Research Process

I chose the Princes in the Tower as my capstone topic because I was interested in the combination of political crisis, historical uncertainty, and long-lasting public fascination surrounding the case. At first, I was drawn to the mystery itself, but as my research developed, the project shifted away from trying to solve the case and toward examining how the story of the princes was shaped over time.

My research brought together primary and secondary sources, including contemporary chronicles, parliamentary records, later Tudor accounts, modern scholarship, and visual materials. Rather than treating these sources as straightforward evidence, I approached them comparatively, paying close attention to rumor, silence, bias, and political context. One of the biggest challenges was working with incomplete and often politically charged evidence without reducing the project to speculation.

This research process changed the way I think about history. It showed me that the most important historical question is not always what happened, but also how people explained events, how stories became authoritative, and how later generations reshaped the past. In the case of the Princes in the Tower, the project ultimately became less about solving a mystery and more about understanding how political narrative, reinterpretation, and memory gave that mystery its lasting power.