At its best, historical research makes you feel like you’re a detective solving a mystery. Descending into the archive or embarking on oral history interviews, you’re searching for answers. You gather evidence, untangle threads, and use the results to craft a narrative.

When students first encounter historical sources, they can feel overwhelmed. Who created this document? Why? Can I trust it? These are exactly the kinds of questions we ask students to consider in OER Project course activities, and with your guidance, that sense of overwhelm can fairly quickly give way to confidence. The sourcing skills that students learn in your class will help them build lifelong habits of inquiry, media literacy, and evidence evaluation.

But how do professional historians approach this same work when there are endless sources available? How do they locate, choose, read, and evaluate the sources they find? OER Project interviewed three historians—Urmi Engineer Willoughby, Eric Nelson, and Tony Yeboah—and asked them to share their approaches to sourcing in this digital age.

OER Project: Let’s start with the basics. How do you search for source materials? And where should students start looking?

Urmi Engineer Willoughby: I start by reviewing finding aids at archives, university libraries, and historical collections. I also collect digital sources, mainly from databases and library archives that I have access to. For teaching and helping students find sources for their research, I keep an ongoing list of digital archives and databases and share them with students based on their individual topics and interests. Increasingly, I have been downloading and archiving primary sources from the Library of Congress in case they are removed.

Eric Nelson: Here’s a tip I offer my graduate students: the footnotes of nineteenth-century monographs are a gold mine for primary sources. Nineteenth-century historians asked different questions than we do today. Their approach was more encyclopedic and heavy on chronological narrative. It can get boring, sure, but they were dedicated to “scientific history”— the idea that it was possible to reconstruct the past through careful analysis of primary sources. This means that their footnotes often offer a comprehensive survey of the manuscript sources available on a topic. Nothing makes me happier than to open one of these histories and discover that nearly half of each page is comprised of footnotes!

A word of warning: It’s always worth contacting the archives referenced in the footnote before traveling. A lot has happened—including two world wars—since our nineteenth-century compatriots were writing. Many manuscripts have disappeared.

For example, I was disappointed to discover that some promising manuscripts in Tours, France, had been held in the main library located right by a strategic bridge over the Loire River that Allied bombers destroyed—along with the documents I wanted—in 1944. Not everything was destroyed though, and when I visited, the archivist showed me some of the fire-damaged manuscripts they still held. 

Tony Yeboah: For my research projects, I visit archives for documentary evidence, but I also examine oral histories and performances from spaces of authority such as the royal palace of Asante in modern Ghana.

In each of these places, archivists, chiefs, and linguists function as gatekeepers to historical knowledge and therefore, accessing historical records of this nature requires some form of negotiation and accommodation with different stakeholders. I also collect oral histories from everyday people on the streets of Ghana.

Finally, as a historian of the built environment, I use architecture as a historical text to examine power imbalances and historical experiences of different social classes in each of the communities I conduct research.

OER Project: We ask students to evaluate whether a source supports, extends, or challenges what they know about a topic. Once you’ve found the sources you want to use, what’s the first thing you look for?

Eric Nelson: Before I analyze a source, I like to give it a chance to find what I call its voice—that is find its place in the constellation of other sources I’ve already examined. Voice means more than just point of view or purpose. I’m interested in how a source’s voice interacts with the chorus of voices that I have already encountered in my research. To what extent is this source singing in harmony with the choir? Or has it joined an alternative percussion circle in the corner? Consciously placing the source in this context helps me to ask better questions about context, audience, and purpose.

Urmi Engineer Willoughby: For published primary sources, the first thing I look for is information about the author and publisher. I start with my research question(s) in mind, and then take notes when I find anything that might be relevant. As I often tell my students, it’s useful to read a primary source from beginning to end, because you often find interesting evidence that you might not have been looking for. 

Tony Yeboah: While my sources influence the stories I write, I usually look for the date and location where a historical document was produced and under what circumstances it was created. Who were the intended recipients the information? This helps me historicize both the period and region of my study.

OER Project: Students might have an image of a historian in their head—someone working in dark and dusty shelves, reading crumbling scrolls of parchment. But a lot has changed in your profession. How have the types of sources that historians access changed in the last 50 years?

Urmi Engineer Willoughby: In the last 50 years, historians are increasingly reliant on digitized sources. I believe this will continue as more archival materials are digitized and made available to libraries and the public (for example on Google Books or the Hathi Trust). Recently, budget cuts and grant cancellations are making it more difficult for most historians to travel to archives, so many have had to turn to remotely accessible digital sources.

Historians today use keyword searches more than they did 50 years ago. Some scholars have written about the costs and benefits of the rise of digital sources. The availability of more materials to more people is certainly a benefit. However, a major problem is that historians often can’t read the entirety of digital documents. They can’t touch the documents or see the other documents filed nearby—losing important context.

Tony Yeboah: In the last 50 years, African historians have embraced interdisciplinary research approaches that have allowed them to integrate methods from allied disciplines in the reconstruction of the past. Music, art, ethnography, cartography, the built environment and even unimaginable sources such as rumors have all been utilized by historians in the production of monographs and essays that have revolutionized our understanding of African history and sources of history more broadly.

Eric Nelson: The digital revolution has changed everything since I was in graduate school. In the 1990s, I had to travel to archives to read manuscript sources, and the cost of microfilm made the copying of more than a few key documents impossibly expensive. Thus, my dissertation was based on the manuscript source material that I was able to read in just a few intense months in the archives. This constraint was a central factor in defining the question that I answered in my thesis.

The emergence of the digital camera changed everything. In 2005 I bought my first digital camera and set up a very early account on what became Google Drive. Over a couple months I took photos of 50,000 pages of manuscripts at several provincial archives in central France. Each day, I filled several memory sticks with images, and it would take all night to upload the images with a dial-up connection.

This was slow, but it was revolutionary. Without a digital camera I would have had to relocate to France for a decade to complete the research projects that I have spun out of this one short research trip. Now, the same archives I visited in 2005 are digitizing many records and making them available online. Today, historians often find that their problem is that they have access to too many sources. I suspect AI will usher in another revolution by helping historians sift through all that data.

OER Project: Along the same lines, in our world today, more people are creating more records than ever. Governments and corporations keep better records thanks to computers and the internet, but we all have email addresses and send texts. Huge amounts of data move across social media every minute. In light of all the materials and records we’re producing, which types of sources do you believe future historians will rely on to understand our era?

Urmi Engineer Willoughby: There are so many materials and records produced in the twenty-first century world, so I imagine future historians will need to be very deliberate and transparent about their methodologies and choices in which sources to read. It is likely that historians will use AI tools to sift through the huge volume of documents produced in today’s world.

Tony Yeboah: Social media has transformed lives and brought our world even closer than before. And it has given profound platforms to everyone, irrespective of social class and location, to articulate their ideas and experiences through their virtual participation in civic and political discourses. I have no doubt that in the next several decades (hopefully in my lifetime), the audiovisual evidence that is produced daily on various social media platforms will become a “gold mine” for historical research. This would make the  profession even more diverse and inclusive in the stories we tell. In other words, I believe everyone’s story will be told in the next several decades, provided historians turn to social media for evidence.

Eric Nelson: I sometimes ask my class to imagine a student taking a world history course in 2300. I ask what they think that student will learn about our time and place.  I always conclude this activity by asking what primary source from their own lives they would want to share with that student in 2300 and why. This last question has elicited interesting responses. Rarely do my students choose the sorts of primary sources that they have worked with in the course—letters, newspaper articles, etc. Instead, students tend to lean heavily on material culture—a fashion item for instance—and their responses have led to interesting broader conversations about the types of sources that future historians will have access to from our lives.

These historians remind us that sources are everywhere. They model for students that doing history isn’t just reading facts in books—it’s gathering evidence from the footnotes of a nineteenth-century text, the architecture of a city, or the voices of people in the street. The historian’s job is to weave those pieces together, checking one against another to build an accurate picture as possible of past lives and events. That’s exactly the skill your students practice when they source documents in class, asking Who created this? Why? Can I trust it? Sharing these historian perspectives can help them see that the questions they ask are the same ones professionals rely on. To bring these insights directly into your teaching, explore the OER Project Sourcing topic page, where you’ll find classroom-ready tools, activities, and primary sources to help your students practice sourcing as real historians do.

About the Contributors

This blog post features insights from three historians: Tony Yeboah, assistant professor of art history and Africana studies at Tulane University; Urmi Engineer Willoughby, PhD, associate professor of history at Pitzer College; and Eric Nelson, professor of history at Missouri State University. 

Cover image: Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress in the Thomas Jefferson Building. By Carol M. Highsmith, public domain.