The Methods and Skills of History: A Practical Guide

Like its predecessors, the third edition of one of our most popular texts, The Methods and Skills of History: A Practical Guide, is a dynamic text/workbook that combines theory with "hands on" practice, providing engaging essays, documents, and exercises designed to make history more meaningful and accessible to student readers—whether they are majoring in history, taking a history course as an elective, or simply reading history on their own—as well as strengthen their critical-thinking and communication skills.

While this third edition retains the essence of its highly successful predecessor in the form of its practical, timely advice on research and writing and “field-tested” exercises, it features important modifications as well, including a reorganization of the chapters to progress even more smoothly from a theoretical discussion of the nature of history (Part I), to practical considerations involved in confronting historical accounts (Part II) to actually “doing” history (Part III). The final section (Part IV) provides a brief overview of how history as a discipline evolved and how it relates to other academic disciplines, as well as appendices that comprise interesting historical documents and helpful source references and bibliographies.