Researching history

Researchers tend to focus excessively on the future and neglect the relevance of the past. Yet the study of history provides deep understanding of individuals, societies, organisations, and global structures in the hope of enlightening and improving the present. At its best, history is an entertaining and informative reconstruction of probable causes of habits, trends and events, and it explores human motives, experiences, behaviours, fears and hopes. The fundamental resource of the historian is evidence from the past. Evidence can be difficult to analyse for comprehensive meaning, but five evaluative techniques are recommended to help to manage the task: detection, scepticism, attribution and disentanglement, verification and clarification, storytelling and explanation. Many examples are given to show how the techniques are deployed by historians.