On June 29, 2023, Professor Anne Foster of Indiana State University posted a query on Twitter: “For all the #twitterstorians , what’s your favorite methodology article? Particularly interested in ones that helped you “get it” in grad school. Looking for inspiration/readings for my “intro to grad study of history” class.”

Having received dozens of helpful suggestions, she compiled them in a bibliography, which she has graciously permitted me to reproduce here:

In April 2021, I recorded a six-part series, “Scrivener for Historians,” which I then forgot to make fully public on YouTube. I’ve now set it to public, and here’s the link.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOQOKzw5SEQCKly7YYF4Km_D1sRSz8Ktc

Inside Higher Ed has published my essay, “5 Paragraphs in Defense of 5 Paragraphs.” Among the other claims, I write that “five-paragraph essays also serve as building blocks for longer works. Three body paragraphs are enough to get students thinking about how one idea relates to the next, as well as to signal those relationships with appropriate transition words and phrases. Once students have mastered that skill, they are ready to assemble those blocks into larger structures.”

Readers may note that The Princeton Guide to Historical Research has five parts.

Twitter directs me to Historians Being Mean: A Glossary, by Margo Shea. It’s a couple of years old, but quite helpful.

“Words to avoid include alterity, hybridity, semiotics, subaltern, parrhesia, affect, discursive, among others. If your mom wouldn’t use it in a sentence (and your mom’s not a feminist scholar) avoid it.”

“How would they know that?” Mr. Trump asked when told that local historians had called his plaque a fiction. “Were they there?”

Nicholas Fandos, “In Renovation of Golf Club, Donald Trump Also Dressed Up History,” New York Times, November 24, 2015.