Your research process & resources for historical writing

Prophecies

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This thread is for any writer to share their 'process' for writing about the past. Some questions to think about: Do you research as you write the first draft? Any recommended resources? Have you visited any places for research? What parts are the most enjoyable re: historical research? Do you have any degrees in research or history?*

I do general research before I outline, and during my first draft, I conduct specific research. There's some great historical resources on YT that give an 'overview' of the event (shoutout to Epic History TV, that's a great channel). If I really want a specific detail, I'll use my university library for academic papers. But mostly, I use books, not journals. There's some great books that are popular with children (Egyptology, anyone?) that talks about clothing and sensory details.

Always wanted to write about Russia, and I tell myself 'okay Madeleine, this is finally the year that you visit' but I keep putting it off? Oh well.

*Note: I don't think it's a requirement, but I'm interested if having one influences any research process. This is my final year studying a B.A in Modern History!
 

TellMeAStory

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I write about a period in history I was already interested in, the years my parents and their friends liked to reminisce about. That makes being a little pitcher with big ears constitute much of my pre-writing research.

I have been lucky enough to visit what remains of the sites I write about, and in some cases, been given tours and interviews and highly undeserved flattery.

I do not have a degree in history, but I did spend my pre-retirement life doing laboratory research. Does that count? No? Ah well. What I do have is a reverence for reference librarians.

I find that reading history is, in some ways, counter-productive. Those authors are writing in retrospect and from reliable sources. My characters need to know only what is before them. That makes newspapers, magazines, journals, and letters of the era far more valuable to me than history books. What did Lily's newspaper read on Dec. 7, 1941? Nothing whatever about Hawaii.
What did her newspaper read on Dec. 9? That Japanese airplanes would be bombing Oakland, California by nightfall. You don't get that in history books.
 

tallus83

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I would be a little skeptical about the History TV Channel. These are the people who made the mini-series about the World Wars. About the ONLY thing they got right was that there were two World Wars.
 

Prophecies

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Oh yeah, primary sources are valuable, I agree. About YouTube: It's great for an 'overview' and for suggestions on further reading.
 

mccardey

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For very recent history (say from the early 1900s onwards) I love love love self-published family histories. A 70-year-old remembering stories their parents or grandparents told them about everyday life - can't get enough of it!
 

Cindyt

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Oh yeah, primary sources are valuable, I agree. About YouTube: It's great for an 'overview' and for suggestions on further reading.

Youtube: I learned how to dress an 18th Century lady, change a yacht's oil filter, and fight with a walking cane, among other things.
 

CWatts

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Youtube: I learned how to dress an 18th Century lady, change a yacht's oil filter, and fight with a walking cane, among other things.

YouTube is great for the practical stuff like that, in particular clothing and weapons. I've also had a lot of luck with Archive.org for digitized primary sources for the mid to late 19th century. Period travel guides are especially useful.

There's always pure serendipity. A friend got me into a Facebook group called Things Found In Walls where people post antiques and oddities found in old houses, etc. They had some steamer trucks recently that sent me down a rabbit hole. Apparently the familiar metal latches didn't come in until 1872. Before that they were leather straps like a belt, with a dowel through the wood to keep the lid from moving. In other words, perfect for a person to hide inside and use a knife to escape....
 

Chris P

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I do research in early drafts, mainly because plot points I come up with later might depend on things I wrote earlier in the process. Finding out some technology a later scene depends on didn't exist results in tons of extra work to clean up.

First person accounts are indispensable, as are films and photos (if available), maps, historical objects, but so is the ability to recognize when enough is enough,and when to leave it to the reader to connect dots on their own. As much as I love the rabbit holes of research (What? The Washington City Canal was started in 1810 but not completed until 1815? How far along was it when the British burned the Capitol and White House in 1814? TO GOOGLE!) at some point you gotta get on with it.

There is nothing like being there. I live (long) walking distance from downtown DC, so my latest dalliance in a historical (1840s) taking place there allows me to retrace the actual steps the characters take. Now I need to visit Picardy in France for my 1917 thriller.

But being there isn't totally necessary. I wrote a chapter of a now-trunked modern day novel taking place in Zanzibar based on travel blogs, Lonely Planet, Google Maps (with photos when Panoramio was still a thing) and Youtube. When I finally got to go there about five years later, I had it *almost* spot on. The only thing I got wrong was that Stone Town is much smaller than I thought. My characters' half-day bike tour of a place that can be walked in an hour was overkill. The rest? Just how I'd pictured it.
 

Tocotin

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Hello!

I write about periods & places I've always been interested in, or maybe I should call it what it really is – if I'm writing about something, it's a love affair. I just love Meiji period and can't get enough of it. I know I would never know enough, but I read about it quite a lot, listened to lectures (I studied not history, but literature, and of a different period, but I took some classes about Meiji as well), read period literature, watched movies, watched kabuki plays, visited the main locations, ate similar food as the characters would eat, went to museums etc., so I did have some rudimentary knowledge before I started.

I don't do much research during the first draft. I feel that researching during writing generally slows me down and gives me excuses not to, you know, put words on paper. I will conduct much more detailed research when I finish, and when I know what I'm looking for. The only things I do when writing is visit the locations (not now, obviously :cry:) in various times of the year, and look for art from the period – photos, woodblock prints, pottery, everyday things... I'm very visual and these things are for me like water when I feel that my writing is getting dry. That, and I also read period literature, for the mindset and language. (And I'm afraid to write about place/characters, if I don't know their language.)

I don't have a history degree, and I'm not sure if my stories are all that historical. I'm only moderately interested in important historical events like wars, revolutions, discoveries etc. What is fascinating to me are customs, religions, attitudes, everyday life in general, so I like long periods of peace when "nothing happens". I'm not even interested in important historical or cultural personages (with exceptions), and when I read biographies, it's more for the general picture of the times – good biographies are very useful for that.

:troll
 

Lakey

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What Tocotin says! I will add the perhaps obvious comment that what sources one uses depends on what time period one is working in -- one has rather different sources available for a story set in 20th-century America than one would for, say, 13th-century Norway. I am not a historian or in any way a professional researcher. I'm learning as I go, and almost certainly making mistakes. I have been researching continuously over the years I have been working on my draft. I am always reading some relevant book or browsing some archive. Here's some of what I have used for my stories that are set in ca.1950 middle-class society and/or lesbian subcultures:

* Academic and popular histories of the time
* Memoirs of poeple who moved in those subcultures at the time
* Contemporary social analysis (what were people writing about gay and lesbian culture at the time?)
* Contemporary magazines and newspapers, generally (what events were going on in the world that people might talk about at their cocktail parties? what adid people serve at those parties? what did clothing and furniture look like?)
* Contemporary fiction and movies -- excellent for getting a hang of the vocabulary and speech cadences of the time, as well as specific details of life such as how one makes a long-distance phone call
* Talking to people who were alive at the time and asking them questions (my dad, for instance, was a little boy when my novel takes place, but he has a prodigious memory and knows a lot of things)

You get the idea! I haven't done as much visiting of locations as I might like -- mostly I write locations from imagination or from memory, as I have set my novel (and the short stories I've written that have spun out of the same research) in locations that I know very well. But I have looked up some historical photos of certain places.

:e2coffee:
 

angeliz2k

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No degree in history, though I came pretty close to a minor in history because I took so many history electives.

(Tangent: because I did really well on my AP US History and both AP English tests, I started college with a full semester worth of credits, and also the stupid major I chose--don't go with Communications, kids!--left me some room for electives. So I was able to spend a semester in London taking classes that had nothing to do with my major, one or two of which were history-related and which were AMAZING. It was the best part of my college experience by far, which otherwise was not good. But, yeah, I'm going way off into left field, so let me get back on topic.)

The places and times I write about have always been of interest to me. I've always been interested in the Civil War, and the more I learned about the Civil War, the more I became intrigued by the mind-bogglingly complex social structure that led up to the war and that continued in some form until . . . well, you could argue it's still there in some form. But it feels like the Civil War has been in my blood since I was a child. I've also been interested in the Edwardian age forever, pretty much. I was fascinated by the Titanic. The last few years, I've become more interested in WWI, which is woefully underserved.

As far as research: It depends a bit on the project. If I were to write in the antebellum or Civil War eras, I frankly wouldn't need to do much research, being quite familiar with the era and having written, er, let's see (carry the two, find the square root, multiply by the speed of light)...having written 3 novels and a novella in that era. I'm not quite as comfortable in WWI/the Edwardian era quite yet.

I start broad. I won't start writing unless I have a pretty solid grounding in the important events and social mores and material culture of the time. This means reading pretty widely--no getting around that. I haven't, thus far, just started in on a time period I didn't already know a good amount about, but even after I have a general feel for the era, I will still read more about the more specific topics I will be writing about. I'll keep reading as much as possible about the time period, even as I write, not just to answer specific questions I might have, but to keep my head in the game, so to speak. You never know what details you might come across as you continue your research. They might come in handy when you least expect them to.

I have been lucky enough to visit a lot of the places I've written about. I live in Virginia, so it's Civil War Central around here. I live within about an hour of three major battlefields (Gettysburg, Antietam, Manassas/Bull Run) and another dozen or so slightly-lesser-known ones (Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Fredericksburg, Monocacy, Winchester, Fisher's Fill, etc.). I've also gotten to visit the places in Georgia that inspired my writing about them, and I got to see the very real places where my very real characters lived and died in England. It isn't necessary, I suppose, but I think it's incredibly important to see the places. I know it isn't always possible for a writer to travel to the place they write about, but for me I don't think I could've written so cogently (I hope) about these places and these people without having visited the sites.

I also would caution against relying too much on television programs, unless they're from a reliable source.

One of my favorite sources is CSPAN American History TV. Obviously, that'll be American history, but they have really interesting programs--talks and lectures from professors and other experts, as well as old documentaries and news reels and oral histories. It's all available online. I often put it on in the background while I'm doing things like cleaning or sewing.

Also, museums. Museums are amazing resources. It's great if you can go to a museum related to your time/place, but many museums also have great online resources. American history again, but the National Museum of Civil War Medicine has great online content. And with the quarantine, a lot of museums are hosting talks. The Museum of Civil War Medicine has had a great series of talks. A recent one was a discussion with a curator from the WWI museum about how medicine progressed from 1865 to 1918. It was fascinating--two experts who know their stuff having a blast talking about the stuff they love and spouting all kinds of knowledge.

The point is, there's a lot out there right now. Keep your ears and eyes open. Take in as much as you can, always. It's a never-ending journey.


Something else that I think I've noted here before: one of my strategies is to find a real person who is my key to a time period. Something about this person corresponds to the character I want to write about, and I use this person as a starting point. For instance, I wanted to write about an actress in Philadelphia c. 1830, so I read all about Charlotte Cushman. I wanted to write about a young woman marrying into a slave-holding family, so I read all about Fanny Kemble. From there, I follow the research threads to fill out the world I wanted to create.
 

angeliz2k

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Also, I will second archive.org. I found some really useful stuff there about the specific requirements for a medical student at Oxford at the turn of the last century.

I will also endorse Facebook groups. I'm part of several groups related to Civil War and Edwardian clothing and material culture, and it's been great just following along and seeing what people post and discuss. There are some very knowledgeable people in those groups, and some really interesting primary sources are often shared. For instance, people share photos and fashion plates and bits of letters and stories about ancestors.

I would take some care with YouTube. Anyone can make a YouTube video--just think about who it is and whether they know what they're talking about.

Chris P, I worked in downtown DC, and more than once I took a walk to peer at some antebellum row houses that still stand on the GWU campus. They're privately owned, so I couldn't go in, alas, but they are a pretty good match for the home of my character living in Washington City in the 1850s.
 

Belle_91

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On the television aspect, PBS does a pretty good job with their documentaries. Good for getting your feet wet in your chosen subject. They're one of a few secondary sources on television that I trust. They're doing a two part series on the Nineteenth Amendment this July that I'm pretty excited about.
 

Chris P

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The mention of Facebook groups reminds me of various enthusiasts' fora. No matter what it is, somewhere there is a chat room for it filled with amazing folks who eat drink and breathe the stuff. If it's a place, they likely have a historical society, even if it's just one guy with binders and binders of newspaper clippings.

Also, university departments might have a specialist you can tap into. I contacted the University of Alabama law school for a project, and got such good info it broke my heart to move the setting to Tennessee!
 

CWatts

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Something else that I think I've noted here before: one of my strategies is to find a real person who is my key to a time period. Something about this person corresponds to the character I want to write about, and I use this person as a starting point. For instance, I wanted to write about an actress in Philadelphia c. 1830, so I read all about Charlotte Cushman. I wanted to write about a young woman marrying into a slave-holding family, so I read all about Fanny Kemble. From there, I follow the research threads to fill out the world I wanted to create.

Seconding this. Sometimes you luck out on someone's life touching multiple threads - I'm reading about Lucy Parsons both for socialist/anarchist history for one project and Reconstruction era interracial relationships for another.
 

angeliz2k

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This is specific to my own topic, but I can't help gushing over the fabulous resource that is jmbarrie.co.uk. Yesterday, I had a blast listening to some audio files that were recently added. The owner of the site (Andrew Birkin) is *the* expert and collector of J.M. Barrie and Llewelyn Davies materials, and most of it is on this site. The pictures and letters are great, but I love the audio interviews that Birkin conducted in the '70s with the youngest of the brothers who inspired Peter Pan. Birkin also interviewed the sister of the girl who was engaged to marry the oldest brother, George (who died in the Great War), the second brother's widow, Lord Boothby (a school friend of fourth brother Michael), and even Daphne du Maurier (the boys' cousin). Nico (the youngest brother) is a delight, and he tells lovely stories. I also enjoyed the fiancee's sister's reminiscences of George (she knew George pretty well). There are also some clips of Barrie giving speeches in the early '30s. Great stuff.
 

Tepelus

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The last work I finished takes place in my hometown in 1923. I chose my hometown because I wanted it to take place here. I also knew I would be able to find historical references fairly easily. The lay of the land hasn't changed much, except for Oversmith Hill which was quite the challenge to travel until late 1923 when they started grading it down. Streets are all mainly the same, a lot of buildings that were once here in 1923 are gone, but quite a few remain. The library has some old Sanborn fire maps that I used as references. The closest one was the late 1910's, the next year was in the 1930's, too late to use for my story. We had a local historian who wrote a weekly column for the paper on the history of our town, and she wrote those articles for over a decade. Lots of history that would have been lost or never known about if it weren't for her (Thank you, Susan Hinckley!).

The library the next town over has nearly every single newspaper (from 1870's - 1960's) from my town on microfilm and I have the ability to save whole pages on a flash drive, which is what I did for the entire year of 1923. (Why 1923? It's the year our library first opened, and a few other reasons.) Those papers are so very interesting, and the way some of the articles are written are quite salty and funny. I wrote a few of my own articles in my novel mimicking the tone of the editor in those papers. I used some of the slang that was used too, and inserted them into the dialog of my characters--for instance, flivver, to describe a Ford.

One thing I learned (among a lot of things) through the paper was that my county did not have an x-ray machine at the time my story takes place. It was late October 1923 when the new hospital opened in the county seat when there was finally local access to one. Those that needed an x-ray were sent to Lansing or Grand Rapids. I originally had a character going to her doctor to have x-rays done to determine if she has tuberculosis, the scene taking place in early October, but after my discovery I had to do some rewriting. She ended up going to a sanatorium.

There was also this website I relied on pretty heavily when it came to period 1920's dress and makeup, the Vintage Dancer. She may not be 100% correct, but it gave me a lot to go on. Then of course there were the random Google searches. The newspapers and the Hinckley articles were the biggest help. They even give me ideas for future stories.