L2: Historian Data

• Historical data


  Historical information gleaned through objects and relics that have endured from the past
• Relics or remains

  • Serve as valuable indicators for researchers seeking insights into the past
  • Offer significant clues, e.g. remains of prehistoric settlements
• Testimonies of witnesses


  Provide firsthand accounts or perspectives on specific events or experiences, whether in oral or written form
• Testimonies


  • Speeches
  • Commentaries
• Interpretative sources


  Explain why and how things happened and were interrelated
• Descriptive sources


  Tell what happened, when and where, and who took part
• Three categories of history sources

  • Narrative or literary
  • Diplomatic or juridical
  • Social documents
• Narrative or literary sources


  • Chronicles, pamphlets, and narratives written to express a message
  • Scientific pieces to inform, media stories to influence public opinion
  • Diaries, memoirs, novels, movies for various purposes
• Diplomatic sources


  • Highly considered as useful by expert historians as they record or establish legal situations
  • Regarded as the most trustworthy and pure
• Social documents


  • Records kept by bureaucracies, pertaining to economic, social, political, or judicial value
• Non-written sources of history

  • Material evidence
  • Verbal testimony
• Material evidence


  • Also known as archaeological evidence
  • Encompasses various artistic creations like pottery, jewelry, dwellings, graves, churches, roads
• Oral evidence


  • Folk songs, sagas, and tales from the premodern era provide important historical context
  • Interviews becoming a vital source of evidence in the modern era