I’ve never really thought about my strategy for approaching a new history research paper topic, but I think I do have one after all. Whenever I get a topic to write about, I try to think of where (if anywhere) I’ve heard of that topic before. If not, I usually do turn to Google or a library to get me started.

When I think of places I’ve heard of a topic before, I’m looking for other books I’ve previously read, maybe even including textbooks that I’ve kept. I usually will go to those to refresh my memory on basic information about the topic and try to gather important names or words I can later use as search terms to find out more information. If I don’t know anything at all about a topic and haven’t really read anything about it before, I’ll do a quick Google search. Often I don’t trust what I read on the internet, so a lot of times I’ll read five or six different sites on the same events to try and corroborate the facts.

Based on this week’s workbook reading, I should probably do more work with primary sources. It’s very rare that I actually get to use a quality primary source. Before doing the reading, I also realize I can and should be using secondary sources’ sources to find useful primary sources. Above all, I need to be more careful to notice bias—something I’m great at doing when the bias is different than my own, but when it’s the same as mine I think I often let it go unnoticed. This week’s readings have definitely given me some helpful tips for how to research a new history paper topic in the future.