The Sea Change in History Research
Why researching history has become easier and more overwhelming than ever.
I routinely have conversations with early-stage doctoral students that go something like this:
Me: “Are you familiar with Google Books?” "
Student: “I’ve heard of it.”
Me: “You need to start using it right away. I use it every day.”
Google Books, HathiTrust, and similar digital libraries have inaugurated a sea change in history research nearly as dramatic as the first advent of internet-based research, which began around the year 2000.
The first advent of internet research was more limited than today, for obvious reasons of scale. But I am also struck by how the first wave of digital history research made the “rich get richer.” So many sources were subscription-based and only affordable for research university libraries. If you were a writer without access to a research library, you were on the outside looking in.
That dynamic remains true in some ways, especially with sources like academic journals and rare books. But across several genres of sources, from historical newspapers and magazines to the papers of the Founding Fathers, freely available digital collections have “democratized” historical research. Anyone with an internet connection could do professional-level history research, if they just knew how to do it and where to look.
Let me give one example to demonstrate my point: recently I was researching an article on the Supreme Court case of Cummings v. Missouri (1867), an understudied case with major religious liberty implications. (The article has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Church and State in 2026.) Where did I get the sources for this project?
I could obtain a lot of the books I needed for the project on Google Books or HathiTrust - for example, the 1870 book Martyrdom in Missouri was one of the key compilations related to the Missouri “test oath” controversy for pastors. Major internet libraries have scans of this book, and it is publicly viewable because it was published before 1930, the current copyright limitation window.
Google Books has scanned most of the books in the stacks of libraries such as Harvard, Michigan, and Oxford. You have complete access to those libraries’ holdings prior to 1930, and limited page views of books published after 1930. Just think about that. Not only do you have free virtual access to many of the world’s major research libraries, but also can do full-text searching of those collections!
But it hardly stops there. In the “first advent” phase, many historical newspapers were available only via subscription to platforms such as America’s Historical Newspapers from Readex. I continue to consult America’s Historical Newspapers, but in my Cummings project I increasingly found that my best newspaper results came from (free) searches in the Library of Congress’s digital newspapers collection, and the wonderful newspaper archive at the State Historical Society of Missouri website.
The sea change, then, is that we have moved from needing subscription-based websites to do the best historical research, to not needing them. Or at least we don’t always need them. This makes a huge difference for students needing to get access to history sources, and for professors teaching at schools that are not research universities (that is, most schools).
The challenge now is that we have access to so much information that it can be overwhelming and hard to know where to start. It takes a lot of practice to know how best to use Google Books and similar sources. Different search terms and search limits can produce wildly different results.
But if you’re in a position where you or your students need to do even the most basic history research, you should familiarize yourself with these free digital libraries. They now are our most essential tools.
My 5-minute PragerU video “Colonial America: Jamestown vs. Plymouth” is now available, just in time for Thanksgiving! This is the first of five videos that will go up each Monday for the next month, each on a colonial America topic (the Great Awakening, the Salem Witch Trials, etc.).