The Archive That Contradicts Itself
A student is writing a case study on a 1930s dockworkers' strike. She has found three sources. Source A is a police report from the strike week stating that 40 people were arrested and 'no serious injuries occurred.' Source B is a union newsletter from the same week claiming 'over 200 arrests and many beaten.' Source C is a photograph dated to the strike showing a large crowd and mounted police, but the archive catalogue lists the photographer as unknown and the date as 'circa 1930s.' Her teacher has warned against 'just splitting the difference' between A and B. The student has 1,200 words for this section and wants to argue that the strike was 'suppressed by state violence.'
1. How should the student handle the numerical conflict between Sources A and B without simply averaging them?
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The student should treat the numbers as claims produced by institutions with interests, not as data points to reconcile.
- Source A (police) has an institutional incentive to minimise disorder: low arrest counts and 'no serious injuries' protect the force from scrutiny. Its genre (an official report) also tends to record only what fits administrative categories.
- Source B (union newsletter) has an incentive to maximise the scale of repression to mobilise members and build a grievance record. Its genre (advocacy) selects for dramatic detail.
The key move is provenance and purpose analysis, then corroboration from a different kind of source. The photograph is useful here only if its metadata can be tested - the student should check whether the crowd's clothing, the police uniforms, or the streetscape can be dated independently. If not, it corroborates 'a large crowd and police presence' but cannot settle numbers.
A defensible conclusion is to refuse the precise figure and argue from what both sources concede: arrests occurred and police were deployed in force. The student should state explicitly that the exact number is unrecoverable from these sources and explain why - that is a stronger historical argument than a fabricated middle number. She should also note that 'no serious injuries' in A is a claim, not a finding, because the report's author had no incentive to record injuries.
2. The student wants to use the photograph as evidence of state violence. What can and cannot the photograph establish, and how should she frame it in her argument?
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The photograph can establish presence and scale: that a large crowd gathered and that mounted police were deployed. It cannot, on its own, establish violence, because a still image captures a single instant and cannot show causation, sequence, or what happened before or after the frame.
The deeper problem is provenance. The catalogue says 'photographer unknown' and 'circa 1930s.' That means:
- The date is an inference, not a record. The image might belong to a different industrial dispute in the same decade.
- The photographer's position is unknown, which matters because framing, angle, and cropping are choices. A photographer standing behind the police lines sees a different event from one inside the crowd.
- The caption in the archive may have been added later and may encode someone else's interpretation.
She should frame the photograph as corroborative, not decisive: it supports the claim that policing was visible and large-scale, which is consistent with both A and B. To argue 'suppression by state violence,' she needs a source that describes an action - a witness account, a hospital record, a court proceeding, or a second independent photograph with secure metadata. If none exists, she should narrow her thesis to 'policed and contested' rather than 'violently suppressed,' and say why the evidence will not carry the stronger claim. Conceding the limit of a source while still using it well is exactly the judgement the exam rewards.