Historical scholarship (sometimes called "secondary sources") is how scholars, like your course instructors, document their studies and share the conclusions of their work. 

You may have heard the terms "scholarly article" or "academic article." They both refer to types of scholarship. In history, scholarship includes studying historical sources to better understand historical events, figures, and cultures.

Traditionally, scholarship has taken the forms of books, articles, and conference presentations. In the field of history, scholars also engage in other types of academic work, like annotating primary sources for reprints, compiling bibliographies of sources related to a subject area, and, more recently, producing podcasts and other types of public-facing work.

You should feel free to engage with the many formats of scholarship that historians produce, but be sure to ask your instructor if you have any questions about their source requirements for an assignment. Sometimes instructors require a certain number of sources to be peer-reviewed. 

Video transcript

Below is a list of resources to find historical scholarship in books and journal articles. A complete list of databases containing scholarship in history can be found on the UH Libraries website.