It's always a challenge. Historians workshop together and sift through journals and online research databases to get an idea of what the historiography of a certain field looks like. The first thing a historian needs to do when approaching a new topic is to get an idea of the currently existing written scholarship. Who are the big names? What have they asserted or argued that shapes our narrative on the topic? Familiarising one's self with this is absolutely key to getting new ideas.

Next you have to ask yourself what you find missing in the field. There's always something. It's a difficult question at first, and historians can grapple with this for several months. What aspect of this topic or event has not had enough light shined on it? Why does it matter (a very important question if you're seeking research funding)? What will answering your new question add to the table of this topic's scholarship?

The next part involves identifying how you can answer this question logistically. This means looking for documents that help shine light on it. It can be newspaper articles, journals, government documents, interviews with key people (especially for oral histories) and so on. This is also difficult, and it usually takes a while to compile a good blend of sources to read and investigate. This will take a lot of time, depending on how much work you're investing into the project and the scope and depth of the research topic. If it's a scholarly article, it can take a few months. If it's a book, it can take years to collect and interpret this data.

Afterward it's proofreading, looking for commentary from friends and colleagues and seeking to publish. It's not easy and it gets pretty stressful at times, but the end result is incredibly rewarding.

This does not mean that there can’t be more research to do, more to uncover, different perspectives to examine, varying elements that have yet to be considered and applied to other far reaching impacts of a given event or development. That’s what’s great about history, going back far enough, no one alive today was actually there so piecing it all together and presenting thoughtful, astute analysis and a fresh robust interpretation is there for anyone with the interest and creativity to apply a scholarly effort —- the possibilities really are limitless. We’re talking about the evolution and formation of Society. What could be more multi faceted than this? Stick with it!

It's a question that I think most historians will have wrestled with, but it's also where I think all potential historians could learn a little something from contemporary history - especially those researching the most contemporary subjects, where you run right past AH's 20 year rule!

As a contemporary historian, there's a very good chance that a lot of people will know intimately the details of what you're studying - and you might even be interviewing them. Some events will have been documented so well, with hundreds upon hundreds of newspaper articles containing first-hand accounts and statistics and so on, that you could write a 'history' of them just by looking up old copies of The Times on microfiche. You have to accept that you can't look at everything, and that there isn't much to be gained from just outlining a chronology or what have you. That's something most historians learn about their discipline, but certainly I remember researching an earlier period for my undergraduate dissertation and finding that I could basically read every available primary source! Stitching together a chronology was a challenge in that case, but eventually that work does feel like it disappears and you end up in the same position as most contemporary historians - writing about a history that is to a considerable extent known, at least in its chronology.

So what does a contemporary historian do, if all the election statistics are on Wikipedia and you can buy ten autobiographies from the period in every bookshop? The first is to think about the absences that remain - the people and subjects that still managed to avoid attention, even with all that documentation. That might be about gender, sexuality or race, but it could also be about geography. For us that tends to lead to oral and material history, but earlier historians have other methods and there's still a lot of these histories to be written. Secondly and relatedly, it's about what questions you try to ask. Are you just interested in who won the election and why, or in the experience of being an activist and campaigning, the practices that involved, the emotions provoked? Similarly, what approaches and theories might you apply to that history that haven't been applied before? Most major periods of activism and protest have been very adequately covered before by historians, but it's relatively recently that historians have started to look at those subjects in terms of space and how it's used.

I think there are some other routes to go down - reducing the scale, as in microhistory or life narrative, which again allows you to explore different types of history. I'm not trying to evangelize for contemporary history here, but just to say that this is a question which contemporary historians will always have to wrestle with - we might not just have historians who've covered our subjects before, but people who can remember what happened and tell us we were wrong! Thinking about how you write history when so much is in living memory, or at least occurred in the age of print and mass literacy, can help with then thinking about what writing history looks like when the book market is saturated with works on your period and region.

most but not all. if you look into history there is alot that is forgotton or on the verge of getting lost. I would start with your hometown, look into its history. if you run across the phrases ,"no one knows for certain how" or " the origin has been lost" or my personal favorite "its said to come from an old indian word..." start there. you may be amazed at what hiddwn history is in your own backyard. It may not be focused on a time that is particularly attractive to you, but believe me, when you start cracking open what our great grandparents didnt like to talk about, and the floodgates are open, you may be suprised at what you discover and the adventures it leads you to.