Studying History and Working as a Historian

01

The shape of academic training

History is typically studied at university level as part of a broader humanities degree before students specialise. Early coursework tends to introduce major periods and regions, along with the basic tools of the discipline: how to read a primary source critically, how to distinguish a primary source from a secondary one, and how to recognise bias or gaps in an account. As students progress, the emphasis usually shifts from absorbing established narratives to producing original research, often culminating in a long essay or thesis built from primary sources.

At postgraduate level, the work becomes more specialised. A historian might focus on a particular country, period, theme or method, such as economic history, oral history, environmental history or the history of a specific institution. Postgraduate training generally involves sustained archival research, close engagement with existing academic debates on the topic, and the development of an original argument supported by evidence.

02

Core skills of the discipline

Several skills recur across almost all historical work, regardless of specialism.

• Source criticism: assessing who created a document or record, why, for whom, and what that implies about its reliability and perspective.
• Contextual reading: understanding a source in light of the conditions under which it was produced, rather than reading it as a neutral window onto the past.
• Comparison across sources: checking one account against others to identify agreement, contradiction or silence.
• Clear argument and writing: presenting an interpretation of evidence in a way that is transparent about its basis and open to challenge.
• Comfort with uncertainty: accepting that some historical questions cannot be fully resolved, and saying so honestly rather than overstating confidence.

03

Where historical training leads

Not everyone who studies history becomes an academic historian in the narrow sense of holding a university research post. The skills built through historical study, careful reading, structured argument, evidence-based writing and comfort with ambiguity, are used widely in fields such as archival and museum work, heritage management, journalism, education, publishing, policy research and law. Some people trained in history work specifically on public history projects, helping communities, municipalities or institutions document and present their own past.

04

Working with South African material

Historians working on South African topics often need to engage with more than one language and more than one kind of record, since the documentary record was produced by a wide range of colonial, missionary, state and community institutions over several centuries, alongside rich oral traditions that were never written down at all. This makes language skills and openness to non-written sources, such as oral testimony, material culture and photography, particularly valuable for researchers in this field.

05

Getting started

Readers considering formal study in history are encouraged to look into the history departments of South African universities directly, since programme structures, entry requirements and specialisations vary between institutions and change over time. For readers who simply want to develop historical thinking without enrolling in a formal programme, a useful starting point is reading widely across different types of sources on a topic of interest and consciously asking, for each one, who produced it, why, and what it leaves out.