Martha C. Howell

This is definitely an important source book for history students, because it not only offers insight into source criticism and comparison but gives the historiography of, well, historiography. I only give it three stars, however, because it gets lost in itself. The text presupposes a level of literacy and writing ability such that anyone able to read it on that level can deduce the main points without the excessive, tangental examples. The last two chapters, or 62 pages, were summarized nicely in the last 7 pages of the final chapter, and really that was all that needed to be included. Even the first three chapters, more about the "hands on" part of writing history, could have been more tightly written and presented.

All in all, even at a graduate level (I read this for undergraduate, pre-senior thesis) this book would be a bit much, a bit too specialized - and in some ways too archaic. I will be sticking with the simpler but much more educational Writing History: A Guide for Students by William Kelleher Storey.… (meer)

From Reliable Sources is the sort of dull-but-worthy book that final year history undergraduates or first year history graduate students should probably read at some point. It's a basic introduction to problems of historical methodology, the development of history as an academic field, important historians, and so on. I didn't find it very engaging—the prose is a little leaden, it's a tad dated (it was published in 2001), there's nothing here that was particularly new to me, and (while perhaps unsurprisingly, given that it was written by two medievalists) people who work in subaltern studies fields will probably be dissatisfied with it (awful lot of dead white guy history/historians). People who are more at the beginning of their studies might find it more useful, however, though I think it would be more useful for them if paired with discussion about it. Such a work, after all, is more abstract/theoretical than about how historians work on a practical level—the "process" they describe here for how historians work (gather sources, decide on the reliability of each source, construct narrative from there) is surely more the ideal than how I've ever observed someone work.… (meer)