Doing History

Lonnie Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and Founding Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of how historians do history for the public.

During our exploration, Lonnie reveals why it’s important for historians to reach multiple audiences with their work and how museums allow them to reach those audiences; The importance of humanizing history; And, how history and the historian’s process helped Lonnie and his colleagues build the National Museum of African American History and Culture and interpret the history within it.

History has a history and genealogy has a history. And the histories of both affect how and why we study the past and how we understand and view it.

Today, we explore why it’s important for us to understand that the practices and processes of history and genealogy have histories by exploring what the history of genealogy reveals about the early American past.

Our guide for this exploration is Karin Wulf, a Professor of History at William & Mary and the Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.

History tells us who we are and how we came to be who we are.

Like history, genealogy studies people. It’s a field of study that can tell us who we are in a more exact sense by showing us how our ancestral lines connect from one generation to the next.

In this episode of the “Doing History: How Historians Work” seres, we investigate the world of genealogical research with Joshua Taylor, President of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society and a professional genealogist.

What do historians do with their research once they finish writing about it?

How do historians publish the books and articles we love to read?

This episode of our Doing History: How Historians Work series, takes us behind-the-scenes of how historians publish their writing about history.

Our guide through the world of history publications is Joshua Piker, a Professor of History at William & Mary, and the Editor of the William and Mary Quarterly, the leading journal of early American history and culture.

How do historians write about the people, places, and events they’ve studied in historical sources?

We continue our Doing History: How Historians Work series by investigating how historians write about history. Our guide for this investigation is John Demos, the Samuel Knight Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and an award-winning historian.

What do historians do with all of the information they collect when they research?

How do they access their research in a way that allows them to find the information they need to write the books and articles we enjoy reading?

Billy Smith, a Professor of History at Montana State University, joins us as part of our “Doing History: How Historians Work” series to lead us on an exploration of how historians organize and access their research.

Not everyone has the means, time, or freedom to travel to archives. So how do historians conduct the research they need to do when they are limited to online resources? 

To answer this timely question, we turn to Sharon Block, a Professor of History at the University of California-Irvine. She has made use of computers and digital resources to do history for years, which is why she serves as our guide for how to research history online.

Historians rely on secondary historical sources almost as much as they rely on primary historical sources.

But what are secondary historical sources and how do they help historians know what they know about the past?

Michael McDonnell, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney, guides us through how he used secondary historical sources to investigate the pivotal role Native Americans played in the history of the Great Lakes region and early North America.

In this episode, we continue our behind-the-scenes tour of how historians work with Zara Anishanslin, an Assistant Professor of History at CUNY’s College of Staten Island and author of Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World.

During our investigation of how historians read historical sources, Zara reveals what historians mean when they talk about primary and secondary historical sources; How historians read and interpret primary historical sources; And details about the lives of four, everyday people who lived during the 18th century: Anne Shippen Willing, Robert Feke, Anna Maria Garthwaite, and Luke Sweetland.

Historians research the past through historical sources.

But what are the materials that tell historians about past peoples, places, and events?

Today, James Horn, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, helps us investigate historical sources by taking us on an exploration of historic Jamestown and the types of sources that inform what we know about it.