Of all the questions that drive us, “Why is the world like this?” is one of the most fundamental. To answer it, we have to understand what do historians study, because they are the detectives who investigate our collective past. They don’t just compile lists of dates and famous names; they dig into the messy, complex, and fascinating evidence of human experience to explain how we got from there to here.
Their work reveals the hidden wiring of our societies—the origins of our laws, the roots of our conflicts, and the foundations of our identities. By examining the raw materials of the past, they build the stories that help us make sense of the present.
At a Glance: The Historian’s Investigative Focus
Here’s what you’ll learn about the specific evidence and methods historians use to uncover how our world works:
- The Three Buckets of Evidence: Unpack the difference between primary sources (the raw data), secondary sources (the scholarly conversation), and material artifacts (the objects left behind).
- The Investigative Method: See how historians move from asking a compelling question to building a persuasive, evidence-based interpretation.
- A Map of Historical Fields: Discover how different specializations—like social, political, or environmental history—use unique lenses to study the same past.
- Common Myths Debunked: Get clear answers to frequent misconceptions about the historical profession.
- How to Think Like a Historian: Learn a simple framework you can apply immediately to analyze the history all around you.
Beyond the Textbook: The Historian’s Real Toolkit
Many of us remember history as a subject of memorization. You read a chapter, you learned the key events, and you took a test. But for a professional historian, the textbook is just the beginning. Their actual work is a dynamic process of inquiry, analysis, and argumentation.
As the historian David McCullough famously put it, “History is who we are and why we are the way we are.” To understand that “why,” historians need a toolkit designed for investigation, not just recitation. This toolkit helps them sift through the noise of the past to find signals of cause, effect, and meaningful change. The ultimate goal isn’t just to know what happened, but to explain how and why it happened. This process is essential for making sense of our own lives and times. To dig deeper into this connection, Explore why historians study the past.
The Raw Materials: What Evidence Do Historians Actually Analyze?
Historians don’t have a time machine. Instead, they rely on the traces that people and societies leave behind. These traces, or sources, fall into three main categories.
Primary Sources: The First-Hand Accounts
Primary sources are the raw materials of history, created by people who participated in or witnessed the events being studied. Think of them as direct evidence from the scene. Working with these sources is the closest a historian gets to touching the past.
Examples include:
- Written Documents: Letters, diaries, government records, laws, speeches, newspaper articles, and business ledgers.
- Oral Histories: Recorded interviews with participants in historical events.
- Visual Materials: Photographs, films, political cartoons, and maps.
- Creative Works: Novels, poems, and music from a specific period.
Case Snippet: The Cuban Missile Crisis
A historian studying the Cuban Missile Crisis wouldn’t just read a summary. They would analyze the declassified letters exchanged between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, listen to the secret White House tape recordings of strategic meetings, and read newspaper articles from October 1962 to understand public fear. Each primary source offers a different, often conflicting, piece of the puzzle.
Secondary Sources: The Conversation Among Experts
Secondary sources are works of analysis, synthesis, or interpretation created by someone—usually another historian—after the event has occurred. They are not evidence of the event itself, but evidence of how the event has been understood. These are the scholarly books and articles that make up the existing conversation on a topic.
Historians study secondary sources for two key reasons:
- To Understand the Landscape: What questions have other experts asked? What evidence have they used? What are the major debates in the field?
- To Build Their Own Argument: A historian must show how their own research contributes something new to this ongoing conversation, whether by using new evidence, asking a different question, or offering a fresh interpretation of old evidence.
They read these sources critically, constantly asking: What is this author’s argument? What evidence do they use to support it? What are the strengths and weaknesses of their interpretation?
Material Culture and Artifacts: The Stories Objects Tell
Sometimes the most powerful evidence isn’t written down at all. Historians also study material culture—the physical objects, spaces, and tools that people used. These artifacts provide a tangible connection to daily life and can reveal truths that written documents miss.
Examples include:
- Archaeological Finds: Pottery shards, tools, and the foundations of buildings can tell us about trade, technology, and diet.
- Architecture: The design of a home or a public building reveals ideas about family, status, and community.
- Clothing and Textiles: Fashion can reflect economic conditions, social hierarchies, and cultural values.
- Technology: An old steam engine or an early computer is a physical monument to a society’s scientific knowledge and economic priorities.
A simple clay pot from ancient Rome, for example, can tell a story about Mediterranean trade routes (where the clay came from), Roman technology (how it was fired), and daily life (what it was used to store).
From Clues to Conclusions: The Historian’s Method
Having a pile of evidence is one thing; making sense of it is another. Historians follow a disciplined process to turn raw sources into a persuasive historical account.
- Ask a Driving Question: Research begins not with a topic, but with a question. A weak topic is “The American Revolution.” A strong historical question is, “How did the experience of fighting in the Continental Army change the political views of ordinary farmers?” The question guides the search for evidence.
- Gather and “Source” the Evidence: Historians collect relevant primary and secondary sources. For each source, they perform a critical evaluation known as “sourcing.” They ask:
- Who created this?
- When and where was it created?
- Who was the intended audience?
- What was the creator’s purpose or motivation?
- Is it corroborated by other sources?
- Contextualize Everything: No piece of evidence exists in a vacuum. Historians place each source within its broader historical context. A political speech means one thing in a time of peace and prosperity, and something entirely different during a war or a famine.
- Construct an Interpretation: A historian’s final product is not a simple reporting of facts but an argument about the past. They build a thesis and use their analyzed evidence to support it, creating a compelling narrative that explains why things happened the way they did. This is why two historians can study the same event and write two very different books—they may ask different questions, focus on different evidence, or interpret the same evidence in different ways.
A Practical Playbook: Choosing a Historical Lens
“History” is not a single, monolithic subject. It’s a collection of specialized fields, each offering a different lens for understanding the past. What historians study often depends on the lens they choose.
Here’s a quick guide to some major fields:
| Field of History | Core Questions | Common Types of Evidence Studied |
|---|---|---|
| Political History | How is power acquired, used, and challenged? How do governments and institutions change? | Government records, laws, speeches, private letters of leaders, political cartoons. |
| Social History | What was daily life like for ordinary people? How did class, gender, and race shape experiences? | Diaries, census data, parish records, oral histories, folk songs, household artifacts. |
| Economic History | How have people produced, exchanged, and consumed goods? What drives economic growth or crisis? | Business ledgers, tax records, trade logs, price data, technological artifacts. |
| Cultural History | What did people believe, value, and fear? How did they express themselves through art and ritual? | Literature, paintings, music, religious texts, advertisements, architectural plans. |
| Environmental History | How has the natural world shaped human societies? How have humans, in turn, shaped their environment? | Climate data, soil samples, maps, agricultural records, accounts of natural disasters. |
| Intellectual History | How have ideas-philosophical, scientific, political-evolved and influenced society? | Philosophical treatises, scientific papers, novels, manifestos, correspondence between thinkers. |
| A historian studying the construction of the U.S. transcontinental railroad, for example, could approach it through any of these lenses—as a political project of national expansion, a social story of immigrant labor, an economic engine of industrialization, or an environmental event that transformed the American West. |
Quick Answers to Common Questions
Q: Is history just about memorizing dates and famous people?
A: Absolutely not. While chronology is important, professional history is about analysis and interpretation. It’s an active process of asking questions and building evidence-based arguments to explain change over time, focusing as much on ordinary people and broad forces as on famous leaders.
Q: Isn’t history just one person’s opinion?
A: No. A historical argument must be supported by verifiable evidence from primary sources and must engage with the work of other historians. While interpretations can differ, they are not mere opinions; they are scholarly arguments that are subject to peer review and must stand up to scrutiny. A good historian makes their evidence and reasoning transparent so others can challenge it.
Q: Do historians only study ancient or far-away events?
A: Historians study the entire human past, from ancient civilizations to events that happened just a few years ago. Many specialize in “contemporary history,” studying the 20th and even 21st centuries. Their work helps provide crucial context for events that are still shaping our world today.
Q: How is history different from journalism?
A: Journalism is often called the “first rough draft of history.” Journalists typically work on tight deadlines to report on current events as they unfold. Historians, with the benefit of hindsight, can access a much wider range of sources (including declassified documents and long-term data) to analyze events with a deeper sense of context, causality, and long-term consequence.
Your Next Step: Think Like a Historian
You don’t need a PhD to start thinking like a historian. The core of the discipline is a mindset of critical curiosity. By understanding what historians study and how they do it, you gain a powerful framework for understanding the world.
Next time you encounter a piece of the past—an old family photograph, a local monument, a traditional holiday—try this simple exercise:
- Observe: What do you see? Note the details.
- Source It: Who created it? When? Why? For what audience?
- Contextualize: What else was happening in the world, the country, or the community at that time?
- Interpret: What story does this object or tradition tell? What does it reveal about the values, challenges, or beliefs of the people who created it? What might it be leaving out?
This is the heart of the historical method. It’s a process of turning passive observation into active inquiry—a skill that moves you from simply consuming information to critically analyzing how your world came to be.
