Lonnie Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and Founding Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of how historians do history for the public. During our exploration, Lonnie reveals why it’s important for historians to reach multiple audiences with their w…

History has a history and genealogy has a history. And the histories of both affect how and why we study the past and how we understand and view it. Today, we explore why it’s important for us to understand that the practices and processes of history and genealogy have histories by exploring what the history of genealogy reveals about the early Ame…

History tells us who we are and how we came to be who we are. Like history, genealogy studies people. It’s a field of study that can tell us who we are in a more exact sense by showing us how our ancestral lines connect from one generation to the next. In this episode of the “Doing History: How Historians Work” seres, we investigate the world of ge…

What do historians do with their research once they finish writing about it? How do historians publish the books and articles we love to read? This episode of our Doing History: How Historians Work series, takes us behind-the-scenes of how historians publish their writing about history. Our guide through the world of history publications is Joshua …

How do historians write about the people, places, and events they’ve studied in historical sources? We continue our Doing History: How Historians Work series by investigating how historians write about history. Our guide for this investigation is John Demos, the Samuel Knight Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and an award-winning his…

What do historians do with all of the information they collect when they research? How do they access their research in a way that allows them to find the information they need to write the books and articles we enjoy reading? Billy Smith, a Professor of History at Montana State University, joins us as part of our “Doing History: How Historians Wor…

Not everyone has the means, time, or freedom to travel to archives. So how do historians conduct the research they need to do when they are limited to online resources? To answer this timely question, we turn to Sharon Block, a Professor of History at the University of California-Irvine. She has made use of computers and digital resources to do his…

Historians rely on secondary historical sources almost as much as they rely on primary historical sources. But what are secondary historical sources and how do they help historians know what they know about the past? Michael McDonnell, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney, guides us through how he used secondary historical …

In this episode, we continue our behind-the-scenes tour of how historians work with Zara Anishanslin, an Assistant Professor of History at CUNY’s College of Staten Island and author of Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World. During our investigation of how historians read historical sources, Zara reveals what hi…

Historians research the past through historical sources. But what are the materials that tell historians about past peoples, places, and events? Today, James Horn, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, helps us investigate historical sources by taking us on an exploration of historic Jamestown and the ty…

Historians research history in archives. But how do you gain access to one? And how do you use an archive once you find that it likely contains the information you seek? In this fourth episode of our “Doing History: How Historians Work” series, we investigate how archives work with Peter Drummey, an archivist and the Stephen T. Riley Librarian at t…

How did enslaved African and African American women experience slavery? What were their daily lives like? And how do historians know as much as they do about enslaved women? Today, we explore the answers to these questions with Jennifer L. Morgan, a Professor of History and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and our guide for an in…

How did average, poor, and enslaved men and women live their day-to-day lives in the early United States? Today, we explore the answers to that question with Simon P. Newman, a Professor of History at the University of Glasgow and our guide for an investigation into how historians choose their research topics.…

History is about people, but what do we know about the people behind history’s scenes? Who are the people who tell us what we know about our past? How do they come to know what they know? Today, we begin our “Doing History” series with an episode about historians and why they do the work that they do featuring Rebecca Onion, History Writer at Slate…