I recently did a Monday Methods post on “how to read an academic book” that you might find useful. It covers secondary rather than primary sources—the latter is harder to come up with a single systematic method for (probably impossible, in fact). So! Without further ado:

Taking a quick scan of my bookshelf, I estimate the average academic history book is approximately 2,464 pages long, about half of which is 8-point typeface footnotes. This raises a critical question. We can make an incredible resource like the AskHistorians booklist, but how are actual human beings supposed to make use of it?

Fortunately, there is a SUPER TOP SECRET strategy to bring the realm of the immortals to our level. For this week's Monday Methods, I'm reviving one of my all-time most-linked posts:

##How to Read an Academic Book:

Sometimes, you're so deep into into a term paper or a topic of research that you just have to sit down, grind it out, and read the darn book. Sometimes, you're hunting through the index of different books to find information on one narrow topic. Very, very occasionally, an author's prose is good enough and the subject interesting enough that you want to read the whole book.

This is not for those times.

When you have a massive pile of history reading to get through, especially when you need to understand the major arguments in scholarship on a specific topic quickly, this is the accepted strategy.

0. What do you need to know?

Author, position in historiography (why this book needs to exist), main argument (thesis), major body of sources, methodology, brief outline of how argument is developed, brief notes on your assessment of the work (does it make sense, did the author mishandle the sources, where did it go too far, where didn't it go far enough, etc)

1. Read book reviews.

Try searching Google for [author last name] [title] review. Amazon and Goodreads are not your destination. You want reviews from peer-reviewed academic journals, which will in most cases be accessible through a database like JSTOR, ProQuest, or Cambridge. There are some fantastic free sources of reviews, too: H-net.org and the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (for relevant topics) can be really helpful. You might also turn up something good and in-depth from a scholar's blog!

You can also search databases internally, but Google (regular Google) is pretty darn good at universal search in this case.

If you don't have access to academic databases, you might get lucky and get the beginning of the review visible for free via preview on (at least, to my knowledge) Cambridge, Project Muse, and JSTOR.

Not all academic book reviews are good ones, but a good one should give you an idea of the book's thesis, some key arguments within it or points of evidence, maybe a general outline (this is rarer than I'd like), perhaps some remarks on where the book fits in to the overall pattern of scholarship, and maybe an assessment of its strengths and weaknesses as a piece of history. Shockingly, these are exactly the things that you will want to take away from the book.

I like to take notes on the reviews I read.

2. Read the introduction. Take notes.

If you're lucky, the author will use the introduction to tell you the book's argument, how they will develop it (outline of the book), their methodology or analytical framework (deep reading? applied feminist theory?), and discuss their main body of sources. For anthologies, that is, collections of essays by different authors, a good editor will include a brief summary of each essay. That happens less often than it should. Typically (though not always), you will get some good insight into the overall theme of the anthology and that topic's significance to the historical narrative of the time period.

3. Read the conclusion

The conclusion should reiterate the introduction or take the story in a new direction. Especially if the introduction is weak, you might get some good information or quotations that you can use in a literature review paper or something from the conclusion.

4. Write down the table of contents

To help you get a quick impression of the book's argument in 3 months when you're coming back to these notes, you're going to make a quick outline of the central point of each chapter. (If the introduction did the work for you, awesome.) That will let you see, at a glance, the roughest path of the argument's development.

5. Read the first couple and last couple pages of each chapter.

Especially if the book proceeds as a "collection of chapters" rather than a united narrative, you will get a mini-intro and mini-conclusion on the topic in those pages. (Sometimes you'll have to read past an opening anecdote, but then, those are often interesting and worth the read. Don't forget--you like history; that's why you're doing this.)

6. Optional: actually read one of the chapters through

This can be if one catches your eye, seems like it could be pretty helpful, or to get an idea for how the author handles the specific body of sources they use.

7. Bonus! If you have a stack of books on the same topic, read the most recent one first.

If you are very lucky, one of the more recent authors will provide you with a historiography or literature review: that is, a brief summary of game-changing books or articles on the same or a similar topic. If you get really, really lucky, you will get enough of an idea from later books that you can more or less skip or skim even more briefly the earlier ones.

8. Perform some kind of synthesis.

You might try writing a one-page "review" hitting up the key points from #0; you might try explaining the book out loud to your pet or a (bribed) friend. Just do something to bring the scattered bits together in your mind, even if briefly.

Super extra special advice for graduate students

If your class has been assigned a whopload of reading, which it has, strategize with each other over who skips which reading. Make sure that at least two people have covered each text, so there can be conversation. Don't. Ever. All. Abandon. The. Same. Book. It will go...poorly.

Hey there! There's actually many ways to answer this question since historians of different periods examine sources in different ways. For instance, a historian like Bart Ehrman examining documents from second century Palastine will have to use different techniques from myself who's work focuses mostly on 17th and 18th century America. For the purposes of your question, I'll talk a little bit about my research for my master's thesis, which was published on ProQuest this past summer entitled The Friends They Loathed: The Persecution of Maryland Quakers During the Revolutionary War. (You can also check out my interview on the /r/AskHistorians Podcast where I was featured in July). In order to understand how I interpreted my sources, I'll share some background on my thesis first.

My thesis primarily argued a few key points. Among them was that when examining religious history of Quakers during the Revolution in America, historians across the board tend to focus almost exclusively on Pennsylvania and ignore all other states. This creates a problem for studying their history since Pennsylvania was a unique situation for Quakers, since it was set up as a Quaker haven, they had huge numbers, and they had a more egalatrain government then almost everywhere else. So this led me on the road to my thesis to examine their experiences elsewhere (also, full disclaimer, I am not a Quaker nor a Christian. I just found that studying them during this period as being fascinating).

Interrogating Evidence

So my thesis examines their persecution, which Quakers everywhere in America experienced hardship since they a) refused to support the Patriot cause and swear an oath of allegiance, instead they remained neutral, b) refused to serve in the Army or militias as required by law since they were pacifists, and c) refused to pay war taxes or fines. I needed to examine a wide variety of sources in order to get a clear picture of what was happening in Maryland, the state I choose to study. My first sources proved to be the most useful. I found, through the help of an awesome historian at the Maryland State Archives, a series of documents that were kept by Quakers during this period. They were meeting minutes from 1778 - 1783 that kept an accounting of the persecution they faced for their hardship. In it, I had financial records of the hardship inflicted upon them and also the steps they took to fight it (mainly petitioning the state government to recognize and respect their neutrality).

These documents were super helpful, but I couldn't simply take them at face value. Like any records, especially those created by churches, there could be errors or lies within them. So I started on a path of 'interrogating' my evidence. How did I do this? But doing my best to cross-examine what the Quakers reported about their own issues with seeing what their enemies or neighbors said. For instance, Quakers started saying that in 1778, enforcement of militia fines and musters were heating up against them. So I started looking through other records to see what I could find to either support or undermine the claim. What I did find was that in 1778, the patriot leader for Baltimore County, William Lux, wrote to Gov. Thomas Johnson, Dated Mar. 3 1778. In it, Lux hate the Quakers in Baltimore County for failing to take the oath of enlistment and essentially said he was going to ramp up efforts to force them to comply. This piece of evidence helped cooperate what the Quakers reported since their own enemies were saying, in private correspondence, that they wanted to make things more difficult to them. There were other examples of how I replicated this, but you get the idea.

Notes and Reading

Part of what you have to do in order to fully understand the sources you are dealing with is read everything you can on your subject. In order to understand the context for the Quaker meeting notes I found, I needed to not only understand everything about 18th century American Quakers, but also understand American Religious history as a whole. I read, in whole or just a few chapters, over 100 books in the two years it took for me to write my thesis (not to mention hundreds of articles I read or scanned). From this, you take so many notes. You need a good filing system too (I used Apple's FileMaker Pro) which saved me. The same needs to be done with all your primary sources as well. Since almost all my sources were hand written, I was fortunate to have them all on scanned PDF slides, and then transcribed them myself. Transcribing them also helped etch them into my memory, which helped when digging through everything later on.

When taking notes in books, I have my own system. I use color coded highlighters and stickies in order to annotate everything I need. In a 250 page book, I'll probably have 15 - 20 highlights that fall into one of four categories, (supporting religious history, supporting Quaker history, important misc. , extra important for thesis) and then take notes and cite the highlights when needed. It also depends on how good your memory is at remembering things you read. My memory is really good with remembering important parts of books, so I was able to remember what book I read something in, and then just flipped to the color-coded highlight that I knew I needed.

And you asked how long it takes to read a book: it honestly depends. On super important books, like Jon Butler's Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, I took my time. Probably about 10 - 12 hours if I had to guess. With other books that I don't necessarily need to remember or read everything, I can blow through it in an hour or two. There's a grad school trick to doing this. First, read peer-reviews of the book first. You'll likely get the idea of the content and also some important page numbers that the reviewer liked. Next, read the entire introduction and take notes. Next, read the first paragraph to every chapter and maybe the first line to every paragraph. Academic books are designed so that lead off topic sentences tell you if you should read the entire paragraph or not. I did this a lot and it truly helped.

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Anyways, that's my take. Let me know if this is clear and if you have any follow-ups!

In addition to /u/sunagainstgold's excellent comment, I'd point to /u/caffarelli's old post on "How to Judge a Book Without Even Reading It", although the thread as a whole will likely be of interest.

For me, two things specifically help for reading historical documents: having a set goal in mind when reading the text, and taking notes/highlighting important text.

By having a set goal, you can pinpoint exactly what you want to get out of the text. Are you reading it for research purposes? If so, what're you specifically looking for in the text? If you can keep in mind what you're looking for in historical texts, it makes digging through them much easier, especially if it's a larger document that you only need specific information from. Now this doesn't work when you're just reading historical documents for the fun of it, which goes into my second point.

Taking notes and highlighting important text in the document is critical for retaining the information, both for when you're doing research and for when you're just generically reading historical documents. Having a notebook, even if it's just for jotting down quick one-line things, is extremely helpful to make sure that you're retaining some amount of information. Highlighting lines of text that have important bits of information also helps, because if you need to go back to the document later, you can look at the highlighted section to jog your memory.

As for other tips, take your time. Some historical documents can be an absolute pain to slog through, so break them up into more manageable chunks that you can work through instead of tackling it as one big huge pile of text. If you have a question about something you read, look it up, or ask on here, or even just take note of it so that you can find it later when you're going back to your notes.

A lot of this was picked up over time as well. The more you read, the better you'll get at it, especially if you focus in a specific area or topic. The first time my British history professor had us read through old British legal documents, I could barely comprehend them, but by the end of the semester, the whole class had picked up on how to read them and get the information we needed from them.