Was told to post this here. Unbiased history sources.

I apologise for responding to what seems at first glance to be a very straightforward question with what will probably appear to be a short lecture. But it's necessary.

One of the most valuable things about AH is the way in which the sub brings together people who have backgrounds in a vast array of different disciplines. This is fantastic; it means we can all learn from one another. And one thing that I, and I suspect others around here who've been trained as historians, learn is that the way we are encouraged to view the past is pretty different from the way that others with, say, a scientific, or maths, or engineering background think. We get a large number of posts here that are rooted on the premise that the people who respond here can offer up "the truth", or strip the bias out of history, or summarise the "consensus view" on some topic or another. And for the most part, that's simply not how history works.

The way that historians are trained to think about these things is to recognise that every historical source is "biased", and that every historian analysing and interpreting these sources is biased as well. That's simply inevitable when one thinks about it. Every person who's ever lived is, in a sense, the sum total of every experience they've ever had, and every belief, attitude and prejudice that they've picked up, as well as of the views common in every community they've lived in, and the laws (religious and secular) that they've either broken or obeyed – and so on. And, while only a rather small proportion of historians set out with the intention of writing polemic, and while most strive to view their sources and the past as objectively as they can, every one of them would admit, I think, that their own background, views and beliefs – not to mention two other incredibly significant factors, the fundamental limitations of the sources and what seems to be significant, important and, yes, academically fashionable in the time and place that they are writing – play a big part in determining what they write and how they write about it.

Thus, while it's certainly true that some of the first academic historians, writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, genuinely hoped that it would be possible to study every possible source, distil the information that these sources collectively contained, and write a history so detailed and so objective that it would be definitive, and never need to be rewritten... things just didn't turn out that way.

New sources turned up, of course, but – far more importantly – the way we think about history changed as well, and things had had not seemed to be all that important gradually became of critical interest to new generations of scholars. To take only one obvious example, the historians of the Victorian era were, with very few exceptions, interested in studying history for what it could tell us about leadership and government, and the "great men" who, it was assumed, shaped history, and could be held up as examples to the future. Today we're far more interested in thinking about what we call "history from below": the study not of the people who were out there doing "important things" so much as the history of the people (women, children, the poor, members of various ethnic or religious minorities, indigenous peoples and so on and on) who spent most of their lives having things done to them. Read an old history written by an old historian and you instantly encounter a bias they were for the most part blissfully unaware of, the bias that prejudiced them in favour of seeing only the deeds and the thoughts of elites as of much interest and value.

I introduced another key problem in that last sentence, and that's another thing that many people who haven't had too much contact with academic history don't realise. Probably the single most important reason why it's just not possible to wrote objective, unbiased history is that only a very small proportion of what historians do is to focus on the "what", "when", "where" and even "how" of history. For the most part (though this is certainly less true the further back into history one goes, the fewer the sources that survive, and the less we really know about what happened), there is relatively little controversy – and a good deal of consensus – about the basic underpinnings, the framework within which history is written. There is a school of history, known as postmodernism, that believes it's important to call into question even this, but for the most part historians don't spend time debating whether or not the Battle of Hastings took place on 14 October 1066. They're happy to accept it did.

What historians do spend a vast amount of time thinking about and arguing about, and failing to reach consensus on, are the "whys" of history, which at root means arguing about what people thought and what motivated their actions. Why did people act the way they did, when they did, and where they did? That's a vastly more important, but far tougher, question to answer, because only a very few of the people we are interested in ever discussed this sort of thing in detail with anyone, much less wrote a detailed analysis of what they'd thought – and even the few who did explain themselves probably knew only part of the story, or had actions of their own that they wanted to draw attention to, or conceal, or were motivated by less than entirely objective and rational and carefully thought-through reasoning. And even those decisions were, in turn, impacted by a never-ending set of external factors, from the weather down to the very personal – someone oversleeping, or going into battle suffering from a flare-up of haemorrhoids. As you can probably appreciate, all this gives historians plenty to debate and disagree about.

And you know what? All this disagreement, all this lack of consensus, all these lashings of bias, aren't really a problem. In fact, they're the lifeblood of the discipline.

Here in the UK, where I teach, student historians at school are taught how to spot "bias", but they are also encouraged to skate gingerly around it. It's introduced as something to be avoided and, potentially, as something whose very presence invalidates a source. So I spend a lot of time trying to persuade students who want to study history at university that this is just not true – that what they see as "bias" can actually be seen as an absolutely invaluable window into the ideas, prejudices and attitudes that, as I mentioned earlier, are in fact the hardest thing for an academic historian to root out and get to grips with.

The more "biased" a source, in this sense, the better. I'd add that, more often than you might expect, it's the polemics of the history profession that have the greatest and most lasting impact, too. Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was a polemic of a sort, and so was E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. Those two works have had as much lasting influence on our profession as any others.

Finally, it's well worth stressing one other fundamental good that comes from producing "biased" history. It makes the readers of that history think, or at least it should do. More than that – done well, it makes them think critically, and for themselves. Nothing could be worse, from this perspective, than the idea that it should be possible to sit down and consume "true history" that's certified to be objective and free from bias. That would tend to actually stop readers bothering to think for themselves. But it takes a student of the humanities, in my experience, to see things in this way.

Lecture over. I've addressed the problem of "historical fact" in an earlier post, here, as well, if you want to know more. But, to go some way to actually answering your question, I would say that (assuming you're now open to the idea of reading some not-fully-objective academic history) you can check out a couple of fairly straightforward and obvious things in choosing what to read.

Does the author have an academic affiliation? If they do, that ought to be a sign that they have some proper training and some concern with academic standards – and that, most likely, they are part of some historical discussion with other historians who see things from different perspectives, and will be more than happy to mention any problems they have with the work to the author... Does the book contain footnotes or end-notes? They're there to keep the author honest, by making it possible for others to check the sources of information they claim say certain things – and to think about whether the interpretations than an author may have placed on a passage are justifiable. And what do reviewers of the work you're interested in say about it? You can also use academic citation indexes to find out how many times a work has been cited by other authors – that's usually a good rough guide to how original it is, and how important the things that it says actually are.