Thirty per cent of the book usage in the library at my university is generated by history students. This tells us many things, but one thing above all others — there is still a persistent core of old-fashioned book reading at the heart of the subject. (It does not tell us that history lags behind everyone else in the digitisation of the subject.)
The materials to be read while studying history are diverse. In the forefront are printed books, newspapers and so on, together with archives and manuscripts which have survived to the present. But reading is not just about what has been written. Historians need to read images, landscapes, film, clothing, buildings and so on. All contain evidence of the past, which is what we are looking for.
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