This is a sheet of reading tips I’ve developed over the past few years for my first-year students in history. I posted it on Twitter yesterday, as a png image and a tweet thread, and it got quite a few positive responses and several requests for copies. So I’m putting it here in what I hope is a more accessible format. It has some obvious limitations, not the least of which is the tacit assumption that sources are always texts; it was designed, too, to fit on a single side of paper, for syllabus use, which means that many points could be elaborated. (It did not occur to me to need to explain that saying “every source is biased” is not the same as saying “all biases are equal,” whatever that would mean; but life is short, and no text is proof against misreading.) In practice, as students in my courses can attest, we spend less time reading instructions like this than looking at sources, which seems right. Still, having a few points written down has been helpful, and to that end brevity is essential. As I noted when I first posted it, feel free to use it, modify it, translate it, or criticize it, in whole or in part, as you see fit. Credit is appreciated, of course.

How to Read the Texts for this Course

• Read actively. Write in the margin; don’t just underline, make notes. With practice you will learn to distinguish between ideas or arguments that authors emphasize, and details that you can look up again later. Rather than aiming to reproduce the contents of the reading or the lecture, focus your notes on main points and key ideas or examples.

• Read different kinds of text differently.Secondary sources (and many tertiary sources, including textbooks) are pieces of academic writing, written by historians.
  • Learn what the different parts of a text can tell you. Titles, subtitles, even tables of contents tell you how a historian sees a subject: what it includes, when it begins and ends, etc. These are choices, not truths about history. Other parts of the “scholarly apparatus” (acknowledgements, footnotes, etc.) tell you about the author’s sources, which historians they agree/disagree with, which theories or methods they use, etc.
  • Learn to “read for argument” – to find an author’s point quickly rather than simply reading an article from start to finish. Authors often state their arguments most clearly in introductions and conclusions; the middle parts of a work tend to provide the sources, analysis and interpretation on which the arguments rest.
  • Every author is making an argument. Even when an author does not state an obvious “thesis,” they are making an argument implicitly, if only by focusing on some events, dates, figures, types of source, or themes, and leaving others out.

• Primary sources are the documents (including texts, images, and objects) that survive from the period we are investigating. They must be read with close attention and an open mind.
  • Simply establishing what a source is saying often requires careful work; language, idioms, spelling, typography, and stylistic conventions all change. Tone and irony can be hard to detect. Even seemingly familiar words and phrases may not have meant then what they now do. Read primary sources more than once.
  • Consider how the source has come to you. Sources almost never come to us directly; they are mediated – by being collected, edited, or translated; by being classified or juxtaposed with other material; and in other ways. All of this affects interpretation.
  • Explore the source’s origins and context(s): its author’s position, goals, and assumptions may explain what the source says or undermine its claims. What events might have prompted the author to create the source? What stylistic norms or conventions was he or she following? Context shapes aims and meaning.
  • Read “against the grain.” A source that is unhelpful or unreliable for answering one question may well be valuable for answering another. Beyond the literal meaning of a source lie assumptions that may be just as revealing. Most sources tell you more than they were intended to, including by their silences. Every source tells you something.

• Every source is “biased.” Identifying a source’s bias or mixture of biases is an important preliminary task. But it is only a preliminary task. Merely pointing out bias is not the same as analyzing an author’s arguments, interpreting a source’s historical meaning, or assessing its value as evidence for a particular question about the past. Those are the real work.

• When in doubt, look things up. Dictionaries (regular, biographical, and historical), atlases, bibliographies, encyclopedias, and other reference works exist for a reason. If you don’t know what kinds of reference works exist for your question, ask an instructor or a librarian.