Qualitative Research: An Introduction to Methods and Designs

The Who: Historical Actors

By now we should be recognizing that questions that once seemed simple (who, what, when, where) are far from that. Considerations about historical actors are equally complex. Historians must identify who or what are the historical actors that played a central role in shaping the time and topic under study. Historical actors more than likely are people, but sometimes they are things, such as organizations (including governments), demographic groups (such as laborers), or ideas (such as democracy).

As with the foci of historical studies, who a historian considers to be historical actors gives us a clue as to how the scholar sees the past. Are these individuals, or are the historical actors organizations or institutions, ...