Nancy Horan Quotes

I have certainly amassed many historical research gathering skills.

I read round the subject, I make a skeleton outline, and then I start work in the relevant archives. During the marshaling of the material, I copy the material from each archive file across to the relevant chapter in the skeleton outline.

I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.

When I'm working on historical books, I'm much more organized. I usually read about 100 books to get the depth of knowledge I need.

I don't read many popular histories like the ones I write. The building blocks for my research are scholarly monographs, and the inspiration for my storytelling style are folks like Chekhov.

What I try to do - and I think this is the former librarian in me - is to get primary source material.

There is more to folklore research than fieldwork. This is why in all of my other upper-division courses I require a term paper involving original research.

To reconstruct stories and scenes, nonfiction writers must conduct vigorous and responsible research. In fact, narrative requires more research than traditional reportage, for writers cannot simply tell what they learn and know; rather, they must show it.

I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are, and to look where things have gone missing.

To be a good researcher is to be a good detective, and I enjoy ferreting out tidbits of information. For a diary book like 'A Coal Miner's Bride,' newspapers come in handy for small everyday details such as weather reports.

Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs.

I really enjoy researching, and for almost every piece, I research enough to write a book.

You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.

My research process doesn't vary much. I do a little reading to establish a timeline and decide how I'm going to approach the story.

I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: 'There's no further new material; there are only new questions.'

History is an accumulative science, gradually gathering truth through the steady and plodding efforts of countless practitioners turning out countless monographs

Most biographers are apt to be discouraged by the sheer volume of papers left behind by their subject.

Research is the historical novelist's map, constraint, and purest energy.

When I talk with my students, I introduce a process of work I call the three R's: First comes research, then real world exploration, and finally, and perhaps most important, a fact-checking review of all that has been written.

In reconstructing the past, historians generally are compelled to rely on accounts written after the event by participants and witnesses, or on the hearsay versions of those who learned at second-hand what had occurred. Such writings are subject to the infirmities of recollection, or of bias arising from allegiance to one side or the other.

It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many.

I never recreate dialogue. I have often been asked by people, 'You must have made this up because this is dialogue, right?' Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.

The Internet has improved a lot in the last few years, but still, you wouldn't want to depend on Web sources for historical analysis. There's just something hard to beat about a book.

I don't normally do pure historical work.

I love the past. I read about the past all the time.