Historical research differs from research in most other academic disciplines in a fundamental way: the historian’s primary task is not to report what other scholars have concluded but to construct an original argument based on direct engagement with primary sources — documents, artifacts, images, and other materials produced during the period under study. Secondary sources (books and articles by other historians) provide the scholarly context, the historiographical debates, and the interpretive frameworks within which the student’s argument operates, but they are not substitutes for primary evidence. This guide, part of iResearchNet’s How to Do Research series, covers the databases, archives, digital collections, and methodological principles that U.S. college and university students need for research papers in history. For topic ideas, see iResearchNet’s History Research Paper Topics.
Primary Sources and Secondary Sources
Understanding the distinction between primary and secondary sources is the first requirement of historical research, because the distinction determines how each source is used in the paper.
Primary sources are materials created during the historical period being studied or by participants in the events being analyzed. They include government documents (laws, treaties, legislative debates, executive orders), personal papers (letters, diaries, memoirs), organizational records (meeting minutes, financial ledgers, correspondence files), newspapers and periodicals from the period, census data, maps, photographs, films, material objects, and oral histories. Primary sources do not interpret events — they are the raw evidence from which historians construct interpretations.
Secondary sources are works produced by scholars who have analyzed primary sources and constructed arguments about what those sources mean. Monographs (scholarly books focused on a specific historical topic), journal articles, edited essay collections, and review articles are all secondary sources. A secondary source is not less valuable than a primary source — it is valuable in a different way. Secondary sources tell the student what other historians have argued, which interpretive frameworks have dominated the field, where scholarly disagreements exist, and what primary evidence has and has not been analyzed. A strong history research paper engages with both: it uses primary sources as evidence and situates that evidence within the scholarly conversation established by secondary sources.
Databases for Secondary Scholarship
Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life
Historical Abstracts (EBSCO) indexes journal articles, books, and dissertations on the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present. America: History and Life (EBSCO) provides the same coverage for the United States and Canada. Together, these two databases constitute the field’s primary bibliographic tools and should be the starting point for any historical research project. Both use a controlled subject heading system and provide detailed abstracts that allow students to assess the relevance of sources before retrieving the full text. Most U.S. university libraries subscribe to both through EBSCOhost.
Additional Databases
JSTOR archives complete runs of major history journals — including the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, Past & Present, and dozens of others — and is essential for both foundational and recent scholarship. Because JSTOR typically lags behind the current issue by three to five years (the “moving wall”), students researching very recent historiographical developments should supplement JSTOR with Historical Abstracts or America: History and Life.
Project MUSE provides full-text access to current issues of many humanities and social science journals, including major history journals, and is particularly strong on cultural history, gender history, and area studies. Google Scholar provides broad indexing and citation tracking; its “Cited by” function is useful for tracing how a seminal historical argument has been received and challenged by subsequent scholars.
For dissertations and theses — which are often the most detailed treatments of specialized historical topics — ProQuest Dissertations & Theses provides the most extensive database of doctoral dissertations completed at U.S. and international universities.
Primary Source Archives and Digital Collections
The National Archives
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the official repository of the U.S. federal government’s historical records. Its holdings include the founding documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights), presidential papers, military service records, immigration and naturalization records, census manuscripts, congressional records, court records, and the records of every federal agency. NARA’s online catalog is searchable and provides descriptions of holdings — though only a fraction of the archives’ billions of pages have been digitized.
Students who can visit NARA facilities (the main building in Washington, D.C., or one of its regional branches) gain access to original documents. Students who cannot visit in person can request copies of specific records through NARA’s reference services or can access digitized materials through the National Archives online. The Founders Online project provides searchable, annotated transcriptions of the papers of six major founders (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Franklin).
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress holds the largest library collection in the world, with more than 170 million items including books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, films, audio recordings, and prints. Its digital collections provide free online access to millions of primary source items, including the American Memory project (historical photographs, maps, documents, and sound recordings), the Chronicling America project (digitized historical newspapers), and manuscript collections from major historical figures.
The Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division holds the personal papers of U.S. presidents, members of Congress, military leaders, scientists, and cultural figures. Its Prints and Photographs Division holds more than 17 million visual images. These collections are essential for research on U.S. political, military, social, and cultural history.
Additional Digital Archives
Several other digital collections provide free access to primary source materials:
Chronicling America (Library of Congress/National Endowment for the Humanities) provides searchable access to digitized U.S. newspapers from 1777 to 1963. For research papers on public opinion, cultural attitudes, local events, or the reception of national events at the community level, historical newspapers are indispensable primary sources.
The HathiTrust Digital Library provides full-text access to millions of digitized books, including many out-of-copyright works that are available for free download. For research on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, HathiTrust often provides access to published primary sources (government reports, organizational proceedings, travel accounts, pamphlets) that are otherwise available only in research libraries.
The Internet Archive hosts a broad collection of digitized books, periodicals, films, and audio recordings, many of which are primary sources for historical research. The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) aggregates materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States into a single searchable portal.
Avalon Project (Yale Law School) provides a curated collection of primary documents in law, history, and diplomacy, including treaties, presidential addresses, constitutional convention records, and historical legal documents.
For international history, the British National Archives, the Europeana digital library, and country-specific national archives provide access to primary materials from outside the United States.
Government Records and Statistical Data
Many historical research papers require engagement with government-produced data — census records, legislative proceedings, economic statistics, and administrative records — that document the operations of government and the conditions of the population it governs.
The U.S. Census Bureau has conducted a decennial population census since 1790. Historical census data — including manuscript census schedules (the original household-level records) and published statistical summaries — are available through the National Archives, Ancestry.com (available through many public libraries), and the IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) project at the University of Minnesota, which provides harmonized census microdata from 1850 to the present in a format designed for quantitative analysis.
Congressional records — including the Congressional Record, committee reports, hearing transcripts, and legislative histories — are available through Congress.gov (for recent Congresses) and through the Library of Congress and GovInfo (for historical materials). Presidential papers, executive orders, and proclamations are available through the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which provides a searchable database of presidential documents from George Washington to the present.
For economic history, the Historical Statistics of the United States (Cambridge University Press) provides long-run data on population, labor, production, trade, government finance, and other indicators. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s FRED database includes many historical economic time series. The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides historical data on prices, wages, and employment dating back to the nineteenth century.
Oral History
Oral history — recorded interviews with individuals who participated in or witnessed historical events — is a distinctive primary source type that captures perspectives and experiences often absent from documentary records. The Columbia Center for Oral History Research maintains one of the oldest and largest oral history collections in the United States. The Oral History Association (OHA) publishes standards and best practices for conducting and using oral history interviews. The Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress collects and preserves the firsthand accounts of U.S. military veterans from World War I through recent conflicts.
Students using oral history should be aware that oral accounts are shaped by memory, perspective, and the passage of time — they are not transparent records of what happened but rather accounts of how individuals remember and interpret their experiences. This does not make them unreliable; it makes them a specific type of evidence that must be analyzed critically, like any other primary source. The historian’s task is to assess oral accounts in relation to documentary evidence, to note where they confirm, complicate, or contradict other sources, and to consider how the conditions of the interview (who asked, when, and why) may have shaped the account.
Analyzing and Interpreting Primary Sources
Finding primary sources is only the first step; the historian’s distinctive skill is the critical analysis and interpretation of those sources. Several questions should guide the analysis of any primary document:
Authorship and context ask who created the document, when, where, and under what circumstances. A letter written by a plantation owner in 1850 describes enslaved people’s conditions from the perspective of someone with an economic interest in minimizing the violence of slavery. A diary entry written by an enslaved person (rare but not nonexistent in the archive) describes those same conditions from a fundamentally different position. Neither source is “objective” — both reflect the author’s social position, interests, and interpretive framework. The historian’s task is not to determine which source is “true” but to analyze what each source reveals and conceals given who created it and why.
Audience and purpose ask for whom the document was created and what function it was intended to serve. A presidential address to Congress serves a different purpose than a private letter to a political ally. A newspaper editorial aims to persuade; a census record aims to enumerate. Understanding purpose helps the historian assess what kinds of claims the document can and cannot support.
Representativeness asks whether the document is typical or exceptional. A single letter describing conditions in a Civil War prison camp is a vivid primary source, but the historian must consider whether the conditions it describes were common to most prison camps or particular to one. Corroboration with other sources — additional letters, official reports, archaeological evidence — strengthens the historian’s confidence that the document reflects a broader pattern rather than an isolated experience.
Silence and absence are as important as what the document contains. Archives systematically underrepresent the experiences of marginalized groups — women, enslaved people, Indigenous peoples, the poor, the illiterate — because these groups had less access to the means of documentary production and because institutions responsible for preservation often did not value their records. Historians of these groups must work with fragmentary evidence, read documents “against the grain” (extracting information about the powerless from documents produced by the powerful), and acknowledge the limits of what the surviving record can tell us.
Professional Associations
The American Historical Association (AHA) is the field’s largest professional organization, publishing the American Historical Review and hosting an annual meeting that is the primary venue for presenting historical research. The AHA also publishes standards on professional ethics, including guidelines on plagiarism, the use of evidence, and the responsibilities of historians to their sources and their audiences. The Organization of American Historians (OAH) focuses specifically on American history and publishes the Journal of American History. The World History Association publishes the Journal of World History.
Numerous period-specific and thematic associations — the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the Labor and Working-Class History Association, and many others — publish specialized journals, host conferences, and provide community for scholars working in particular subfields. Students should identify the association most relevant to their topic and check whether its journal is accessible through their university library.
University Special Collections
Most U.S. research universities maintain special collections — repositories of rare books, manuscripts, organizational records, and other unique materials — that support historical research on topics related to the university’s geographic region, founding mission, or areas of academic strength. Students should consult their library’s special collections website to determine whether relevant materials exist. Working with special collections typically requires an appointment and may involve supervised access in a reading room.
Historiography and Interpretive Frameworks
A history research paper is not simply a narrative of what happened; it is an argument about what events mean, why they occurred, and why they matter. The interpretive framework that organizes this argument is informed by historiography — the history of historical writing, meaning the evolving body of scholarly interpretation and debate about a given topic.
Students writing history research papers should review the major historiographical positions on their topic before constructing their own argument. A paper on the causes of the American Civil War, for example, must engage with the long debate among historians over the relative importance of slavery, states’ rights, economic conflict, and political failure. A paper on the New Deal must engage with interpretations that range from seeing it as a revolutionary transformation of American governance to viewing it as a conservative program that preserved capitalism by making limited concessions to labor and the poor. The student’s own argument should be positioned explicitly in relation to these existing interpretations — agreeing with some, challenging others, and contributing something that previous scholarship has not yet said.
The major interpretive approaches in contemporary historical scholarship include social history (emphasizing the experiences of ordinary people, communities, and social groups rather than political elites), cultural history (examining how ideas, symbols, and cultural practices shape historical experience), political history (analyzing governance, policy, and power), economic history (examining production, trade, labor, and material conditions), gender history (analyzing how gender relations shape and are shaped by historical processes), and transnational or global history (examining connections, exchanges, and comparisons across national boundaries). These approaches are not mutually exclusive, and many historical studies combine elements of several.
Citation and Writing Conventions
History uses the Chicago Manual of Style citation system, specifically its Notes-Bibliography format (sometimes called Turabian style, after Kate Turabian’s widely used student manual). This system uses footnotes or endnotes for citations and a bibliography at the end of the paper. The footnote system is preferred because it allows historians to provide commentary, context, and cross-references alongside citations — functions that parenthetical in-text citation systems like APA and MLA do not support as naturally.
A standard Chicago footnote for a book includes the author’s name, the title (in italics), the place of publication, publisher, and year (in parentheses), and the page number. Subsequent citations of the same source use a shortened form. Students should consult the Chicago Manual of Style Online or Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations for detailed formatting guidance.
Historical writing values clear, precise prose and narrative coherence. Unlike many social science papers, which follow a standardized structure (introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussion), history papers are structured around the argument and the evidence, with sections organized thematically, chronologically, or analytically as the argument requires. The American Historical Association (AHA) publishes guidelines on professional standards, including standards for the ethical use of evidence and the attribution of sources.
Key Journals in History
The leading general-interest history journals in the United States include the American Historical Review (the flagship journal of the AHA), the Journal of American History (published by the Organization of American Historians), and The William and Mary Quarterly (early American history). Past & Present, the Journal of Modern History, and the English Historical Review are leading international journals.
Specialized journals serve particular subfields and periods. The Journal of the Civil War Era, Civil War History, Diplomatic History, The Journal of African American History, Gender & History, Environmental History, The Journal of World History, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, and The Journal of Social History are among the many field-specific journals that publish research on particular topics, periods, or methodological approaches. Students should identify the journals most relevant to their specific topic and should check their university library’s access to those journals.
The Reviews in American History and Reviews in History (published by the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research) publish extended review essays that synthesize recent scholarship on major historical topics — these review essays are particularly valuable for students who need to quickly understand the current state of a historiographical debate.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to use primary sources in my history paper?
Most history courses at U.S. colleges and universities expect students to engage with primary sources, though the extent of that engagement varies by assignment and course level. Introductory surveys may require analysis of a few assigned primary documents. Upper-division seminars and capstone courses typically require students to locate and analyze primary sources independently. A history research paper that relies entirely on secondary sources — summarizing what other historians have said without engaging with original evidence — will generally receive a lower grade than one that presents an argument grounded in primary material.
Where do I find primary sources on my topic?
The answer depends on the topic’s period, geographic focus, and subject matter. For U.S. history, the National Archives and the Library of Congress are the two most important repositories. For historical newspapers, Chronicling America provides free access to digitized papers from 1777 to 1963. For published primary sources (government reports, pamphlets, organizational proceedings), HathiTrust and the Internet Archive often provide full-text access. Your university’s special collections may hold materials relevant to local or regional topics. A reference librarian can help identify which archives and collections are most relevant to your specific research question.
What is the difference between a history paper and a report?
A report summarizes existing information — what happened, when, and where. A history paper advances an argument — an original interpretive claim about why events happened, what they meant, or how they should be understood. The argument is the thesis of the paper, and every section of the paper should present evidence that supports, develops, or qualifies that thesis. A paper that describes the events of the French Revolution chronologically without advancing a claim about their causes, significance, or meaning is a report; a paper that argues that fiscal crisis rather than Enlightenment ideology was the primary catalyst of revolution is a history paper.
How do I handle conflicting interpretations among historians?
Conflicting interpretations are not a problem to avoid — they are an opportunity to contribute to a scholarly conversation. When historians disagree about a topic, the student should present the competing interpretations fairly, identify the evidence and reasoning behind each, and then explain which interpretation the student finds most persuasive and why. The student’s own argument should be informed by the existing debate, not constructed in isolation from it. Acknowledging complexity and disagreement demonstrates intellectual maturity and produces stronger papers than presenting a single interpretation as though it were settled fact.
Related Pages
- How to Do Research — Overview of research methods and discipline-specific guides
- How to Do Library Research — Using catalogs, databases, and librarian expertise
- How to Do Online Research — Evaluating and using internet sources
- History Research Paper Topics — Topic ideas for history research papers
- How to Write a Research Paper — Complete step-by-step guide