Unless you’re trying to publish research I wouldn’t worry about it. The best way to get good at this method is to read several works on the same subject, analyze whether there is bias, check for footnotes or endnotes, and just have fun with reading.

Some authors you can check their background. If they’ve only ever written one work and the rest is fiction novels, they are not an authority on anything but still could have found some interesting sources. Some are journalists who, again, are not a historical expert but are experts at digging into source material.

Some historians you’ll find will show favoritism on a subject. If they only present good things about a person or a country it’s not an exhaustive research.

There are a lot of places to find reading and a lot of reading is required to be considered an expert. But this will also include having to write research a lot on a specific subject. So that’s why I say if you aren’t going to publish anything just have fun with reading.

Hope that helps some.

-History grad student

PhD candidate here. Total historical rigour is a mirage, it is unattainable. There will always be someone who knows more than you about a specific event, person or period. Especially if you consider in how many languages articles and books are being published every day. It gives academic historians huge amounts of anxiety that we might have missed that one "smoking gun" file in the archive, simply because we did not have enough time to open that one box. Or that we have committed a huge blunder by not reading that one book which was a the bottom of the stack on our table. So while we like to pretend that, as academics, we follow the rigorous historical method, the fact of the matter is that we can simply read more than "laypeople" because we are - hopefully - being paid to do it.

Personally, I think that is precisely not a historian's job to "know everything" about a certain topic, since that is a physically and intellectually impossible task. A historian's job is rather to synthesise a given research topic in an insightful and accurate manner. Additionally, historians should always be very critical of the veracity of their sources and be willing to constantly re-evaluate their previous assessments. These are the basic tenets of our discipline. If you subscribe to them, and if they are reflected in your work, you will be respected by the people who truly care about the topic – academics and laypeople alike. Still, there will be a lot of academics who will act snobbish towards you because of your missing credentials. But these particular academics act snobbish towards everyone – first and foremost other academics – so you should politely ignore them.

And keep in mind that many, many PhD holders write incredibly boring and negligible publications that not even their colleagues care about. So, if you enjoy writing, go out there and start working on a book right now! If you have the possibility to access physical archives, great. If not, think about exploring digital collections. There are so many untapped digitised resources it is almost mind-boggling. Spend the time you have available on researching the topics that fascinate you and share your insights. And don't be afraid of credentials!

Edit: I had a crazy idea last night in response to u/SplakyD's comment below: what if the users of r/AskHistorians started a community-owned, crowdfunded OpenAccess publisher for all historians? All historians – with or without academic credentials. We could collectively decide using upvotes/awards which book proposals get funded and published, instead of relying on the opaque peer review process, in which Reviewer #2 decides to throw everything out on a whim. There could also be a journal based on the same principle. And funding for podcasts, videos, etc. What do people think? Is this just a crazy idea? If anyone thinks that this is worth thinking and talking about, let's have a chat in the lounge of r/OpenHistoryPress (new subreddit I just made), so we don't spam this thread.

Yes. History is a process, like science. You can learn and apply the process regardless of your level of training, so long as you understand its components. The formula isn't much different than the scientific method, but it uses research instead of experimentation (although sometimes experimentation can make up an element of the research). The process usually looks like:

• Ask a question. The question doesn't need to be deep or complex, in fact some very simple questions can lead to a total adjustment of the earlier historiography. The question usually starts with "why" but that isn't a hard and fast rule. Be careful of questions that limit your framing. Something like "why did Kubrick fake the moon landing" contains some assumptions that need to be addressed first, and likewise "how did Kubrick fake the moon landing" might lead to a highly technical and unsatisfying answer (if you make it past the obvious hurdle to this question). A better question in this absurd instance might be "why do some people believe that Stanley Kubrick helped fake the moon landing?"

• read "the literature." Chances are you'll be asking a question other historians have already answered or attempted to answer. So, read those. Read all of them. You'll notice as you do that many of these historians approach the topic from different perspectives, use different evidence, and ask different secondary questions. A historian of filmmaking might answer our hypothetical Kubrick question with a different set of background knowledge and interests than a history of conspiracy theories and theorists. By reading both of them, you benefit from the conversation these two approaches have, and can begin to find the shared documentary evidence they draw from. This helps to shape your own question, and gives you ideas of how to methodologically approach the topic. But you will doubtless also have stacks of secondary works in related literature, so this question might involve reading more general histories of the US space program, the US film industry, even filmmaking theory, general political histories of the 1960s, histories of the Cold War, histories of political scandals in the US, the Civil Rights Movement, etc. Having a higher baseline knowledge of all of this stuff will help us parse the works that deal more directly with our question, and help us evaluate the quality and methodological make up of the other sources.

• go to the sources. Primary sources are a historian's bread and butter, but primary sources don't have primacy, that is, they should be subject to the same scrutiny and skepticism as any secondary source. They're closer to the events they depict, and therefore subject to biases, perspectives, and politics that might be invisible without a solid grounding in the period. Chances are, you'll be looking at primary sources that your secondary works have mentioned (a good way to find these is just to read the citations of the secondary works closest to your topic), but your specific question will help frame the kind of evidence you're looking for, and give you a way to interpret things that will allow these sources to be used in a unique manner. At the same time, having now read the related literature and the sources they're based on, you can get a better understanding of how previous historians used these sources, and whether or not they used them well.

• hypothesis. Now that you've done some of the leg work, familiarized yourself with the historical grounds, as it were, you're ready to advance your theory. Why did people believe that Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing? Maybe it's because the US was desperate for a "win" in the Cold War and manufactured a triumphant achievement they could use to reinvigorate nationalistic support for the US during the worst phases of the Vietnam War (this is all fake, btw, please don't take this seriously). Now, armed with a hypothesis, you can go back to more research

• new round of questions! Did the US space program change depending on the politics in the country? Was there a connection between NASA and the military? Was there an overt relationship between Cold War national goals and the space program? Did NASA respond to the Civil Rights Movement? Was filmmaking technology sophisticated enough to fake the footage? Is there any evidence related to Stanley Kubrick connecting him to NASA or the US government? What does Auteur Theory have to do with any of this? In essence, these last three steps will likely repeat, again and again, on a project like a thesis or PhD dissertation. Your question leads to research, your research refines your methodology, your methodology frames your hypothesis, and your hypothesis leads to more questions, your followup questions lead to more research. You repeat this until you have a hypothesis backed by enough evidence you can confidently advance it with support, and - this is what separates a proper historian from a pop historian - in conversation with the previous historiography. If you pick up a book written by a historian, chances are you'll find an introduction that essentially describes the process above, and will do a rundown of the existing theories and major works in the topic, and the differences between those approaches and the new one advanced by the writer. It's not just a fun cool story, it's a part of an ongoing conversation between historians, based on the study of a single unifying topic, from various perspectives.

• some more about "methodology." I've used the word a lot, but to help define it here, what I mean is the purposeful limitation of the scope and the purposeful utilization of theoretical tools to answer historical questions. For instance, a larger question, something like "Why did France emerge in the mid 17th century as a powerful centralized state" could involve a deep focus on just one or two decades in France's history, the study of a single person within the history, or a long-term study of huge trends over decades and centuries. Each will self-select different evidence and advance different hypotheses as a natural result of the limitations of each approach. In addition, one might focus on kings and queens and popes ("big man" or "top down" history), or approach it by studying peasant movements, religious trends, and the bourgeoisie ("bottom up" history). Each of those also helps self-select certain types of evidence and demands particularized engagement to make sense: studying a single peasant is probably not a great way to answer a question about why France emerged as a powerful state, but it might help to answer a question about religious theory and the beliefs of common people, or about wild heresies with unclear origins (this is a reference to a classic work of history called The Cheese and the Worms and I recommend it highly). To put things another way, the questions you ask lead to certain methodologies, theories, and evidence-selection as a sort of best practices, but that methodology biases your results inherently.

• let's talk about big scary bias. As said above, your question will lead to making a choice about your framework, your methodology, and will invoke particular theories that will be helpful in answering your question. It will lead to a selection of your evidence, and possibly bring in evidence from fields outside history. All of this is a bias. You're asking a limiting question and using tools that select evidence that best helps answer the question. Knowing your bias and working with its strengths while understanding the limitations of the bias is a very important part of historical work. It's another thing that separates historians from pop-history producers. The latter can sometimes lean too heavily on what they consider "facts" as if the entire field of history isn't about interpreting those facts using specific tools to answer specific questions. Facts are great and helpful, but it takes interpretation before they can say anything. And it must be said that a great deal of what pop-history people advance as fact is, quite often, a theoretical interpretation of certain facts. Presenting an interpretation as a hardbound "fact" is problematic not only in that it skews the audience's perception of events, but limits the understanding of the mechanical elements of history: namely, that history is at its core interpretation of evidence. Even curation of evidence is interpretation. In other words, if I merely present a parade of facts that are all agreed to be true to the best of our knowledge, even the fact that I have removed them from context and put them in a particular order for a particular presentation is an interpretation, and therefore has a bias and methodology that should be scrutinized.

To wrap all this up, history is a process. It's a long and hard one, but despite that it's relatively simple. There are books about historiography and about how to conduct research, and personally I think that if you want to take something you're passionate about and really get to a formidable understanding of it, you must understand and work with the historical process, or historiography. I happen to think it's interesting in its own right, and I'm a big nerd about it, which is helpful since I am another flair here that doesn't have a PhD. You might be able to audit a local college's historiography course, or find a tutor willing to help you sort through some of the heavier stuff - theories and their history and development is, uh, let's call it fun - and there are also books, like I mentioned above, if nothing like that is feasible for you. Having an understanding of this stuff will change the way you approach and consume history, and will paradoxically make you more confident in presenting certain historical things and less confident in asserting others. But that's just the way.

Taking a different tack from other people, to me it's not about historical "rigor" which as others points out is highly variable.

The true purpose of grad school and the PhD, is training you to write in a stylistic language of academia.

Like food for thought, most people who publish in history journals have a PhD or at least an MA (although they may not necessarily have jobs as historians) You almost never see people with a BA although it happens. In the field of the history of christianity or theology, I tend to see more people who don't have a grad degree but they are, however, extremely versed in the academic literature and the right style of writing to be published.

I also emphasize style because this is a known weak point in academia, that in certainly less rigorously peer-reviewed corners of humanities journals, the right style will get you published even if the substance behind that style was fabricated.

However, there is a high overlap between knowledge and style. You have to have quite a bit of specialist and academic historical knowledge to write in an appropriate journal style, and even those aforementioned fabrications, the people making that point knew exactly where the weak points in the knowledge would be. They were academics fooling other academics, not randos fooling academics.

So, if you want to get the historical rigor/style you seek, read more journal articles (which are the tip of the spear of new history), break apart those journal articles to observe methodology (a dirty secret of grad school is half the time they don't teach you methodology, you're just forced under the gun to have some), and think about what history subject you can devote a specialty to in order to produce your own academic articles.

tl;dr - the best way to be an academic historian, is to write like an academic historian, and knowing what that entails

EDIT: Fun fact, I am probably a good template for you to follow. My undergrad and professional career was in journalism. I got an MA in Classics having never taken a classics course before and am now doing a PhD in religious studies having no formal training in religious studies.

I acquired my historiographical and critical theory knowledge however I could, via comic books, podcasts, academic books, youtube videos, but most importantly, engagement here and elsewhere with academics until I could hold my own.

It seems to have worked out for me. Ultimately, this is why I say, what you're really looking for is the ability to communicate in the style of the academic community. The best way to do it is by doing it bit by bit. It just so happens universities tend to be a good place to find that community, but it's not the only place.

Hope this comment can stay, but I just wanted to express my thanks to the contributors of this thread. Ever since graduating with my undergraduate degree in history, I have missed studying history in an academic context like crazy, but have been prohibited from going back to school for all sorts of reasons. So, I’ve felt like I was missing out to a huge extent and struggled with feeling like I was on the outside. So, these comments are incredibly encouraging to me to keep reading, keep being curious, and keep asking questions.

That depends on what you consider meaningful. The things that historians engage with that are hard for a lay person to approach are journal articles and primary source documents (i.e. records, archives, etc). The former, unless they are open access, are too expensive for most individuals but there's probably a college/university library nearby that either has print or digital copies and (depending on institutional policy) are often all to happy to help you access their collections.

The latter is unfortunately basically out of reach to everyone except professional historians and archivists, as there are vast collections of materials that are still not digitized (microfiche or even paper) that you sometimes need to spend hours going through lists of records or indices to find the call number of the thing you're actually looking for. This takes an almost absurd amount of time, and then reading the document itself can pose considerable challenges (script, writing style, language, etc). Even many academics try to avoid research projects that will entail doing this kind of work.

***

I guess the question you really should be asking yourself is what your goals in relation to learning about history as an educated layperson actually are, both in terms of outcome ("I want to know more about the iconography of Pompeiian frescoes as it relates to the ancient Roman religion ca. 1st c. CE") and process ("I want to spend 4 to 8 hours per week on this"). In general it's good to develop a certain sense of perspective with these things - yes, the religious iconography of Pompeiian frescoes is probably super interesting if you get very deeply into the subject, but that's because pretty much everything is super interesting if you get deeply enough into it. Even if you lived forever you adequately learn everything about everything because, while you're learning about frescoes in Pompeii, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of graffiti artists in most big cities doing the same thing only with an even more complicated interplay of artistic trends and cultural currents (there are hundreds of books just about Banksy, he's just one guy and still alive).

If you find that "learning new stuff through reading" is more or less what drives you, rather than the desire to know, in detail, about specific topics, you could just subscribe to mailing lists from the big academic publishers (Cambridge, Oxford, Routledge, Princeton, etc) for new releases on topics you're interested in, or just browse their sites.

As a last note, when it comes to history writing, please follow these basic principles:

- Do not approach your evidence with a prejudiced meaning in mind, for it will easily create a misreading, leading to straw man fallacies.

- Let your hypotheses be guided by the evidence, and do not let your evidence be chosen by your hypothesis. That means, in particular, that it is bad history if you disregard or refuse to discuss evidence that contradicts your hypothesis.

- Be always a critical reader of your sources, whether they be primary or secondary: Who wrote it, under which circumstances and when was it written, and most importantly, who was the intended audience? To draw conclusions with these three factors unregarded is ahistorical; and it is wise to use care when even one of these cannot be fully ascertained.

And for guidance in writing itself, there is this eternal piece, the Ten Commandments of Writing by the great Hugh Trevor-Roper:

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF WRITING
1 Thou shalt know thine own argument and cleave fast to it, and shall not digress nor deviate from it without the knowledge and consent of the reader, whom at all times thou shalt lead at a pace which he can follow and by a route which is clear to him as he goeth.
2. Thou shalt respect the autonomy of the paragraph, as commended by the authority and example of the historian Edward Gibbon; for it is the essential unit in the chain of argument. Therefore thou shalt keep it pure and self-contained, each paragraph having  within it a single central point to which all other observations in it shall be exactly subordinated by the proper use of the particles and inflexions given to us for this purpose.
3. Thou shalt aim always at clarity of exposition, to which all other literary aims shall be subordinated, remembering the rule “clarté prime, longeur secondaire.”* To this end thou shalt strive that no sentence be syntactically capable of any unintended meaning. To this end also thou shalt not fear to repeat thyself, if clarity require it, nor to state facts which thou thinkest as well known to others as to thyself; for it is better to remind the learned than to leave the unlearned in perplexity.
4. Thou shalt keep the structure of thy sentences clear, preferring short sentences to long and simple structures to complex, lest the reader lose his way in a labyrinth of subordinate clauses; and in particular, thou shalt not enclose one relative clause in another,  for this both betrays crudity of expression and is a fertile source of ambiguity.
5. Thou shalt preserve the unities of time and place,** placing thyself, in imagination, in one time and one place, and distinguishing all others to which thou mayest refer by a proper use of tenses and other forms of speech devised for this purpose; for unless we exploit the distinction between past and pluperfect tenses, and between imperfect and future conditional, we cannot attain perfect limpidity of style and argument.
6. Thou shalt not despise the subjunctive mood, a useful, subtle and graceful mood, blessed by Erasmus and venerated by George Moore, though cursed and anathematized by the Holy Inquisition, politicians and some of the media, and others who prefer to diminish language.***
7. Thou shalt always proceed in an orderly fashion, according to the rules of right reason: as, from the general to the particular when a generality is to be illustrated, but from the particular to the general when a generality is to be proved.
8. Thou shalt see what thou writest, and therefore shall not mix thy metaphors. For a mixed metaphor is proof that the image therein contained has not been seen worth the inner eye, and therefore such a metaphor is not a true metaphor, created out of the active eye of imagination, but from stale jargon idly drawn up from the stagnant sump of commonplace.
9. Thou shalt also hear what thou writest, with thine inner ear, so that no outer ear may be offended by jarring syllables or unmelodious rhythm; remembering herein with piety, though not striving to imitate, the rotundities of Sir Thomas Browne, and the clausulae of Cicero.
10. Thou shalt carefully expunge from thy writing all consciously written purple passages, lest they rise up to shame thee in thine old age.
                                                                                AMEN

I think one of the good things about history, perhaps in contrast to other academic disciplines, is that you don't need to hold a university position, or even have a PhD, to be taken seriously.

There are various ways to be a historian. You don't have to publish in academic journals to be published: trade non-fiction / popular history is a good approach, and well-researched and well written popular history books can be just as valid (in my view) as writing for peer-reviewed academic journals. You will reach a much wider audience and do more for the public understanding of history. Military history, in particular, always seems to find a ready market, as does historical biography, but these are not the only options.

Incidentally, I would regard a high school history teacher as a professional 'historian' - you make your living from knowing and teaching about history. I have a friend who is a high school teacher and has written several popular history books, and it's perfectly do-able.

If you want to take your studies further, one route might be to do an MRes - a masters by research - typically that is a one-year dissertation based course. It's quicker and easier (and a lot cheaper) than a PhD, can usually be done entirely by distance, and will let you focus on a particular topic - which you can then turn into your first book.

Good luck!

When I was getting my Master's of Teaching History (fellow History Teacher!), at the same time as my good friend was starting his PhD in History, I was really put off by how much 'extra' he seemed to be doing. Demonstrating fluency in reading journals in multiple languages, understanding Heidegger's 'Being-in-the-world', I really felt like being a PhD was something I wasn't qualified for. Seven years later, I read his thesis -- I'm not saying it was bad! -- but I had all the skills and mindset needed to write that.

Mind you, four out of the five people I know who went for their PhD's had real mental health issues going through it. I'm quite happy with the path I took.

I often see (often in critiques of popular history's sloppy historiography compared to 'real/good' historians) comments like, "but really the author you should be consulting is so-and-so, they're an expert in Roman religious iconography of Pompeiian frescoes" and I think, "shoot, I'll never have the time to read to that degree of specificity in every part of history I want to know about" and thus, by extension, "I'll never progress past a Dan Carlin/Mike Duncan level of historical rigour".

I'm a doctoral student working on Early Modern Latin poetry, so not a historian, but I think there's enough overlap that I might add a bit to what others have already written:

This kind of super-specific recall is something I (only) have when I myself have written on the topic at hand. In that case, I necessarily have a fairly good idea of the literature that has been published so far and can usually recall titles that I know to make some specific argument. But with me being just a PhD student, this sort of familiarity with the literature is of course still focused on single spots.

But there's also a less specific kind of recall where I vaguely remember that something on this topic has been published recently or that (Name) tends to work along these lines. With the help of the internet, this can look deceptively like the first kind of knowledge, though, as I'll look up the specific publication rather than post "I think Grafton has written something like that, but I can't recall the title right now" (which is what you'd get in a real-life conversation).
The sources for this second kind of knowledge are, at least in my case, usually second-hand - maybe something I read cited this article, maybe a colleague or professor mentioned it, maybe I heard a talk by this person once, maybe I read their CV for some reason (I also tell undergrads to look up the CV of whoever wrote whatever they're reading), and if we're talking about books I probably saw it while browsing reviews. Browsing reviews (for me Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which is open access, as well as The Classical Review and Renaissance Quarterly, which are not) is a great way of passing time when you're feeling unproductive. Of course I don't read all reviews front to back, I just look at whatever strikes my eye (related to my own research interests, related to general interests, topic seems really cool or really out there, I know the name of the reviewer or the author of the book that is being reviewed, ...).
But with time, more and more of what passes in front of your eyes starts to stick as your mind builds networks (of people, institutions, research topics, ...) to contextualize any new information it receives.

(A middle ground would be literature encountered while preparing a course syllabus.)

tl;dr There are many different ways in which you constantly encounter new literature when working in academia, which also vary regarding the intensity of that encounter - ranging from literature you end up knowing by heart because you cite it in your publications to the knowledge that some person is working on, say, ancient writers of technical literature without having actually read anything of theirs.
Reading reviews may be a good, often entertaining and relatively accessible way of getting to know the kind of stuff that is being worked on in a field.

Honestly, objectively the best historian I know, holds a PhD from Oxford, couldn’t make her family goals work in academia and went back to school and is now a nurse in a doctor’s office. I would dare say, unless you intend to teach uni level or publish research, a PhD in any subset of history is a fucking waste. You can be a great historian on your own time, researching and digging into source material, supporting your students in their research and genuinely being interested in it. People hype up terminal degrees but I feel like more often not they’re not worth the time and expense.

I suggest you read some of the linked answers in As historians how do you find sources and put them into context when writing a book? especially contributions by /u/caffarelli and /u/cordis_melum and /u/Snapshot52.