I've recently developed an interest for history, and while reading Mary Beard's "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome", a question has been walking around in my head that's always bothered me. How does she find her sources? There's a great deal of thought and research put into her book, and I've always been fascinated how people of a similar interest or occupation find the sources and information they need.
So is there an exact or general process as to how this is done? And either way, is there a way for someone who is not in a good position to find or even afford books and physical material, to do such a process?
I’m still in the process of securing my history degree, but I think I can still shed some light on the process.
It is necessary to have what historians refer to as “historiographies” (historiography means the study of the study of history), which basically consist of the secondary work surrounding a particular topic. Though your approach depends upon the type of historical account you want to write, generally you’ll compile primary sources from a library or foundation, and will then familiarize yourself with the historiography. This will not only provide you with a good idea of the research that has already been done and of the arguments previously put forward, but will also provide you with a comprehensive set of bibliographies which can point you in the direction of additional sources.
The gathered sources are then applied to your work or argument, which can dictate the way in which you integrate them. It must be noted that the types of sources and individual interpretations often reflect the biases of an author, and while many historians attempt to be objective, many others either fail or never try in the first place. Some works are simply modern narratives supported by the past; for example, while Last Hope Island by Lynne Olson is about the multinational forces in Britain during the Second World War, it’s subliminally about Brexit, and the argument for European unity is made by exaggeration and rhetoric placed in-between primary and secondary source references.
So the standard is the location of primary sources, the accumulation of secondary sources, the process of historiographical analysis, the analysis of all supplemental work, the formation of a thesis (if there’s an argument being made) and finally the actual writing.
There's no single "process" and certainly not an exact one. Every historian I know works fairly differently in their day-to-day research work (which involves coming up with new ideas and research questions, finding the sources to answer them, writing it all up, and so on), and the differences between different subfields of history translate into really different methodologies (a medievalist, modernist, a critical historian, and an intellectual historian all work somewhat differently and have a different relationship with their sources — a medievalist might write a whole book about one or two sources, a modernist might have thousands of them, and neither of those is necessarily "better" than the other), though there is a rough process that probably many forms of history can be lumped into: You read the existing literature, which tells you what other people have already found (and where they've found it) and what they've done with it. You identify possible sources through both this literature's footnotes and the finding aids of libraries and archives (something made much easier now that many of them are online). You then go to said libraries or archives (or access them digitally, if they're entirely online, another new novelty), and look at lots of things. You take a lot of notes, or take a lot of photos (and then later take notes), and out of this mass of often unsorted, disconnected, unclear stuff, you eventually begin to piece together a narrative, an argument, a paper, etc.
Basically when you study history, you are learning how to do these. Undergrads get to experience a little bit of the "reading other scholars" part (those assigned readings), the "engaging with arguments" part, and usually a very brief sampling of the "primary sources" bit (e.g., "here is a source that I've picked out for you to read and I can provide you the context of it"). They sometimes get to do a tiny bit of research (the final research paper, maybe the honors thesis, etc.) that might involve a bit of primary source work but is usually secondary source work. In graduate school, each class you take basically makes you write a paper the length of an undergraduate thesis on some topic in history. The general exams make you buff up on the secondary literature of specifics subfields of history (you read 300 books or so in a semester and then answer questions on them). Finally you commit to a PhD topic which involves you going to archives and doing all of the primary source work, and finally writing the equivalent of a book. And then as a post-doc or professor you turn that thesis into a real book that human beings can read (instead of just a dissertation committee).
If you look at only the final product of this, it looks overwhelming and impossible to imagine how one gets there, but you do it through stages, and it gets easier as a result. Writing 3 page history papers is hard as a freshman just starting out, but after you've been writing papers for 20 years it's hard to write even a response on Reddit that is shorter than that. :-)