History: An Introduction to Theory, Method and Practice
This is a companion website to our textbook History: An Introduction to Theory, Method and Practice. It is designed to complement and enhance your studies by making available additional reading material for each of the chapters, organized sequentially. This material includes extracts from primary and secondary sources which touch on and provide a focus for thought and discussion around many of the issues raised in the chapters. And there are brief bibliographies of recommended reading for each chapter – for the most part, those sources that we have found useful.
We also include a list of websites of potential interest and value to historians. In writing the book, we have drawn freely upon such sites in writing the book, and would encourage you to do the same in your studies. The list is not and cannot be comprehensive; there are simply too many now available to us. With such profusion, however, comes great variety not only in coverage but also in quality, and so you always need to be alert to those sites which are derivative, poorly presented or overtly biased. In making our selection, we have striven to include what we consider to be some of the more valuable ones, particularly those which themselves provide detailed lists of relevant sites.
We begin with a brief discussion of what is involved in reading a document as an historian. Before starting work on the documents themselves, therefore, you might find it useful to have a quick read through in order to gain some idea of the issues to which historians need to be sensitive in using these materials.