Immediate, first-hand accounts of a topic, from people who had a direct connection with it. Can include texts of laws, newspaper reports, speeches, diaries, letters, interviews, original research, datasets, photographs, video, or audio.
Secondary Source
One step removed from primary sources, though they often quote or use primary sources. Can include books, analysis or interpretation of data, scholarly articles, documentaries.
To think historically, students need to be able to: 1) Establish historicalsignificance, 2) Use primarysourceevidence, 3) Identify continuity and change, 4) Analyze cause and consequence, 5) Take historical perspectives, and 6) Understand the ethicaldimension of historicalinterpretations.
Historical Significance
A historical person or event can acquire significance if we, the historians, can link it to larger trends and stories that reveal something important for us today
Primary Source Evidence
The litter of history —letters, documents, records, diaries, drawings, newspaper accounts and other bits and pieces left behind by those who have passed on — are treasures to the historian. Historians learn to read these sources.
Continuity and Change
Looking for change where there has been none and looking for continuities where we assumed that there was change.
Causes and Consequences
What were the actions,beliefs, and circumstances that led to these consequences? Causes are multiple and layered, involving both long-term ideologies, institutions, and conditions, and short-term motivations, actions and events.
HistoricalConsequences
Understanding the foreignness of the past offers surprising alternatives to the taken for granted, conventional wisdom, and opens a wider perspective from which to evaluate our present preoccupations.
EthicalDimensions
Taking historical perspective demands that weunderstand the differences between our ethicaluniverse and those of bygonesocieties. We do not want to impose our own anachronisticstandards on the past. At the same time, meaningful history does not treat brutalslaveholders, enthusiastic Nazis, and marauding conquistadors in a "neutral" manner.
How to read primary sources
1. External Criticism (lower criticism): Determine the authenticity of the document by establishing authorship, place, and time
2. Internal Criticism (higher criticism): Determine if the content is accurate and reliable
ThinkingLike a Historian
Sourcing: Think about a document's author and its creation
Contextualizing: Situate the document and its events in time and place
Close reading: Carefully consider what the document says and the language used to say it
Using Background Knowledge: Use historical information and knowledge to read and understand the document
Reading the Silences: Identify what has been left out or is missing from the document by asking questions of its account
Corroborating: Ask questions about important details across multiple sources to determine points of agreement and disagreement
Ninoy's Letter to Noynoy, August 25, 1973
Reveals historical significance, continuity and change, and cause and consequence
HistoryasReconstructionofEvents
Witnessed/Observed
Remembered
Recorded
Account
THE PAST:
Events observed:
by someone ; not observed - lost to history
and remembered ; not remembered - lost
remembered and recorded : unrecorded actions and thoughts - lost
for which we have surviving records - Raw material of history
available, usable, believable records for a given historical account.
HISTORY is the interpretative and imaginative reconstruction of the past, based on written or non-written surviving records, in order to understand the meaning and scope of human existence.
Sources of History
Written source materials
Artifacts
Oral Literature/ Folktales
Oral Interviews
Primarysourceevidence
Primary sources that can give up the secrets of life in the past