This is for the undergraduate level but I'm hesitant to claim that. Really, this guide is more of an intro to various subfields within the subject. Use it only as a point of exploration.
How to use this guide
- Read primary sources: ask who made them, for whom, when, what they omit etc.
- Read scholarship as argument: identify the question, claim, evidence, method.
- Practice making your own evidence based arguments.
- Study breadth + depth: I recommend sampling several fields, then specializing in one period/region/problem.
Part 1: What History Is
Read two or three first. They disagree, and that is useful.
Starting works:
- E. H. Carr, What Is History?: fact selection, interpretation.
- Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft: historical knowledge and evidence.
- John H. Arnold, History: A Very Short Introduction: short modern entry into historical reasoning.
Deeper method/history of the discipline:
- John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: standard overview of method and sources.
- Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History: historical truth vs skepticism.
- John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: history as a distinctive form of knowledge.
- Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: power, archives, and historical silence.
- David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: common errors in historical reasoning.
- Optional: Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern: history of historical writing.
Part 2: Understanding the Historian
Reading Sources
Primary: James West Davidson & Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection: practical cases in source analysis.
Pair with: Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice.
Researching and Writing
Primary: William Kelleher Storey, Writing History: A Guide for Students.
Shorter option: Mary Lynn Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History.
Classic: Jacques Barzun & Henry Graff, The Modern Researcher.
Part 3: Fields
Ancient
Survey: Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, Mary Beard, SPQR.
Landmark scholarship: Moses Finley, The Ancient Economy, Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity.
Primary sources: Herodotus, The Histories, Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.
Medieval
Survey: Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe, The Inheritance of Rome.
Landmark scholarship: Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast.
Primary sources: Bede, Ecclesiastical History, Einhard, Life of Charlemagne.
Early Modern Europe
Survey: Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Early Modern Europe, 1450–1789, Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation.
Landmark scholarship: Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic.
Primary sources: Machiavelli, The Prince, Montaigne, Essays.
Modern Europe
Survey: Tony Judt, Postwar, Mark Mazower, Dark Continent, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes.
Landmark scholarship: Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, Georges Lefebvre vs François Furet on the French Revolution.
Primary sources: French Revolution pamphlets/declarations, Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
Russia and East-Central Europe
Survey: Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy, Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution.
Landmark scholarship: Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, totalitarian vs revisionist debate on Soviet society.
Primary sources: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, Soviet memoirs/testimony.
United States
Survey: Oxford History of the United States series, Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought, James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom.
Landmark scholarship: Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, Eric Foner, Reconstruction, C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
Primary sources: Federalist Papers, Frederick Douglass, Narrative.
Latin America
Survey: John Charles Chasteen, Born in Blood and Fire.
Landmark scholarship: Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins.
Primary sources: Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, The Broken Spears.
Middle East
Survey: William Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East; Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples; David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews; John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent.
Landmark scholarship: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews; Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews; Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam; Edward Said, Orientalism; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History.
Primary sources: Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah; oral testimony; communal records, responsa, and documentary archives.
South Asia
Survey: Barbara D. Metcalf & Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India.
Landmark scholarship: Subaltern Studies, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
Primary sources: edicts of Ashoka, Mughal chronicles such as the Akbarnama.
East Asia
Survey: Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan.
Landmark scholarship: Philip Kuhn, Soulstealers, Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths.
Primary sources: Confucius, Analects, Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji.
Part 4: Debates and Methods
Annales / longue durée
Focus: long-term structures: geography, climate, demography, everyday life.
Read: Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean, Civilization and Capitalism.
Marxist History / History from Below
Focus: class, labor, ordinary people, material structures.
Read: E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Eric Hobsbawm's trilogy.
Cultural Turn and Microhistory
Focus: meaning, symbols, small cases, everyday worldviews.
Read: Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, Davis, Martin Guerre, Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms.
Gender History
Focus: gender as a core historical category, not a side topic.
Read: Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History.
Postcolonial and Subaltern History
Focus: empire, colonial knowledge, non-elite and colonized perspectives.
Read: Edward Said, Orientalism, Subaltern Studies, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
Global and Transnational History
Focus: trade, migration, empire, disease, ideas, commodities across borders.
Read: C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton.
Memory and Archive Silences
Focus: memory, commemoration, forgetting, missing voices.
Read: Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past.
Part 5: Specialization and Original Research
- Pick a field and narrow a question. Look for a tension, gap, or disagreement in scholarship.
- Find sources. Use archives, newspapers, letters, court records, images, objects, digitized collections, or oral histories.
- Situate in historiography. Know what historians already argue and where your claim fits.
- Write the argument. Claim, evidence, counter-evidence, limits of sources.
Read monographs from Part 3 as models: question, evidence, structure, and argument.
Suggested Path
- Carr or Arnold, then Bloch.
- After the Fact + a writing guide.
- Tosh, The Pursuit of History.
- Two or three fields: one deep, others for breadth.
- Debates/methods from Part 4 alongside the fields.
- Specialize in one field/period/problem.