To provide some context for where this question is coming from, I'm looking at the relationship between the Church and the Holocaust, and last night I started The Myth of Hitler's Pope by David Galin, and in the first chapter, he brings up Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, pointing out that while it enjoyed popular success, it's not a serious historical analysis, and has been debunked by numerous professional historians.
What this has me wondering is how can I, a newcomer to this discussion, distinguish between good and bad historical writing/research? One obvious answer is simply read more, and while I intend to, I feel like good history should be about more than just reading everything available. I know relying more heavily on books by University presses as opposed to popular publishers is a decent rule of thumb, but that seems like an easy way to miss out on a lot of great resources. I've recently finished Tim Snyder's Black Earth and Laurence Rees' The Holocaust, and while both seemed good, I'm wondering if there's a way I can know that they're good and reliable. My degree is in philosophy, and there the quality of a text tends to rest on whether or not the arguments made are good, but with history, I don't see how I can factcheck a text, so when it comes to settling historical debate, I feel I'm currently at a point where all I can do is pit different sources against one another and pick one.
Apologies if this question is more meta-history than actual history, but this seemed like a good place to go. If there's another sub that might be helpful, feel free to point me to it, or crosspost yourself and link it back here. Any help will be appreciated, and thanks in advance.
You can always look at university reading lists for history topics that interest you, as lecturers usually encourage reading the most recent, influential or extensive works as an entry-point into historiography on a topic.
You could also see if books have reviews on academic sites like History Today or HistoryNet. Reviewers often compare them to other historical research and make a judgement on the validity of any claims
This is a question that's sometimes asked on AskHistorians, and there's a section of our FAQ that's devoted to questions about how best to judge writing about history. In particular, /u/caffarelli's post about how to judge a book by its cover is a good place to start. This post by /u/flyingdragon8 about what to look for in a book is also helpful.
Finally, the series of posts linked here about how to find and analyse primary and secondary sources might not seem to obviously be about what books are good and bad, at first glance. However, it's this stuff which really makes the difference between good and bad books, so it's worth reading.
One of the most sure-fire ways that nobody has mentioned explicitly but that is, in my experience, absolutely crucial on how to judge both the reliability of books like Goldhagen's as well as better understand where he is coming from and what kind of arguments he makes within the broader scope of research is reviews.
H-net as well as the vast amounts of journals accessible via JStor and at your local library offer an extreme wealth of content in terms of book reviews that either tell you, how a certain book is viewed within the field, what it's weaknesses and strengths are, and where it falls within certain debates as well as let you know, which books could be interesting to you if you are looking for something in a certain field.
For example this comparatively short review of Goldhagen's book lets you know right out of the gate that it has been very controversial; what Goldhagen's central thesis is; and that it relies on the same sources but delivers a radically different interpretation from Christopher Browning's book Ordinary Men – all of which is crucial information when it comes to gauging the book for its usefulness and determining how reliable it is for certain purposes.
If you want to study something deeply, it pays off to go to the local library or get access to Jstor reviews in other ways but H-net and their free reviews usually offer an immensely good starting point.
Another, though longer, way to gauge these books better is to get some basic overview over what are considered standard works. This is important because it helps to discern how reliable authors are by who they cite in their footnotes. I mean there are some indications in that someone better give a good reason in their introduction why they only cite books from before 1975 e.g. (this also being a good tip: In academic books, the introduction usually contains a discussion of previous historiography including reference to why certain books are good and useful and others aren't). The gist here is to approach a topic not by reading the first book you come across but rather approach it by picking an overview work – see for example our book list – and trying to get a feeling for what is the current state of research, what books are considered standard and so on and so forth. Anthologies, which contain published articles, are also really useful for this (e.g. Dan Stone (ed.): Historiography of the Holocaust will introduce you to some of the biggest topics and books of recent years).
This, I believe at least, is not very dissimilar to how one – or at least I – would approach the subject of philosophy in that e.g. in order to engage with Kant, I would try to get a sense for what Metaphysics is before I am able to judge his arguments on it.
The short short short short answer would be checking sources. On what sources do the authors make their claims? Read these sources your self, and see what you can find out about them. Do they seem like first hand accounts? Does it seem like propaganda? When are they written? And do they match their for example litterate conventions of the time? Doing detective work on authors is also a good way to find out about possible incentives for writing certain kinds of books.