researchers-historical

researchers-historical is a skill for Claude Code from bitwize-music-studio/claude-ai-music-skills. It costs 30 tokens per session (2,137 once invoked), scanned A, original, CC0-1.0.

A historical research guide for reconstructing past events from archives, records, contemporary accounts, and later analysis.

In plain words
What is it for?
Researching historical events, official investigations, news coverage, oral histories, photographs, and documentaries for a documentary music project.
Why use it?
It helps agents build timelines from sources created during or after an event and identify details that require human verification.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the bitwize-music plugin — 52 skills, 1 hook, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Researching historical events, official investigations, news coverage, oral histories, photographs, and documentaries for a documentary music project.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add bitwize-music-studio/claude-ai-music-skills
Claude Code
/plugin install bitwize-music

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install bitwize-music, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 52 skills, 1 hook, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for researchers-historical

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bitwize-music-studio/claude-ai-music-skills/researchers-historical/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bitwize-music-studio/claude-ai-music-skills/researchers-historical)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bitwize-music-studio/claude-ai-music-skills/researchers-historical"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bitwize-music-studio/claude-ai-music-skills/researchers-historical/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for researchers-historical

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bitwize-music-studio/claude-ai-music-skills/researchers-historical"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bitwize-music-studio/claude-ai-music-skills/researchers-historical.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 30 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,137 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00030 $0.02137
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.01069
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00427
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00214

Measured 12d ago against content hash e3f7ab69bdae, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

researchers-historical scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/researchers-historical/SKILL.md · 341 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 341 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Your Task

Research topic: $ARGUMENTS

When invoked:

  1. Research the specified topic using your domain expertise
  2. Gather sources following the source hierarchy
  3. Document findings with full citations
  4. Flag items needing human verification

Historical Researcher

You are a historical research specialist for documentary music projects. You research past events using archives, historical records, contemporary accounts, and retrospective analysis.

Parent agent: See ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/researcher/SKILL.md for core principles and standards. Override preferences: If {overrides}/research-preferences.md exists, apply those standards (minimum sources, depth, etc.) to your domain-specific research.


Domain Expertise

What You Research

  • Historical events and timelines
  • Archival documents and records
  • Contemporary news coverage (from the time)
  • Retrospective analysis and books
  • Oral histories and interviews
  • Photographs and visual records
  • Official reports and investigations
  • Anniversary coverage and documentaries

Source Hierarchy (Historical Domain)

Tier 1 (Primary Sources):

  • Contemporary documents (created at the time)
  • Official reports and investigations
  • Government records and archives
  • Photographs, film, audio from the era

Tier 2 (Contemporary Accounts):

  • News coverage from the time
  • Eyewitness accounts
  • Diaries, letters, memoirs (written at time)

Tier 3 (Retrospective):

  • Books by historians/journalists
  • Documentaries
  • Anniversary coverage
  • Academic analysis

Tier 4 (Reference):

  • Wikipedia (for overview, verify against primary)
  • Encyclopedia entries
  • Timeline compilations

Key Sources

Digital Archives

Archive.org: https://archive.org/

  • Wayback Machine (historical websites)
  • Books, newspapers, magazines
  • Audio/video archives

Google News Archive: https://news.google.com/newspapers

  • Historical newspapers (limited)

Newspapers.com: https://www.newspapers.com/ (paid)

  • Extensive historical newspaper archive

Read the full file on GitHub · 341 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 341 lines · 30 tokens per session scan A e3f7ab69bdae

Subscribe to this mod's changes

researchers-historical is a skill published in the GitHub repository bitwize-music-studio/claude-ai-music-skills (483 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed CC0-1.0. It adds 30 tokens to every session and 2,137 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

developer-growth-analysis

Analyzes your recent Claude Code chat history to identify coding patterns, development gaps, and areas for improvement, curates relevant learning resources from HackerNews, and automatically sends a personalized growth report to your Slack DMs.

composio-community/awesome-claude-plugins · 47 tokens

book-to-skill

Use when the user names one book, course, paper, or source document and asks to distill it into a reusable skill. Classifies the source as procedure or reference, writes an attributed SKILL.md, and proves its routing. Not for a folder of sources — use map-corpus.

OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin · 64 tokens

drill

Use when a concept needs practising rather than explaining: run a scaffolded exercise from worked example to independent problem, quiz the learner, run spaced recall over what they cleared, or probe for the gaps blocking what they want next. For explanation, use explain-concept; for an end-to-end build, use capstone.

OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin · 67 tokens

writing-lean-proofs

Use when asked to design, write, review, refactor, lint, or performance-diagnose Lean 4 proofs, libraries, or tactics. Not for non-Lean code or changes outside source, API, proof, or linter scope.

OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin · 56 tokens

scaffold-exercises

Use when a course needs numbered problem, solution, and explainer scaffolds. Creates type-specific files with non-colliding names, populates them, and validates with the course linter. Not for a CLI or Next.js project scaffold — use scaffold-cli or scaffold-nextjs.

OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin · 62 tokens

explain-concept

Use when a concept needs making clear rather than practising: build the intuition, explain why it exists and what it replaced, trace where it came from, draw it, or contrast it against what it gets confused with. For exercises and grading, use drill.

OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin · 56 tokens