You will get lots of answers to this question, and your sources for information will vary depending on what historical period you are looking at. Fundamentally though, there are a few things you need to know that will make your life easier.

Firstly is there is no such thing as 'pure facts', as most things are up for debate and actual 'facts' such as dates, names and general descriptions of major events are not hugely useful in understanding the period. Further, 'raw information', which in terms of history would refer to contemporary (that is, dating from the period you are studying), is also not necessarily useful to you as much contemporary material is subject to a wide variety of interpretations. For instance, just because Josephus says Roman drills are like bloodless battles and their battles are like bloody drills doesn't make it true: Roman tactics were not that mechanical.

It is essential that you understand the difference between primary and secondary sources, and what constitutes an appropriate secondary source. A primary source would generally a contemporary document or something written from the period. It is 'raw information' but it doesn't mean that everything written in it is true. It has to be interpreted by experts. This is what secondary sources do: interpret the 'raw' historical information, analyse it, and present it in a reasoned, academic manner. This does not necessarily mean secondary sources contain 'pure facts' either, as different historians will provide different interpretations or explanations for the topic at hand, and one or more of them may have validity.

A 'valid' secondary source is not a website, not a news media site, not a blog, and not Wikipedia. All these forms of media must use real secondary sources, that is academic books, journal articles and papers, to come up with their arguments. None of these forms of media, even Wikipedia, tend to do that particularly well. That is because not all secondary sources are created equal: a book on Rome written by some guy is not the same as a book on Rome by Adrian Goldsworthy, but you get as many books by some guy as by serious academics on history shelves in bookshops. These non-academic publications tend to be written off with the usually-disparaging term 'popular history'.

If you're confused, then that's fine. Historians have to be trained in analysing primary sources and secondary sources combined with a lot of background knowledge in their specific period to be any good at producing a sound historical argument. Websites, blogs, news media and even Wikipedia generally do this badly.

So here is my own general method for researching a new topic that you can use, and will probably be broadly similar to what many other historians would do:

1- Read a general, accessible source on the topic. For me, that is Wikipedia.

2- Look at the list of sources for the article on Wikipedia. Contemporary sources are the primary sources, which I would look at for the 'raw' information, but these must be read alongside the secondary sources, which are the books and journal articles. Generally, newer sources are better.

3-Secondary sources are more important for understanding the topic, primary sources are often more interesting. Books are more interesting than journal articles and more informative for a beginner than primary sources. To make sure a book actually reflects good scholarship, use tips such as the following: google the author and see if they are actually a recognised historian with other publications, make sure the book has a significant bibliography and reference list, or run it through Google Scholar like /u/Akasazh suggested below.

4- Using these methods to narrow down one or more good 'general' works on the topic, usually a book, find it, borrow it, buy it (I use bookdepository, it has free shipping), and read it. Once you have a general understanding of a topic from a good general book, you can go deeper.

5- If you want to go deeper, read another book on a topic a bit more specific to what you're looking at. Find a published journal article of relevance. Concurrently with these things, look up the primary sources (which for ancient history are all online), and read parts or all of them so that you understand the references to the primary sources you will find in the secondary sources.

6- To get a major headstart on all of this, you can look at the reading list here on AskHistorians, or you can post a question and ask for sources. Again, once you've read Wikipedia (which gives you the gist of an idea but also often contains outdated scholarship, crappy research and just plain made-up or mistaken stuff), you want a good general book on the topic.

Here is a more specific example of how to find a good book on a topic without professional guidance:

You want to learn about the American Civil War. You start here. Read the article. Scroll down to the bottom and look at the Bibliography. For the American Civil War, it is extremely large, probably one of the larger ones on Wikipedia. Look at all those names and books. There's so many! So just look at the ones where the name of the book describes a general history of the war: ignore anything without "civil war" in the title, ignore journal articles, ignore things that mention other topics aside from the US Civil War. There's a few options there. Shelby Foote "A Civil War: A Narrative" is the sort of title you're looking for. We also have "Encyclopedia of the American Civil War" by Heidler et. al. John Keegan's "The American Civil War: A Military History". McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era." There's a few more.

You could probably read any of these books and get a good beginner's understanding of the war. But if you google the books and the authors, you'll find more information to help you determine which one you should be reading. Googling Shelby Foote's book tells you it's several volumes. Too long! Same problem with the Encyclopedia by Heidler et. al. (five volumes!). Keegan's book is very military focused, and googling the book gives this review as the first result, which tells us a bit about the book's flaws. Keegan is not an American specialist, you would note by looking at his Wikipedia page, where few of his publications specifically concern America. So finally, of the examples above, you could google McPherson's book. The book has a Wikipedia page where can find it's written in 1988, which isn't that old for such a well-researched topic, we can find that it won a Pulitzer prize, and is a pretty well-regarded one-volume treatment of a complex period. So that's the book I'd be buying, though it's far from your only option. This is an example of the process I might use to pick an opening book for a new topic, and you can apply it to any topic that has a Wikipedia article really.

I should add that this method will work better with more detailed articles with a wider array of sources in the bibliography. Shorter articles on niche topics may not have 'cutting edge' stuff in the references, but it will be better than nothing. Once you're a bit more practised at using google to check up on the quality of secondary sources, you can search for books yourself and use the same method to check them out, running them through google, checking the author's credentials, reading reviews, or checking the number of citations through Google Scholar.

I hope this helps you. Again, if you're looking at a specific topic, reply in a comment and I or somebody else will be able to fairly easily point you to a good general book on the topic.

EDIT: /u/granzi 's post on librarians is a good idea that has never occurred to me because I always had a University to guide me while I was learning. As he said, it is a really, really good idea to ask somebody knowledgeable about where to start. Almost certainly, they will recommend a well-regarded general book on the topic.

/u/OakheartIX also gave a good summary on how to work with primary sources, if that's what you would like to do, in a post below.

I think an underused resource are reference librarians at universities. Even if you're not a student, or you don't live close enough to a university to visit them in person, many universities now make it easy to contact their librarians through the internet. They're often happy to help members of the public with finding material. Just go to the library's homepage and look for a link to contact them.

For example, the University of Oregon Library has a drop down menu on the far right corner of the top menu bar: "Chat/Ask us." You can either chat with a librarian during regular hours, call, email, or even text.

Unlike your typical neighborhood librarian (good as they are), librarians at universities are not only trained to help with finding sources, but have experience accessing, cataloging, and combing through the vast resources that universities have in paper form and stored digitally. Since you're not a trained historian, you'll want someone knowledgeable to make recommendations about books or articles you can read on the topics you're interested in. Once you've got a good grasp of the basics, you can move beyond introductory material to things like primary sources (stuff written by eyewitnesses or at the time of the event such as diaries and newspapers).

Especially at public universities, you may even be able to get borrowing privileges to check out books or get access to online databases.

This may sound trite, but unless you are holding artifacts or documents from the era you are researching, you will be holding reports or articles favoring one side or position. Often you will find several historians disagree on what actually happened during well documented events.

Research the authors of what you read. Who wrote it is a great first clue into how trustworthy it is. You might also consider taking a first-year city college course just to help tune your curiosity.

I think you might be served better by a understanding that there might not be anything like raw historical fact. Each document will inherently have a bias, or may just have the wrong information. In part that is part of the fun of working with sources if you think about them the right way. Reading newspaper articles or reports is less about the illusive search for truth, but more of an attempt to understand the author. What is their bias, and how is this source limited? Looking at how people understand the event that you are interested in is perhaps more interesting then a fairly futile search for truth, as what actually happened shapes people actions less then what the believed happened.

If that is unsatisfying I am sorry. As a Professor of mine said we can't really know what happened in the past. Even the people who were there didn't really know what happened due to issues with memory. So much of the work of the historian is gathering information that supports their argument and theory about what happened and deciding if that source is reliable. So it is important to read broadly on subjects you are interested in and think about what you read critically.

Full disclosure, I'm not a historian, but I am a political scientist and I imagine I run into a lot of the same headaches that historians do.

Anyway, re: raw information and pure facts, the problem is that they don't really exist in either field. Everything is subject to interpretation, and not only should that interpretation inform your understanding of the subject, it's really what both of these fields are. Historians don't just hand over a dead person's diary to their thesis committee, I didn't just hand over data from the Mexican Migration Project.

That said, if you're seeking something that has a relative lack of bias, you might be best served using resources like Google Scholar or the search engine for your university's library. This will lead you to peer reviewed articles on whatever you're looking for, so you can at least be sure that the methods are sound. As well, if you go to an institution that has a subscription to the publication the article is in, you can see the data in social science articles, as well as a whole lot of analysis that doesn't make it into the abstract in both social science and history articles.

When you want to evaluate the level of stock you put into an article's conclusion, you should look at how often it's cited--along with who cited it, what institutions they work in, how long their careers are, etc, if you have the time--and when it was published. In poli sci, there's not a ton of work from before 1980 or so that I really see being cited anymore; this is because there's usually either more recent work that better supports the point due to more data being available, or because the new data has pointed to the work's conclusions being wrong. I'm...not really at all sure where this mark is within the field of history, to be honest, but it's likely no later than ~1960.

To add to all the other answers, when you come across a document that is considered a source (so I am not talking about an academic article or a book written by a scholar) there are a couple of steps you need to go through so as to understand what you are seeing/reading. This applies to anything from a photograph, a movie, a royal edict, the transcription of a conference or presidential debate, ...etc. Anything. :

• What type of document is it (photograph, official written document, ...etc.)
• By whom was it made or written (learn as much as possible about the author) ?
• Who is the public ?
• When was it made ?
• What period/years is it referring to ?
• What is the context (social, political, economical, but don't go too far, it must remain linked to the document) of the period the document is referring to ?
• What is the context of the period the document was made in ?

It may be very easy to do or tedious depending on the document. However once you go through all these steps you already have a better understanding of it as well as what it is. Every students and professionals are confronted to documents and analyse them one way or another but will ask themselves these questions at some point.

For example, let say you have in front of you the excerpt of the Memoirs from Beyond the Grave of Chateaubriand when he is introduced to the court of Versailles and Louis XVI.

You know it is from memoirs so then what are the issues of such writings ? The author may be truthful but he is of course biased towards his own life. Or he may be completely lying about some events of his life. Who is Chateaubriand ? An Enlightened Breton aristocrat who was first sympathetic to many aspects of the French Revolution in 1789 but quickly changed his mind and emigrated. He is also a devoted Catholic at the time he is writing. He disliked Napoleon and was loyal to the Bourbon when they came back, ...etc. When is he writing ? We know he started to write around 1810 but most of his work was written during the Bourbon Restauration. At that time he worked as the French ambassador in London. So he worked for the crown. When was it published ? Did he intend to publish his memoirs during his lifetime ? It was published after his death and he probably intended that it was (thus he may have felt he had more freedom to writer whatever he liked). Let's get back to the excerpt. When was he introduced to the king ? Before the Revolution. Meaning a long time ago compared to when he writes this chapter and he knows what is going to happen to the King even though when he meets him he does not know anything about the Revolution nor that it is going to happen. What public is concerned with these memoirs ? Anyone as the author himself stated.

With all that you already have enough material to have a certain critical eye when reading the excerpt and be able to analyze the document.. And it helps a lot because you always have to be critical and it does not matter if the author tells the truth or blatant lies about the events, what he did and whom he met. It was written in a certain context by someone who lived in his own time (that is with a different culture and way of thinking that is very different from our own). Know that sources are never reliable and they don't need to be actually (again I am not talking about an academic work written yesterday). It is the job of the person who is using it to put it back in a context of event (What? Who? When? Why? For whom?). This is a methodology that I learned in university. It varies from historian to historian but the questions asked there are necessary before really starting to analyze a document be it as I said a Robert Capa's photograph for Life magazine or a papal bull.

Just a note, to add on to what others have said: if you replace "historian" and "history" with "physicist" and "physics," what happens?

"Where can I, a normal guy with no physics background, find 'raw' physical facts? How can I know whether an article is lying or not? What are reliable sources for learning about physics?"

Suddenly it gets much more tricky. Oh, there are ways to do it. But they require you to acquire specialized skills, and generally speaking, when "normal" people try to wade into physics, they look like cranks or fools, because it really just isn't accessible to non-experts. To even "see" some of these "facts," you might need sophisticated laboratory equipment (and the knowledge of how to use it), or even access to massive facilities (like particle accelerators).

We could talk about medicine in the same way, if we wanted. How can you get "raw" facts about, say, whether particular gene expressions are correlated with cancers? How could I get "raw" facts about what kinds of brain surgeries are associated with positive outcomes?

Which is only to say: because historians tell stories, and because there are non-academic historians (of varying degrees of competence), people can tend to talk about historical expertise as if it were not a form of expertise, i.e., did not require years of study, careful methodology, lots of work. But it does. The non-academic historians who write good history, and make actual contributions to understanding (as opposed to just repackaging what academics say, or writing erroneous history) tend to have spent about a PhD's worth of time on their subject, in my experience.

If you read the footnotes of a serious historical work, you can see what the "evidence" being offered up is, and where it is located. But looking at the "raw" evidence alone is insufficient — it takes years of training and/or experience to learn how to correctly interpret historical evidence, the same as with other fields of knowledge. "Raw" historical data requires huge amounts of contextualization, interpretation, and knowing how it fits with lots of other data to make sense of. Looking at a single source or two is a sure-fire way to get very mixed up and often exactly wrong in one's conclusions.

So my answer is: you can't. I mean, you can look up primary sources. But that isn't going to tell you whether a particular historian's interpretation is erroneous or true in most cases. That requires a very deep sort of knowledge. Expertise.

You could, of course, pursue that deep knowledge. To get deeply into a topic from scratch takes several years of research. Reading other scholars' views. Looking at various forms of evidence. Piecing together interpretations, testing them out against other scholars and experts. Etc. Totally doable, even without a formal educational environment, with no fancy equipment or facilities required for the most part... but it requires becoming, to some degree, an expert yourself. And not just "a normal guy with no history background."

This isn't meant to be discouraging. But it is meant to push back on the idea that historical knowledge is not a form of expertise. One can argue about how difficult of an expertise it is to acquire (in the same way that languages can be ranked by their difficulty of achieving non-native fluency), but it is still a form of expertise, either way.

Raw information in history is documents- physical information preserved in some way by a human. That's a nebulous term, because they can exist in any form. A clay tablet with cuneiform listing the taxes due from a farm is a document. So is a DVD of an interview, a hand-written diary, a newspaper article, a marriage certificate, a wall with graffiti, and a royal proclamation. Physical facts are also information, of course-- like the foundations of a ruined building or the geography of an area, but even then we tend to process them as a document: in those two examples, the ruined building would be used by a historian by reading the report of an archeologist, and the geography comes from maps or drawings or photos.

What kind of documents will have the facts you are looking for depends of what questions you are seeking to answer. When I was researching whaling crews, I read crew manifests and customs declarations and shipping papers (i.e. crew contracts) and logbooks. A grad school acquaintance that was working on prostitution in Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s read police reports and trial transcripts and interviews and diaries and census forms and so on.

Telling if an article is actually lying is very difficult. If it's been published in a scholarly journal, the lies are sophisticated enough to have fooled the editors and reviewers. If the article includes statistical information, you could look for signs that the numbers were "massaged" or outright faked. The math required is beyond my expertise, but the blog Retraction Watch would be a good place to start getting an education on it; the blog is about scholarly work that is retracted, which sometimes happens when the authors are caught lying. If you're deciding if an article is lying, the answer is you detect the lies the same way you would detect any lie: the article make claims that are in conflict with facts known to you, and you have reason to believe evil intent rather than mistake.

Even then, history is above all a matter of interpretation. So historians very frequently disagree with each other about very basic and cut-and-dry things. An emotionally-charged example is the Holocaust, and the debate between the functionalists and the intentionalists. (To oversimplify, intentionalists think Hitler wanted the Jews exterminated and directed that it be done. Functionalists think that the Holocaust was perpetrated instead by lower-ranking Nazis switched to a program of extermination to try and achieve the goal of a Jew-free greater Germany without specific orders from Hitler to do so via extermination.) The interesting thing, is that neither side is lying. It isn't about Holocaust denial. Rather it's trying to interpret the facts, and reasonable minds differ.

Lastly is the recognition that there are no "pure facts". All information is mediated by fallible human minds. Remember that list of documents I mentioned in the start? That clay table of taxes might have an inflated requirement if the assessor disliked the farmer. The DVR of the interview might be edited, or the person being interviewed might be lying. People lie in their own diaries all the time, or write things that are untrue because of mistakes of memory. My work on American whaling crews was specifically about lying, in part-- there were financial incentives to make sure crews had a certain percentage of U.S. citizens, so legal submissions were faked to make sure that ships appeared to have enough crew to qualify. Foreign sailors might be given false names and identity documents, or a ship about to return to harbor would transfer a few foreign crew members to a ship that had just left harbor, or the customs office would just accept blatantly forged documents. But those lies were the exact facts I was looking for!

After all my discussion, I'd like to say that you're really asking basic questions about how history is made. You'd be well-served to read a book on the theory and practice of writing history, which will answer your questions better than I have. My three favorites are The Landscape of History by John Lewis Gaddis, The Historian's Craft by Marc Bloch, and What Is History by E. H. Carr. All three are slender volumes and are not difficult to find or read. Any one of them would serve you well.

I really recommend you read E.H. Carr's What Is History? if you ever wish to more clearly understand how history is written and why there are no unbiased historical texts. All historians are human and as such we cannot help but subconsciously frame the information we perceive through the conceptual lenses we use to see the world. Carr goes into detail about how one can properly read and write historical texts during one's quest for knowledge.

Even if you don't have much time available to read the whole book, I recommend the first three chapters.

Related question, what are some good sources for primary source documents? They're surprisingly hard to find just on their own.

As others have pointed out there's almost no such thing as "raw facts" and even primary source documents are inherently flawed because there is no way to perceive and write about events without some sort of bias- no matter how slight.

But let's ignore that and press on to finding more information. The library is one of your best bets for information within the last century or so. They will likely have newspapers on microfilm or physical copy. This you may consider a biased source but it's important to know two things- what happened? How did people feel about it when it was happening? We know from newspaper clippings that Hitler was rising to power in Germany but Americans weren't very alarmed about it. That's two pieces of information in one biased analysis of a German election.

The other way is to flip to the back of the book you're reading and dig up more information from the bibliography. And if you're really interested- go to your local university library (if available) and in the reference section you'll find bibliographies of bibliographies. That can make hunting down information a bit easier.

But the plain fact is few book publishers are going to publish raw facts because they're often boring, in old languages few understand, and aren't held together by any common thread. That's why historians use postmodern analysis to fill in the picture of the past. If you want to generate your own picture from the past it can be pretty difficult and it takes a lot of study. Skilled urban historians can tell you about a neighborhood just by looking at a map and census records.

University libraries are the best place. However, I'm mostly responding to your comment about the bias in historical sources. Many historical documents are going to be heavily biased. Just be aware that finding completely objective sources may be a difficult task. It is the historian's job to interpret such sources and sift through the biases. (Someone inform me if I'm espousing false information here o.o)

The particular historical event you're interested in has been covered extensively on this sub. See here and here, as well as our FAQ section on the subject. There's also this post addressing particular claims.

History as a discipline has a foundation in the ability to analyze sources. Finding bias in a source doesn't disqualify it. Generally, expose yourself to as many sources as you can on a single topic, and try and make sure you undergo that experience where a source you wholeheartedly believe is thoroughly examined (not necessarily contradicted though) and that makes the importance of analyzing sources clear to you.

The reason why I would recommend one particular event or time period us because I feel that understanding the basis of analyzing the sources in front of you allows you to try and delve into any event or time period you wish.

Personally, the most prominent example of the experience I described would be when I had read the Autobiography of Malcolm X and a few years later read Manning Marable's biography of Malcolm X and his his accompanying list of sources.

I sometimes wish there were units of history that were entirely fiction but used a thorough list of newspapers, journals, letters, textbook chapters, etc. just to try and emphasize that your ability to learn and apply history to your life is reliant on this skill

Access to primary documents can often be had via databases at large libraries, and some library systems--such as the NYPL system--make it pretty easy to get a library card and then get access to vast resources. Make an appointment with a reference librarian to go over the library's electronic & other resources!