I finished my PhD not too long ago. For my field (1st C BCE/CE Rome) there's not much new per se. Sometimes we find a new papyrus or something, but as a rule all the evidence is out there already.

What does change is the interpretation: the lens through which you view the evidence. You can grab such lenses from other fields to give your topic a spin.

So, my diss, for instance, was investigating the Roman integration of Italy around the events of the Social War of 90-88 BCE. I indeed read the scholarship backwards, as you were recommended to do. I'm going to narrate going forward though.

The traditional view of the Social War, going back to the ancient sources themselves, is that Rome's allies (the socii) bore the burden of Roman military expeditions to an increasing extent without having access to Rome's foreign policy, and they hoped to correct this by gaining the Roman citizenship. When they failed to achieve this through legislation (the last proponent of extending the citizenship, Drusus, was assassinated) they resorted to violence. Rome won the war, but only by fracturing the alliance of the socii by granting citizenship first to those that didn't defect, and then to those that put down arms, and eventually to everyone.

In 1996 this guy Mouritsen came along and said, "Hang on; that narrative only pops up about 200 years after the war in question. The earliest historian we have that reports anything about that war is living in a world in which Italy is entirely integrated into the Roman state. He's explaining the nature of the state he lives in rather than describing the history that brought it into being. It may well be Rome didn't accept Italians into the state, but rather imposed the Roman state on them, a punishment for their revolt, by destroying their own civic identities and polities." There was some pish-poshing about this opinion, but no one really made an argument against it except "all the sources say this," nevermind the earliest historians were writing 200 years after the fact.

I wasn't happy with the pish-poshing. I think the traditional narrative can have a better defence than "that's just silly." So this is what I did: while I don't have a historian writing about that war for about 200 years after the fact, I do have some foundation narratives that are roughly contemporaneous with that war. I know from political scientists like Ronald Suny (I have a background in polisci) nation-states tend to produce foundation narratives that address political issues at the time they were composed rather than actually describing something that happened in the past (think about the traditional Thanksgiving narrative in the USA - far more useful for explaining why people of European extract are here and framing the whole affair as a friendly thing, rather than, you know, genocide).

So I have two things to do now: 1) despite the fact that most theorists consider nation-states to be exclusively modern, show Rome was sufficiently close enough to a nation-state that I can read Roman foundation narratives in the same way we read foundation narratives of modern nation-states, and 2) provide a reading of the relevant Roman foundation narratives that lends support for the traditional account of the war.

I accomplished #1 by looking at political theorists of nation-states. In particular I found Smith and Kymlicka helpful. Smith challenges the notion that nation-states are modern, and Kymlicka introduces the notion of a nation-building-state. I used both of these polisci peeps to argue that Rome can indeed be seen as a nation-state, and so I can read the foundation narratives the way we read modern foundation narratives. That lets me use those Roman foundation narratives to inform my understanding of the issues underlying the Social War, even though I don't have contemporary historians to work with.

No new evidence. I'm not even questioning the traditional narrative. I'm in fact trying to support it. But to the best of my knowledge, and the knowledge of my committee, no one had applied modern political theory to this particular historical problem.

How did I stumble onto this topic? I don't really know. I remember applying for grad school right after finishing my BA and being asked to write a PhD proposal. Fuck that. I didn't know nearly enough to write a proposal. I only took an interest in the Social War when I learned the socii were minting their own coins and I became interested in the iconography on those coins, and I thought back to my polisci days and started making connections. I don't remember why or how the Italian coins came to my attention. But my polisci background, interest in coins, and interest in foundation narratives gave me what I needed to create a new lens and a new interpretation.

That's a bit of a long story. I hope you find some part of it useful.

There are basically two approaches to novelty. One is finding a new question to ask, which is what /u/LegalAction describes in detail. (We call this "applying a new framework" but I find "finding a new question" to be a more straightforward way of saying the same thing.) You can do this with any period or topic of history, and it can cause you to completely read the same evidence or sources that people have looked at for centuries (if not longer) totally differently.

The other way is to find new sources, and by "find new sources" I really mean "use sources that other historians haven't really used much before" most of the time (historians are very rarely the people who actually "find" any new sources in a real sense). There are occasionally genuinely "new sources" added to archives, things that either had been lost to time and rediscovered, or more recent things that were not accessible to historians previously (for example, I use the Freedom of Information Act to get government documents from the mid-20th century — they are "new sources" only in the sense that they were classified and kept from historians until I got them). New sources can be useful in telling new stories and asking new questions. But without having already seen said sources, or being guaranteed access to them, it's very hard to formulate anything like a hypothesis or research agenda that relates to them. So when writing up a PhD proposal, for example, that might rely on new sources, you describe the general thing you plan to look at, the general questions you plan to ask, and what your hopes are for potential sources. But the final product will always depend on what you can find.

And yes, in searching for things that might be interesting, it really does help to become familiar with the existing literature. Sometimes it is about "gaps" (though as a former advisor once put it, sometimes it turns out the "gaps" are there for a good reason, because the world doesn't need a monograph on literally everything that happened in the past), but often again it is just about asking a new question. Very well-trod topics tend to dig "ruts" in the kinds of questions they ask; it can be very hard to get out of those "ruts" and start asking different questions.

An example from my own work: the topic of Truman's "decision to use the atomic bomb" has been gone over by historians since 1945 in great detail. One would think there are no new questions to ask of it. But it turns out that most of the time, people were just asking and arguing over the same questions repeatedly — e.g., "were the atomic bombings necessary, what were the real motivations of the atomic bombings, did the atomic bombings end the war or was it something else?" These are perfectly good questions but it is hard to imagine, as a junior scholar, coming up with a genuinely novel answer to any of them at this point, at least without using radically different sources than had been used before (Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy was novel in the sense that it used American, Japanese, and Soviet sources simultaneously, which had not really been done — which highlights how specific "novelty" can be).

But there are far more questions about Truman and the atomic bombings that one could ask than this. The question I ended up finding very productive for my own work was: "What did Truman know about the targets before the bombings took place?" These kinds of "epistemological" questions (when did X know about something, and what did they know?) are common in my main field (the history of science, which is all about epistemological questions) but uncommon in diplomatic history, so what I ended up doing was grafting one "framework" (a new question) onto a topic that hadn't had it applied to it well before. And then I went over pretty much every book, source, footnote, etc. that I could find that seemed like it might enlighten me on it. I found nothing "new" in the sense of a genuinely novel document, but I used some documents that had never been used before, and read things into them that hadn't been read into them before (e.g., drafts of the speech that Truman gave on August 10, 1945, which had started being written before the bombing of Hiroshima and then incorporated different language about the bombings into it, which in my framework is revelatory to how Truman's initial understanding of what kind of target Hiroshima was got "adjusted" by information about mass casualties there on August 8th).

From this new question I ended up with an entirely new argument about how to think about the bombings, and ended up with a totally different focus than previous historians had. As historians have known for decades, Truman was not that involved in the "decision to use the atomic bomb." But he WAS involved with one decision, which was whether Kyoto or Hiroshima would be the target of the bomb, and in my paper (published in 2020) I argue that this event that is usually barely a footnote in most accounts is actually quite important, because it may have been the source of a fundamental confusion Truman had about the nature of Hiroshima (whether it was a city or not).

Anyway — I elaborate on the long example just to make it clear that asking a new question does not necessarily mean pulling out some fancy new French theory or wading into jargon or even asking anything particularly complex. It just means finding a different way to interrogate the past, and then looking at what the implications of that interrogation might be.

As for the fear of having nothing new to say — generally I always tell people to trust themselves on this, that if they do the work they will end up with something new to say, because you've got a different perspective and live in a different time and maybe have access to different things than most of the people who came before you; you can't but have a different perspective on history, just by living through a different historical time period.

In some fields that is going to be harder than others, of course. (I did a research paper in grad school that touched on the history of Freud and I concluded that it was so overgrown as a field of study that it was absolutely un-fun to work on, and would take far more effort than I was willing to put in to have anything novel to say.) But again, the trick is not to look at the same old questions and come up with new answers. The trick is to look for new questions and then find answers to those, which will be fairly new by default.

First of all, if you're writing a proposal when you're applying for a Ph.D., don't worry too much about the precise topic you're going to end up writing your dissertation on. Almost nobody has a fully-thought-out dissertation topic in mind when they apply for their Ph.D.; I honestly don't even remember what I said in my proposal (cut me some slack, it was 11 years ago), but I know it wasn't what I actually ended up doing. In truth, I only started with a vague idea of what I wanted to do. I knew the time period and geographic area (WWII, Romania), but beyond that, I didn't have a ton of specific ideas.

I came to my original idea gradually during my first couple of years of coursework, along with a couple of articles I worked on on the side. How did I decide on those topics? Uh...good question. I really don't remember. In any case, by my third semester or so I had a fairly concrete idea of the general topic I wanted to work on (antisemitic economic policies in Romania), and started doing deeper reading on that topic, only to discover that, oops, someone had already written a book about that (this was actually not the first time that happened, but I digress). I didn't really think I could find enough new source material or create enough of a unique methodological angle to do something unique, so instead, I started to look for other related questions that hadn't been covered in detail in that book or other relevant works; i.e. after reading the existing historiography, what questions did I still have that weren't answered? Eventually, I came to a concrete topic that hadn't been addressed in those books, and started looking around to see what existed in terms of primary sources, only to stumble onto a trove of documentation that hadn't been mined yet (hundreds of thousands of pages on microfilm). Et voilà, I had my topic. (Sorry for not specifying what I picked, it would instantly identify me).

I don't know how helpful that is, but it's how my process went. I can try to answer any other questions you have.

[also, insert obligatory "don't get a Ph.D." here]

That's a very insightful story, thank you very much sharing! Did you have any guarantees when you started, that applying the nation state and polisci ideas would indeed support the traditional narrative of the Social War? Had you already "seen it" in the primary sources or was it more of a wager that ended up with a positive answer?

I am doing something very similar by applying the lens of sustainability thinking (my background is in environmental change) to agricultural texts of Middle Ages hoping to change the usual story of "ancestors of empirical science" to one of "humble farmers who see nature as Creation." But so far, I am finding a lot of difficulty!

On history I am a us colonial historian who is interested in va md pa then ky.

I am a genealogist, who is interested in her family mainly. I am from a lot of colonial families.

I like working with that angle then I find stuff.

I got into a daughters of the American revolution chapter is working on a book of sorts on (it ends up being my grandfathers as well) but American rev war between local settlers and British siding indians.

My input on colonial matters is what is often unexplored or too trivial to matter to a larger historian.

Without giving my identity. I am related through marriage to a Ohio company person. And the next generation is a whiskey rebellion prisoner. So the grandfather married a niece of a prominent man and his son in law got in trouble with whiskey rebellion. George Washington is there as well throughout the narriativre coincidence i don’t knek