1: Introduction -- Part I: Articulating Your Vision -- 2: Getting Your Bearings -- 3: Encountering the Experts -- 4: Questioning Primary Sources -- 5: Finding a Place to Stand -- Part II: Selecting Your Focus -- 6: Planning for Success in the Archives -- 7: Planning for Success in the Digital Realm -- 8: Designing Your Project -- Part III: Developing and Supporting Your Thesis -- 9: Imagining Claims and Counterclaims -- 10: Supporting Claims with Evidence -- Part IV: Writing Up -- 11: Structuring Your Paper -- 12: Crafting Your Exposition -- 13: Working with Feedback -- Part V: Looking Ahead -- 14: Joining a Community of Scholars -- 15: Exploring Alternatives.

Complete with practical advice and helpful guidance, this book is an approachable manual perfect for budding historians at all levels. Its worksheets, which focus on framing realistic goals and heading off common misunderstandings, will aid independent work and make check-ins with the advisor more candid and productive. Drawing on examples from six continents, as well as primary sources ranging from cuneiform tablets to emails, students will learn about the effective deployment of quotations, footnotes, maps, graphs, images, and data visualizations. Throughout the book, emphasis is placed on how the student can formulate, support, and revise their claims in a historical project with a skeptical reader in mind.