Supervising master’s students has taught me a lot about the challenges of reading historical scholarship, mostly because MA programs compress a process that usually unfolds over many years into a very short window. In two years — while also taking coursework — students are expected to move from historiography exams to designing and executing their own research. I’ve had a version of the same conversation with multiple students: how do you read a body of scholarship differently when you’re preparing for exams versus when you’re actually knee-deep in your own primary sources trying to write? Those are, it turns out, not quite the same skill, even though they both involve reading the “same” historical scholarship. That distinction — between reading a text to understand its place in a scholarly conversation and reading it to help you interpret your own evidence — sits at the heart of something I don’t think we teach explicitly enough: there are actually two different ways to read historical scholarship, and they require two different kinds of attention.
We often read the very same book or article for both purposes at once. But conflating them is part of why reading scholarship can feel so overwhelming, especially early in your career. So let’s pull them apart.
Reading for Historiography
The first way of reading is reading for historiography. Here, you are trying to understand a text as a move in an ongoing scholarly conversation. What claims is this author making about the past? Why do they think those claims matter? Whose work are they building on, and whose are they pushing back against — and why?
This kind of reading is about argument and positioning. You’re not trying to absorb every detail of what happened in the past; you’re trying to map the field. Where does this piece sit relative to other pieces? What debate is it intervening in? What would change in the historiography if this argument were right? This is the reading that lets you eventually answer the question I wrote about in an earlier post — how you know that your own argument is new, or necessary, or worth making. You can’t answer that question without having read enough historiographically to know what “new” would even mean in your field.
Historiographical reading can, and often should, move fairly quickly. You are looking for the argument, the stakes, and the scholarly conversation — not necessarily annotating every paragraph. This is the reading you do widely, across dozens or hundreds of texts, to understand the shape of a field. In doing that, however, you have to still be careful – if you move too quickly, you might mischaracterize the work or mischaracterize an argument. Read to understand the author’s argument on their own terms and try to understand the historiography that they are in conversation with before you try to understand its significance to your own work. To do that, you have to place the book in its own historical context, thinking about when it was written, what the state of the field and prevailing scholarly arguments were at that time, and how they were engaging with a particular audience. You can’t, in other words, read historical scholarship ahistorically.
One of the biggest hurdles students face in making this adjustment is learning to read beyond summary for argument. More than once, I’ve asked a student what the argument of a book is, and they’ve responded by telling me what the book is about. That’s not what I asked. That’s not a small slip — it’s a signal. Summary is what happens when your attention is fixed on the details rather than the argument: the chapters, the case studies, the chronology of events the author covers. Argument is different. It’s the claim the author is making about how or why those details matter, and it’s usually a good deal more compact and more contestable than the summary. If you find yourself narrating a book’s contents back to someone rather than stating its claim in a sentence or two, that’s a sign you’re still reading for summary, not argument — and it’s worth going back and asking, explicitly, “so what is this book actually arguing?”
The other common mistake I’ve seen is misunderstanding significance by not thinking about the text within its historiographical context. This is hard – it’s the sort of perspective that gets easier as you read more and learn more. That said, when you’re first starting out, be careful about making strong statements. An important way to check your assumptions on older texts and to gain an appreciation for their role in the historiography is to read book reviews published in scholarly journals, which are often written by scholars familiar with the field right around the time of publication.
Reading as a Secondary Source
The second way of reading is slower, and it’s the one I think gets shortchanged. Here, you are reading a text as a secondary source — as a resource that helps you interpret your own primary sources and build your own argument. When we make an argument, we do so building on the scholarship of those who come before us – not just against them. Existing historical scholarship helps us fill in the gaps and provides essential context that makes it possible to interpret our sources and make arguments. It’s important to engage carefully in reading historical scholarship as a secondary source because we’re using that reading as a sort of evidentiary base. We need to make sure that we are accurately reporting and interpreting the evidence in this context just as much we are with primary sources.
This kind of reading still requires attention to argument, of course. But it also requires you to slow down and pay close attention to what the author says about the actual facts of the past: what do they describe, and how does that description help you understand what’s happening in the sources you’re working with? You’re not just asking “what is this author arguing?” You’re asking “what does this text tell me about the world my sources came out of?”
This is close reading. It’s the kind of reading where you might spend an hour with ten pages, because those ten pages describe exactly the institution, or town, or set of practices that shows up in your primary source, and you need to understand it well enough to use it as context and evidence for your own interpretation.
Reading for Context, Broadly
When you’re reading as a secondary source, it helps to think about context along two dimensions: depth and breadth.
Depth means understanding what came before your period of study. You cannot understand change without understanding what existed prior to it — the precursors, the conditions, the inherited structures that your period is responding to or diverging from. If history is fundamentally about the relationship between continuity and change, you need a clear sense of what continued and what didn’t, and that requires reading backward from your period, not just within it.
Breadth means understanding what else was happening at the same time, in other places, other institutions, other domains of life. Your primary sources didn’t exist in isolation. The political history, the economic history, the social and cultural history of your period all inform one another, even when your own project is narrowly focused on one of those threads.
Both dimensions — depth and breadth — feed into how you interpret your specific case. Reading only within your narrow topic and time period will leave you with a thin, flat sense of what’s happening in your sources. Reading deeply and broadly is what lets you say, with real confidence, what a particular document, practice, or event actually meant in its own moment.
Reading Historical Scholarship as a Non-Historian
As a person who does a great deal of intentional interdisciplinary scholarship, I know first-hand how difficult it can be to read across disciplines and understand the conventions of scholarly practice and methodology. I will address interdisciplinary research itself another time, but I’ve taught enough classes, supervised enough students in interdisciplinary programs, and had enough conversations with colleagues to know that reading poses a particular challenge.
The frameworks above can and should help you in thinking about how to read and engage the work of historians, but in order to get there it might be necessary to address some misconceptions and assumptions. For non-historians who might be struggling to read historical scholarship, you might find our writing style particularly frustrating. For North American historians, in particular, the focus on narrative means that the argument, theory, methods, and evidence may be less self-evident than in much social science scholarship. I promise it is still there, however.
Focusing on the introduction helps enormously. In books and articles, historians will almost always lay out the argument and its stakes even if they don’t signpost it as explicitly as you might be used to. If you are only reading historical scholarship to inform a “historical context” chapter (or section), I want to challenge you to look more carefully at the text to find and carefully consider the intervention. I too often see historical scholarship cited in social science research, failing to attribute major contributions to historians as authors, analysts, and theorists. We could absolutely do better at being more explicit, but I want to challenge you to also look deeper and read more carefully when engaging with history. We’re more than context and our arguments deserve recognition and engagement.
A Book Worth Studying, Not Just Reading
If you want a text that will actually show you how historical scholarship gets built — and, in the process, teach you how to take one apart — I’d point you to Trevor Getz’s Abina and the Important Men. Its format is unconventional (it’s presented partly as a graphic history), and that alone forces you to read differently than you would a standard monograph. But what makes it so useful pedagogically is that Getz doesn’t just present an argument — he narrates his own process as a researcher alongside it. He shows you the historical context he had to reconstruct, the historiographical conversations he’s working within, and exactly how all of that connects back to a single primary source. It’s rare to get that kind of transparency in published scholarship, where the finished argument usually erases the scaffolding that produced it.
That makes Abina a wonderful primer for exactly the kind of reading this post is about. Study it carefully — not just for what it argues, but for how it’s put together — and you’ll come away with a much clearer sense of what’s actually involved in producing historical scholarship, which is, in the end, exactly what you need to understand in order to read it well.
Putting It Together
In practice, you’ll often pick up the same book for both purposes. You might read it quickly the first time through, for historiography — figuring out its argument, its stakes, its place in the field. Then, months later, when you’re deep in your own sources and you realize this book actually describes the very institution or practice you’re trying to understand, you go back and read it again, differently and more slowly, mining it for content and context.
Knowing which kind of reading you’re doing — and being deliberate about switching between them — will save you an enormous amount of time and frustration. It will also make you a better reader of your own sources, because you’ll come to that material having done the work of understanding both the conversation you’re joining and the world you’re trying to reconstruct.
If you want to see what this looks like in practice, take a look at the books that have stayed with a scholar over the long term. My own copy of John Parker’s Making the Town and Gracia Clark’s Onions Are My Husband are full of post-it notes, marginalia, and other markings from cover to cover. None of that accumulated in a single pass. It built up over years, project by project. Every time I begin something new, I go back to Parker or Clark, and I read it again through whatever lens my current project puts in front of me — which means I notice different things each time, underline different passages, argue with the book in the margins in new ways. The book hasn’t changed. My questions have. That, more than anything, is what it looks like to read historical scholarship well: not once, and not for one purpose, but again and again, differently, for as long as it keeps being useful to you.
How to Get Started if You’re Really Struggling
If you’ve read everything above and you still feel like you’re struggling, you might be having a hard time discerning different types of information. Often when students are reading historical scholarship for the first time, they assume that the most important information is the information that is new to them. Historians, however, read differently. If you want to test out your own reading strategies against that of a historian, try this Reading Importance Exercise. This is an excerpt from a text written by historians. Go to the second page of the linked document and read the paragraph, underlining information according to what you consider its level of importance: triple underline the most important, double underline the second-most important, and single underline the least important information. Then compare what you did with the first page where I have indicated how I read that same text (using font size rather than underlining). How did your own reading line up with mine? Where are there differences? What kinds of information did I tend to identify as important – if you could categorize or describe it, what would that be? What kinds of information did you underline as important? Likewise for information that was the least important? And then what is left in the middle? What makes that information less important but still significant? In what ways is it still significant? How does it relate to the most important information? If you think about the kinds of information being identified rather than the content itself, this can often be enlightening in highlighting the differences in reading strategies.
Again, making this transition is harder when you’re first starting out. When everything seems new and unfamiliar it can be more challenging to discern the difference between an argument and a statement. But this exercise begins to help you identify the signals that historians use – the sorts of language and signposting – that sets arguments and statements of significance apart from other kinds of information.
Not all reading is the same – it’s a skill and one that you have to learn to develop. Keep working!
