How to Pick a Good Research Topic, Part 2

Photo by Sarah Klockars-Clauser. Available
through the Open Photo Project.

PERUSE. The next step is to get a pile of books and rummage through them. Maybe you’ve decided
to search for a topic in environmental history. You’re going to want to borrow books on famous conservationists, the Kyoto Protocol, urbanization and industrialization, deforestation, coal mining, etc. Obviously, pick the ones that sound interesting to you.

Don’t read these books. You aren’t researching your topic yet, you’re looking for it. Read snippets. When you get bored, move on. You’re topic isn’t there because your topic isn’t boring.

Don’t forget about reference works. Encyclopedias are excellent sources to peruse because they are concise and authoritative. Also, dictionaries are underrated as sources of historical information. (Look up Istanbul, for instance.)

PERUSE FOOTNOTES. When you compose a research paper you are entering into a discussion with other researchers. Those other researchers are all going to be familiar with certain documents. For instance, historians of American slavery are all familiar with something called the Federal Writers' Project. This was a New Deal program that paid researchers to transcribe interviews with former slaves. If you write a research paper on American slavery, you don’t necessarily need to use this particular source, but you do need to know something about it.

You can figure out what documents researchers are talking about by looking at their footnotes and bibliographies. Some of these are going to be primary sources. Others are going to be secondary sources.

John Trumbull's 1806 portrait of Alexander Hamilton,
one of the principal authors of the Federalist Papers.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Primary sources are documents from the period you’re researching. If you are researching the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, your primary sources would include the Constitution itself and the Federalist Papers.

Secondary sources are books and articles that historians have written based on primary sources. In a research paper on the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution would be a secondary source. (Yes, for other purposes Beard’s book would be a primary source. This would be the case if, for instance, you were writing a paper on how historians have interpreted the adoption of the Constitution. But don’t think too much about that right now.)

In perusing footnotes, some of the secondary sources are going to pique your interest. Borrow these from the library too. Peruse them.

You’ll learn a lot in the process of sifting through these books. You’ll develop a sense of important people, dates, and events. You’ll also develop a sense of what historians have had to say about these people, dates, and events. And at this point, you probably think some of these historians are great and others are confused, biased, or incomprehensible. That's good. It means you’re becoming familiar with the field.