The Craft of Historical Research A Practical Guide from Start to Finish

Complete with practical advice and helpful guidance, this book is an approachable manual perfect for budding historians at all levels. Its worksheets, which focus on framing realistic goals and heading off common misunderstandings, will aid independent work and make check-ins with the advisor more candid and productive. Drawing on examples from six continents, as well as primary sources ranging from cuneiform tablets to emails, students will learn about the effective deployment of quotations, footnotes, maps, graphs, images, and data visualizations. Throughout the book, emphasis is placed on how the student can formulate, support, and revise their claims in a historical project with a skeptical reader in mind.

1: Introduction.- Part I: Articulating Your Vision.- 2: Getting Your Bearings.- 3: Encountering the Experts.- 4: Questioning Primary Sources.- 5: Finding a Place to Stand.- Part II: Selecting Your Focus.- 6: Planning for Success in the Archives.- 7: Planning for Success in the Digital Realm.- 8: Designing Your Project.- Part III: Developing and Supporting Your Thesis.- 9: Imagining Claims and Counterclaims.- 10: Supporting Claims with Evidence.- Part IV: Writing Up.- 11: Structuring Your Paper.- 12: Crafting Your Exposition.- 13: Working with Feedback.- Part V: Looking Ahead.- 14: Joining a Community of Scholars.- 15: Exploring Alternatives.

Isaac Land is Emeritus Professor of History at Indiana State University, USA, where he received two university-wide teaching awards. From 2018-2021, he served on the American Historical Association’s Raymond J. Cunningham Prize awards committee, which recognizes excellent undergraduate research and writing. The author of War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), he also co-edits the Palgrave Macmillan series Global Studies in Social and Cultural Maritime History and the Sage journal Coastal Studies & Society.