What Is History? Methods, Sources, Funding, and Careers

History is the disciplined study of the human past, built on evidence rather than on memory or tradition alone. Historians do not simply recount what happened: they locate surviving traces of the past, assess where those traces came from and what they can and cannot show, and construct arguments about causes, change, and meaning that other scholars can examine and contest. This guide explains what history is as a research discipline, how historical method works, the difference between primary and secondary sources, how archives and oral history fit in, how oral history is treated under U.S. human-subjects rules, what digital history adds, how the field is organized, and how historical research is funded and supported.

What Is History?

The word “history” is used in two senses, and the distinction matters for research. In the first sense it means the past itself, the events and processes that occurred. In the second it means the scholarly activity of investigating and interpreting that past. As a discipline, history is the second: an organized body of methods, standards of evidence, and scholarly debate. The English word comes from the Greek historia, meaning inquiry, which is a fair summary of the discipline’s starting point. Ancient writers such as Herodotus and Thucydides are conventionally treated as early models of inquiry-based writing about the past, and the modern professional discipline took shape in the 19th century, when scholars such as Leopold von Ranke in Germany made systematic criticism of archival sources a defining expectation of the field.

Three features distinguish history from adjacent fields that also study people:

• Dependence on surviving evidence. A historian cannot run an experiment on the past or ask a sample of people who are no longer living. Everything rests on traces that happen to have survived: documents, images, objects, buildings, recordings, datasets, and the memories of people who are still alive.
• Attention to context and change over time. Historical explanation asks how a situation came about and why it differed from what came before. A source is read in light of when, where, by whom, and for whom it was produced.
• Interpretation that stays open to revision. New sources, new questions, and new methods routinely overturn or refine earlier accounts. This ongoing argument, usually called historiography, is part of the discipline rather than a sign of weakness in it.

History overlaps with, but differs from, neighboring fields. Anthropology reconstructs human life through fieldwork and, in its archaeological branch, through material remains; sociology typically studies contemporary social structure with surveys and statistics; linguistics analyzes language itself. Historians borrow from all of them, and the boundaries are porous, but history’s core commitment is to explaining particular pasts through critical reading of sources.

Historical Method

There is no single historical method in the way there is a standard experimental protocol, but there is a recognizable sequence of practices that nearly all historical research shares.

1. Frame a question. Strong historical projects begin with a problem rather than a topic. “Why did a particular reform succeed in one place and fail in another?” is a question; “a city in a given decade” is only a subject.
2. Survey the existing scholarship. Historians read secondary literature first to learn what is already argued, where scholars disagree, and what evidence is known to exist. This is the historian’s equivalent of a literature review; see how to write a literature review for general techniques.
3. Locate and gather sources. This usually means identifying which archives, libraries, collections, and databases hold relevant material, and then traveling to them or accessing digitized copies.
4. Evaluate sources critically. Traditionally called source criticism, this asks about authenticity (is it what it claims to be?), provenance (where has it been and who kept it?), authorship and purpose (who produced it, for whom, and why?), and reliability (how close was the creator to the events, and what might they have gained or lost by their account?).
5. Corroborate and contextualize. Individual sources are compared against one another and placed within the wider circumstances of their time. A single document rarely settles a question by itself.
6. Interpret and argue. The historian constructs a defensible account, states its limits, and engages competing interpretations.
7. Document the evidence trail. Footnotes or endnotes, along with a bibliography, let readers trace each claim to its source. In U.S. history writing, notes-and-bibliography citation in the Chicago style is the common convention; see the overview of citation styles and referencing formats.

Primary and Secondary Sources

The primary/secondary distinction is the most basic organizing idea in historical research, and it is relative to the question being asked.

• Primary sources are materials created at the time under study, or by people who took part in or witnessed the events. Examples include letters, diaries, government records, court files, newspapers of the period, photographs, maps, financial ledgers, oral-history interviews, and physical artifacts.
• Secondary sources are later works that analyze, interpret, or synthesize primary evidence, such as scholarly monographs, journal articles, and textbooks.

The same item can be either, depending on the project. A 1990 history of a labor movement is a secondary source for a study of that movement, but a primary source for a study of how historians in 1990 understood it. Many guides also recognize tertiary sources, such as encyclopedias and bibliographies, which collect and point to the other two kinds.

Archives and Special Collections

An archive is an organized body of records, usually the accumulated papers of a person, family, organization, or government body, kept because they have lasting value. Archives are the characteristic working environment of historians, and archival research has its own vocabulary and conventions:

• Provenance and original order. Archivists generally keep records together according to who created them, and in the order the creator kept them, because that arrangement is itself evidence about how the records were used.
• Finding aids. These are the guides that describe a collection’s contents, structure, and access conditions. Reading the finding aid before a visit is standard practice.
• Access and restrictions. Collections may be closed for a period, restricted to protect privacy or national security, or governed by donor conditions. Access terms, reproduction rules, and permission to quote vary by institution and should be checked early, not at the end of a project.

Archives are related to, but are not the same thing as, the research data repositories used in the sciences. Repositories typically preserve and share datasets for reuse, while archives preserve records as evidence of the activities that created them. The difference is covered in research repositories vs. archives, and the general idea of a repository appears in the dictionary entry for data repository.

Oral History

Oral history is the practice of recording and preserving first-person accounts, usually through planned, recorded interviews that are then archived for future researchers. It is especially valuable where written records are thin or silent, as in the experiences of communities that left few documents, or in recent events still within living memory. Because the evidence is created by the researcher’s own interview, oral history raises methodological questions that documentary work does not: how memory shapes accounts, how the interviewer’s questions steer answers, how recordings and transcripts are prepared and preserved, and how interviewees give permission for their words to be used and shared. A signed release or deed of gift, and clear agreements about archiving and access, are central parts of good practice. For related qualitative technique, see qualitative data collection techniques.

Oral History and IRB Review

In the United States, whether an oral-history project needs institutional review board (IRB) oversight depends on how the federal human-subjects regulations define “research.” Under the 2018 revision of the Common Rule (45 CFR part 46, in effect since January 21, 2019), the definition of research lists certain activities that are deemed not to be research. One of them is scholarly and journalistic activities, with oral history, journalism, biography, literary criticism, legal research, and historical scholarship given as examples, “including the collection and use of information, that focus directly on the specific individuals about whom the information is collected.” An oral-history project that fits that description is therefore outside the regulatory definition of research and does not need to go through the exemption categories at all.

Several practical points follow, and they are the reason this topic still generates questions in research offices:

• The exclusion is tied to the activity, not the label. A project called “oral history” that is actually designed to produce generalizable findings about a population, for example by systematically sampling and coding interviews to test a hypothesis, may fall back inside the regulatory definition of research. That distinction follows from the regulation’s definition of research as a systematic investigation designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.
• Institutions may apply their own policies. Many universities still ask investigators to obtain a determination from the IRB or research compliance office that a project is not human-subjects research, even when federal rules would not require review. Graduate theses and dissertations are often looked at more closely.
• The Common Rule is not the only source of rules. Funder terms, state law, tribal research review processes, and non-U.S. ethics regimes can add their own requirements.
• Ethics does not depend on the rule. Informed participation, careful handling of sensitive material, and honest agreements about publication and archiving remain part of responsible practice whether or not an IRB reviews the project.

For background on the regulatory vocabulary, see the dictionary entries for the Common Rule (45 CFR 46), institutional review board, exempt human subjects research, and informed consent. The guide to research ethics in qualitative research covers adjacent interview-based work. Research administrators should treat institutional policy as the operative rule in any particular case.

Digital History

Digital history applies computing to the study, preservation, and presentation of the past. It covers several distinct kinds of work:

• Digitized sources. Archives, libraries, and newspapers have scanned large bodies of material and made it searchable, which changes how quickly a historian can find relevant evidence and also changes what is easy to find, since undigitized collections can become comparatively invisible.
• Computational analysis. Text mining, topic modeling, network analysis, and geographic information systems (GIS) let researchers ask questions across thousands of documents or map change across space and time.
• Public and collaborative projects. Online exhibits, scholarly editions, and community archives extend the audience for historical work beyond journals and books.

Digital projects raise their own research-administration questions: how data are described and preserved, who owns the scanned images and the derived datasets, how rights and permissions are handled for copyrighted or culturally sensitive material, and how a project will be sustained after its grant ends. Funders that support digital humanities work often ask for a data management plan; see the guide to NEH data management plans for digital humanities grants, and the discussion of DARIAH-EU for a European example of shared research infrastructure for the arts and humanities. Persistent identifiers also matter for scholarly editions and digital collections; see ARK identifiers explained.

Subfields and Approaches

History is organized along several overlapping axes, and an individual historian usually works at the intersection of two or three.

• By place and region. For example, the history of the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, or South, East, and Southeast Asia, or transnational and global approaches that follow people, goods, and ideas across borders.
• By period. Ancient, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary history each have distinct source bases and languages.
• By theme. Political, diplomatic, military, economic, social, cultural, intellectual, religious, legal, environmental, and gender history are well-established themes. The history of science, technology, and medicine is a large field of its own; for a related history of a research practice, see the history of peer review.
• By method or scale. Quantitative history, microhistory, oral history, public history, and digital history differ in how they gather and present evidence.

A Short History of the Discipline

History writing is ancient, but history as a professional academic discipline is relatively recent. In the 19th century, universities, particularly in Germany, began to train students in critical reading of archival documents, and this seminar-based model spread to other countries. In the United States, the American Historical Association (AHA) was founded in 1884 and received a congressional charter in 1889 for the promotion of historical studies and the preservation of historical manuscripts. The twentieth century saw successive widenings of the field’s subject matter, from political and diplomatic history toward social, cultural, and global history, and a continuing debate over objectivity, evidence, and the role of the historian’s own position. Since the late twentieth century, digital tools and the preservation of born-digital records have added new questions about method and about what counts as a source.

How Historical Research Is Funded and Supported

Historical research is typically less expensive per project than laboratory science, and much of it is supported through fellowships and small grants for time and travel rather than large equipment or team budgets. Support comes from several kinds of sources.

• The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Established in 1965 under the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, NEH describes itself as the only federal agency in the United States dedicated to funding the humanities. It supports individual and collaborative research, including fellowships, as well as digital humanities projects, museums, libraries, and archives. Its Summer Stipends program is a common route for individual scholars and involves institutional limits on how many nominations a campus may submit; see NEH Summer Stipends and the two-nomination cap. Program names, deadlines, and award terms change, so always check the current NEH notice of funding opportunity.
• Private foundations. Foundations such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation support humanities and arts research and infrastructure; see Mellon Foundation humanities and arts funding.
• Other national funders. Outside the United States, research councils and academies fund historical work, and the British Academy, for example, runs postdoctoral fellowships; see the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
• Universities, libraries, and archives. Internal research funds, sabbaticals, and short-term fellowships at libraries and archives that hold relevant collections are a major part of the funding picture.

Research administrators supporting historians should expect some features that differ from lab-science proposals: single-investigator projects are common, outputs are books and articles rather than datasets, and budgets center on salary replacement, archival travel, translation, transcription, and digitization costs. Authorship norms also differ, with single-author work far more common than in the sciences; see single-author humanities vs. multi-author STEM authorship criteria.

Journals, Societies, and Professional Standards

The AHA is the largest professional association for historians in the United States and publishes the American Historical Review, a leading journal of the field, along with the news magazine Perspectives on History. The AHA also maintains a statement on standards of professional conduct, which sets out expectations about evidence, attribution, and scholarly integrity. The Organization of American Historians (OAH) is another major U.S. society and publishes the Journal of American History. The Oral History Association focuses on oral history practice and publishes guidance used by researchers and institutions. Most subfields and regions have their own societies and journals, and a research office supporting a history department benefits from knowing which ones matter to its faculty, because these shape hiring, promotion, and publication expectations. For how scholarly review works across fields, see the guide to peer review, and for the integrity concern most relevant to historical writing, see the dictionary entry for plagiarism.

Training and Career Paths

The research doctorate (PhD) is the standard credential for professorships and for many senior research and curatorial positions. Training typically involves coursework in historiography and methods, advanced reading knowledge of one or more languages relevant to the sources, comprehensive examinations, and a dissertation based on original archival research. A bachelor’s or master’s degree in history leads into a wide range of work, including teaching, archives and records management, museum and heritage work, libraries, government and policy, journalism, publishing, law, and research administration roles that support humanities scholars. The pace and funding of doctoral training vary by country and institution, so applicants should check current program details directly.

History in Research Administration

For a research office, history is a discipline with its own norms rather than a lighter version of the sciences. Practical points include: confirming early whether an oral-history component needs a not-human-subjects-research determination under institutional policy; budgeting for archival travel, reproduction fees, and transcription; checking access and permission-to-publish terms for archival and born-digital material; planning how digitized materials and derived datasets will be preserved and shared; and recognizing book-length monographs and edited editions as legitimate outputs in assessment and tenure processes. Related context appears in the overview of the branches of science and companion discipline guides such as What Is Philosophy of Science?.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is history in simple terms?

History is the scholarly study of the human past, based on evidence from surviving sources, and the practice of building and testing interpretations about what happened and why.

What is the difference between a primary and a secondary source?

A primary source was created at the time being studied or by a participant or witness, such as a letter, record, or interview. A secondary source is a later work that interprets or synthesizes such evidence, such as a scholarly book. Whether an item is primary or secondary depends on the research question.

What is historiography?

Historiography is the study of how history has been written, including how interpretations of a topic have changed over time. It can also mean the body of scholarly writing on a particular subject.

Does oral history need IRB approval?

Under the 2018 U.S. Common Rule, oral history that focuses directly on the specific individuals interviewed is among the activities deemed not to be research, so federal rules do not require IRB review of it. However, projects designed to produce generalizable findings may be treated as research, and many institutions still require a determination from the IRB or compliance office. Check your institution’s policy.

How is historical research funded?

Mostly through fellowships, small grants, and institutional support covering researcher time, travel, and digitization. In the United States, the NEH is the main federal source, alongside private foundations, universities, and archives.

What is digital history?

Digital history uses computing to find, analyze, preserve, and present historical evidence, from searching digitized archives to text mining, mapping, and building online exhibits and editions.