Module 1

• Primary Source


  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 historical significance, 2) Use primary source evidence, 3) Identify continuity and change, 4) Analyze cause and consequence, 5) Take historical perspectives, and 6) Understand the ethical dimension of historical interpretations.
• 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.
• Historical Consequences


  • 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.
• Ethical Dimensions


  • Taking historical perspective demands that we understand the differences between our ethical universe and those of bygone societies. We do not want to impose our own anachronistic standards on the past. At the same time, meaningful history does not treat brutal slaveholders, 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
• Thinking Like 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
• History as Reconstruction of Events

  1. Witnessed/Observed
  2. Remembered
  3. Recorded
  4. 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
• Primary source evidence 


  Primary sources that can give up the secrets of life in the past