This Book Was Published in 2016

You might think there would be little to add to many historical topics, since nothing new is going to turn up on something that people have already researched for a couple of hundred years, right? That may be true, but researchers do find new information about the past more often than you might think. For instance, historians writing a book about Cambridge (Massachusetts) were intrigued to find a note on a map from the 1870s that said “Tomb,” near Walker Street. They traced land titles and eventually found out that a little settlement called Lewisville off Garden Street  had been founded by freed slaves in the late 18th/early 19th centuries. No one previously knew about this settlement or its inhabitants.

Old documents continue to be unearthed, or people make connections that had eluded earlier researchers. In my own case, I’ve seen that as more newspapers, journals, and other documents are digitized, I can find information through the internet that would have been the equivalent of searching for a needle–not in a haystack–but in the entire hay field.

What I’m saying is that if you find a topic intriguing, don’t give it up just because several books or articles have already been written about it. Check to see when the research stopped. If all the information out there is even as recent as 10 or 20 years old, there may be new information available which can add to the story.