Iris Chang Quotes

I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.

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.

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

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.

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.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

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.'

The quarrel of the sociologists with the historians is that the latter have learned so much about how to do it that they have forgotten what to do. They have become so skilled in finding facts that they have no use for the truths that would make the facts worth finding.

The initial research will be very indiscriminate. I do a lot of reading, buy a stack of books and read and digest them, and then I start doing phone interviews and archival research and then the travelling.

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

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

I applied for funding to embark on an overseas field trip in Iceland, and spent six weeks there happily holed up in the national archives, museums and libraries, sifting through ministerial and parish records, censuses, maps, microfilm, logs, and local histories.

Now, whenever you read any historical document, you always evaluate it in light of the historical context.

I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.

The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves.

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.

I like historical things; I like researching things.

The way I work: I pick a country. I learn the political history - I mean I really learn it; I read until it sinks in. Once I read the political history, I can project and find the clandestine history. And then I people it with the characters.

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.

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.

I view my job more almost as a field biologist or anthropologist, where I'm collecting practices. I'm collecting techniques.

I don't normally do pure historical work.

With my research, I really need absolute confirmation of what actually happened, direct physical connections to the past.