ABSTRACT
The goal of every creative historian is to produce new material. In the author's experience, creative historians are omnivorous readers, interested in all kinds of books and articles. Much of what historians read today is online in the form of history web-sites, blogs, and digitally accessible journals. Digital archives compliment and in some cases even replace physical archives. Historians will still need to debate the evidence and do the work of piecing it together in new ways. Digital tools are now indispensable for historical research. At their best, digital tools free up historians to do less tedious work and more critical thinking. Reading and research should not be a lonely process. Interesting sources that inspire creativity are often within reach, but hidden behind a shelf, or in a closed-off room; they are there—it just requires an extra step to find them.
