The question is basically in the title, but here is some additional context/reason I’m asking:
When I was in high school we used to write essays and do short answer questions (there was a specific name for these but I forget what it was) for U. S. History. An example question would be of the form “To what extent did...”
So I’m curious what other types of questions do historians ask themselves and answer when doing their research?
First, if you were given some specific sources to use as evidence, then these were DBQ (Data Based Questions).
To answer your primary question, in my particular research, I started with the question, “Why do American History textbooks have extensive coverage of the Holocaust?” I don’t mean textbooks used in the United States, I mean textbooks covering US history. I would expect World or European History textbooks to cover the subject, but not US. Thus my question came about in trying to understand what seemed to be, to me, an oddity.
Further, that question led me to, after have read significantly on the subject of how Americans have understood and memorialized the Holocaust, a number of other queries. For instance, “If Americans didn’t really engage with the Holocaust as a concept for categorizing and understanding the murder of Europe’s Jews, how did they categorize and understand that event?” Also, “What language did Americans employ to discuss the murder of the Jews?” Differently, “What lessons, and solutions, have Americans taken from the murder of the Jews?”