could thus, for instance, call the sources for the life of Alexander the Great primary sources in the sense that there are no closer sources available to us (anymore), while at the same time they are technically also secondary sources, reporting the testimony of other closer sources (now lost).

In any case, historians seek to engage with this evidence ‘in the raw,’ which is to say with the minimum number of possible filters. In almost every field, for instance, it is an essential, non-negotiable element of historical training to be able to read one’s main body of source evidence in the original language, If that means mastering archaic syntax and vocabulary or entire dead languages, then that is the ‘price of admission.’ Working in translation may be enough for hobbyists and some ‘pop history,’ but a research historian must work with the original text. For modern historians, this often means directly, personally combing state records or archives or collecting eyewitness testimony (‘oral history’). The complications of ancient evidence sometimes means additional specialists are required: for instance a given ancient work might exist in a number of manuscript copies each with its own small differences and errors; a philologist is going to have collated those traditions and produced a single ‘edited text,’ with which the historian will work. Or it may be an inscription carved on stone, which requires a trained epigrapher to transcribe accurately (although ancient historians are then trained to read the technical notion systems epigraphers use to publish their inscriptions).

Now the historian’s training comes in at this point in a few ways. The first, of course is knowing where to look. Whereas secondary historical sources are sold in bookstores and stocked in libraries, primary source material, especially ‘in the raw’ is often scattered or relatively inaccessible. For most historians who work on modern (and to be clear, when I say ‘modern’ I mean ‘post-1500’ not ‘right now’) societies, their evidence is often found in archives, in the form of official documents, records, letters, diaries, memoirs and so on. In most cases, the historian looking at those documents is often the first person to do so in decades; in some cases the first person since their production. Ancient historians don’t generally do archive work (because our archives don’t survive!) but the closest I’ve come to this is working with museum collections, requesting the museum’s records on file for various objects. My own project involved dozens and dozens of such requests to quite a few museums. I’ve also had secondary sources come in as microfiche or microfilm, which requires special machines to read, an experience that may be more common for historians working in other eras. In a lot of cases, the funding and use of these archives and sources is too low to support large digitization projects, meaning that while these sources are being digitized, that’s happening only slowly and as a result it is often necessary to engage with non-digital sources (which of course also means you need to go there to look at them).

Of course I should note that museums and archives have their own staff, many of whom also have quite a bit of historical training. Without those folks keeping, preserving and organizing the material they steward, the research historian would have far fewer sources (in many cases, effectively none). These folks aren’t our focus today, but they are very important to our understanding of the past.

In addition to being potentially hard to find or access, a lot of this material is very ‘raw.’ Whereas other fields often focus on working with ‘data‘ – evidence that has been processed, homogenized and turned into standard numbers – historians work with evidence in the form it comes in, often because that evidence either has not or cannot be converted into ‘data.’ A historian sorting through an evidence base that is, say, twenty-five thousand handwritten letters from the American Civil War (split between a great many archives) is sorting through twenty-five thousand handwritten letters: having to make out the handwriting, determine the context and dates of the letters and so on. While the body of ancient Greek and Roman literature is mostly edited and all collected now (mostly – this is not true for the epigraphic and papyrological evidence!), my medievalist colleagues often find themselves working with medieval sources that may exist only in a handful of manuscripts (or just one!) which may not yet even have an edited form. In some cases, they are still working with the original manuscripts (with their centuries old handwriting, which yes, we are trained to read).

Finally – and this is going to bring us back to theory – there is a tremendous amount of this material. Because this stuff is not yet sorted into ‘data,’ the historian is working through a large and laborious set of evidence. Of course sometimes we can make that task easier by sorting material into data – a lot of digital humanities approaches do things like this – but in a lot of cases that isn’t possible without a ton of initial work or even possible at all. Again, if your source-base is twenty-five thousand handwritten letters and you want to understand the values and worldview of the people who wrote those letters (and the even larger body of their non-letter-writing fellows whose views the letters might help you reach more clearly), there really isn’t a substitute to sitting down and reading all of those letters – especially as most of the archives and collections historians work with are not yet even digitized, much less sorted with say, OCR to produce machine-readable texts. I do wonder how advancing technology (like large language models) may give us powerful new tools to engage with large source-bases, but I suspect we will still always need to engage with our sources as raw evidence to a considerable degree.

What the foundation in theory gives the historian is a framework to know what questions to ask all of those letters (or whatever the source base may be) and how to interpret the results. Note that it doesn’t mandate an answer (this is often misunderstood by lay audiences who assume that a given historical theory is about the answer of the sources; it is about the question you ask), instead the theory helps suggest the sort of questions that might produce interesting answers, generally because they’ve produced really interesting answers in other source bases. So for instance, you might go to those letters with an institutional/strategic-culture framework, looking for how the letter writers are shaped by the military as an institution and how that shapes their decision-making. Or you might take a critical theory approach and look at how the background of those writers shapes them. And so on.

In terms of scope, most historians are going to organize their research by roughly ‘book length’ projects – history is, as we’ll get to in a moment, a ‘book field’ not a ‘paper field.’ That tends to mean even a project that is very narrow – say, the history of the development of one town over a few decades – is going to embrace an enormous amount of source material (probably including a huge chunk of that town’s record archive). The size of these projects vary, but a five-year cycle for a monograph is broadly typical.

What happens during that process? In an ideal, platonic form of research, the historian would:

1. Read the existing literature on the period and topic in question, familiarizing themselves with the contours of the problems, then
2. Using their foundation in historical theory, formulate a question, then
3. Identify a source base that can provide an answer – or at least partial answer – to that question.
4. Initial ‘raids’ into archives or other sources may be necessary as a first step to try to figure out where the most useful evidence is; these hotspots may then be ‘sieged’ (probed more thoroughly, often over several days in the case of archive work).
5. While both raiding and sieging the places your sources are at, the historian is taking lots of notes. Everyone has their own note-taking system (mine is terrible and I plan to overhaul it from the ground up for book project 2); by way of example, the core of my book project’s archaeological work is a OneNote file with information on about 500 archaeologically recovered weapons, organized so that each object has a digital ‘card’ with a unique reference ID and all of the relevant notes, bibliography, measurements, current location and so on.
6. Those notes in turn form the writing foundation of the publication process, which comes next.

This is why, as an aside, your research historians seem to publish so glacially – usually a few years between books – while ‘pop’ historians can seem so prolific. If you aren’t doing that primary source research and merely summarizing and reformulating the primary source work other historians have already done, its possible to write much faster! But of course you aren’t writing with any new evidence (even if you may have new conclusions) so there’s a real limit to how far our understanding of the past can get merely remixing what we already know.

Nevertheless, no one pays historians to just learn things for themselves. Instead, we expect historians to teach and write, which brings us to:

Publication

Most research historians are employed as faculty at universities, which means their job duties involve a mix of teaching, research and publication. The exact mix of those varies from institution to institution – roughly equal time at R1 research-oriented universities, whereas teaching oriented colleges expect a lot less research than teaching. We’re not going to treat teaching in depth here, but I just want to note it because of course one way all of this research ‘comes out’ is through the teaching process as well as the publication process.

That said historians are expected, of course, to publish their findings. As we’ve discussed before, that publication takes two basic forms: field-to-field (writing by academic historians for academic historians) and field-to-public. Those two forms are not always done by the same people: you might have research historians whose work is published in field-to-field form (which we’ll get to in a moment), which then ends up in field-to-public form (textbooks, popular books, blogs, etc) through the work of other historians. Often that second group are also research historians and the way that historian A’s work actually reaches the public is that their very narrow, particular conclusions become part of the framework for historian B’s work, which is in turn broad enough to excite public interest.

You all have seen that a fair bit here, of course, where very niche publications often appear in my footnotes or bibliography notes – but of course this is a field-to-public venue. A lot of what I do here is translating that field-to-field scholarship for a public audience (whereas, by contrast, my book project is very much a work of original research).

Publication for historical research comes in three major forms: the conference paper, the journal article and the book. Generally speaking the way this works is that the overall, large-scale project is the book project, while smaller chunks become articles, chapters and conference papers. That is, again, because history is a ‘book field,’ – what matters the most for impact in the field and professional advancement is the big argument expressed in a monograph (a single-author scholarly volume).

The conference paper is the least impactful form of publication, in that it isn’t really published: these papers aren’t usually published in a written form. Instead, the conference paper serves two main purposes: it alerts other historians in the field to the state and nature of your current project (good for collaboration!) but it also walks out the argument in an abbreviated form for feedback. It can be hard to take conference criticism – and you will get harsh conference criticism – but that lets you know where the weak points in your argument or your evidence are, so that you can strengthen them (or, if necessary, trim your argument’s sails a bit).

Far more substantial is the journal article or its close cousin the chapter in an edited collection. While we generally plan research projects as book projects, while we are sifting through all of that material above, historians inevitably run into situations where they have a research-dead end or an interesting point that simply isn’t going to fit structurally into the book. Those components get broken off and become articles. And of course sometimes what was intended as a major point turns out to just not have much more to it than the c. 10-15,000 words of an article, so in that case, one publishes that as an article (might as well get it out there!). Finally, you will also see ‘trial’ versions of a book’s argument walked out as an article as well: a smaller, more restricted version of the argument (say, over a smaller chronological period), often a few years before the book proper is ready.

Journal articles, edited chapters and scholarly monographs all go through a process called peer review before publication, though this works a bit differently for each type. In the case of a journal article, the historian submits a finished, polished draft which the journal editor reads; the editor can then reject the article or sent it out for review by two reviewers who are also experts in the subfield in question. Those experts provide detailed – often famously harsh – comments and a recommendation to either accept the article, reject it or require substantial revisions. The final decision is with the journal editor or editorial board but in theory the idea here is that no article goes out without at least being run past two other experts to make sure – even if they don’t agree with the argument – that it is basically sound.

For an edited collection – a book of chapters, each written by a different historian on related topics – generally the book editor assembles the authors, who write their chapters, and then the entire volume is submitted for peer review by the publisher. Those reviewers basically then review each chapter, with each chapter author getting responses back, but in theory the whole volume doesn’t move forward unless all of the chapters pass muster.

For a scholarly monograph, peer review is handled by the publisher and their editor. That step can happen earlier for monographs, because peer review generally happens before the press signs a book contract with the author. That may mean the book is not entirely finished: the package for review is generally several chapters (but can be the whole book) and a proposal outlining the entire project. In all of these cases, the process is double blind: the reviewer is not told who they are reviewing and the author is not told who their reviewers are, in order to avoid any sense of fear or favor (though with scholarly book monographs in small fields, it is possible to run into a situation where practically any qualified reviewer is going to know simply from the content of the text whose project it is).

Now it may seem strange that books thus seem to get a bit less scrutiny, but they have an additional layer of review, the book review. Many academic journals in both history and classics have a book review section. Publishers will give out copies to journals so those journals can send a copy out to an academic reviewer (that is, another scholar in the field) who will write a book review, published in the journal. For the ancient-history-curious, the ‘review of record’ for all things Greek and Roman in English is the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR), gloriously online and open access. Unlike pre-publication peer review, book reviews are not at all anonymous, but they reflect an early stage of scholars in the field taking stock of a new work and gauging its likely importance and impact.

I should note that there’s often an assumption that this process is deeply political – to which I’d encourage folks to actually read a bunch of academic book reviews, for instance those at the BMCR (link above). These tend to be fairly technical reviews, covering the structure of the work, its main arguments and evidence, and the audiences likely to benefit from reading it. The core question being answered is not ‘did you like it’ (although ‘does the argument actually work’ matters) but ‘who should read this and why?’ It is very common to see book reviews where it is clear the reviewer disagrees quite strongly with the argument being made but nevertheless concludes by noting that the argument is likely to stir the pot in a given subfield and so everyone in the subfield probably ought to read it, if only to register objections!

Now the thing I’ve left out in all of this, of course, is the actual writing process. This isn’t the place to get into a detailed discussion of how historians write our books – that would be its own huge topic and not one I necessarily feel qualified to hold forth on. What I do want to note is that the demand of scholarly historical writing is that it be precise and meticulously sourced. For a sense of how meticulously, my current book draft is about 190,000 words (c. 600 pages) and cites about 750 works over about 2,000 footnotes; that is longer than most history monographs but the ‘citation density’ is not unusual. Meanwhile, the demand for very precise writing means that sentences have to be labored over for clarity and there’s often a fair bit of technical language.

All of that means that scholarly writing is unavoidably slow. My sense is for most historians, putting down around 500-1000 words in a day is a very good ‘writing day’ – and of course we’re teaching and doing other professional tasks, so not every workday is a writing day! Many writing days are much slower. So assembling a typical length 75,000 word monograph might involve at least 150 writing days at minimum. In practice the figure will be much higher and given the scarcity of writing days, that’s probably anywhere from one to two years of writing process, which is in turn almost invariably sitting on top of at least as much time – often far more time – spent in the research process.

A Possession For All Time

Then, as we’ve discussed before, those scholarly monographs (as well as articles and such) get used by other scholars as the building materials for public-facing history products: they are the bricks and mortar of your (good) pop-history books, podcasts, YouTube channels, and, yes, blog posts. Those final products thus sit on top of an enormous amount of research labor, conducted slowly and painstakingly and requiring a lot of specialized skills.

When folks imagine that ‘historian’ is a job that doesn’t require special training, they are often imagining the job of the historian as reading history books. But the task of writing history books and more importantly doing the research to discover the past does demand quite a lot of specialized skills and training. And of course now is where I note that the institutions we created in our society to train those historians and support their research are in distress. This is not some new political thing (although current political trends are negative for the field), they have been in distress for going on two decades now. We do not know anything like ‘everything’ about the past: vast troves of evidence remain largely untouched, be they archaeological evidence from the ancient world or the seemingly endless archives of modern administrative states (especially outside of Europe and North America – historical scholarship on the rest of the world is very thin). And of course linear time has a habit of minting one new minute of history every minute.

The process of discovering that past is a painstaking, careful, meticulous job, largely carried out by specialists, but of course we keep at it for the same reason Thucydides laid out at the very dawn of the discipline in c. 400 BCE:

If it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human affairs must resemble, if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. For I have written my work, not as an essay to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.