Working with Evidence: Research, Sources and the Historian's Craft
Working with Evidence examines the historian's craft: how sources are found, read, tested and used to answer a question. The exam rewards precise handling of provenance and purpose, not a summary of what a source says.
Core rules
- Primary sources are produced in the period under study; secondary sources interpret it later. The distinction is about function, not truth.
- Establish provenance: author, date, place, genre, audience and purpose. A police report, a diary, a census return and a propaganda poster answer different questions.
- Read content and silence: what is asserted, what is assumed, what is omitted, and which words carry evaluative weight.
- Corroborate before concluding. Agreement across independent sources strengthens a claim; disagreement is itself evidence of conflict.
- Separate evidence from inference. 'The report states X' is different from 'X happened'.
- Let the research question drive selection: a source useful for attitudes may be weak for casualty figures.
Worked example
An RIC county inspector's report (June 1920) on an ambush states that the IRA fired first and the patrol showed restraint. The author is a police officer; the purpose is to justify police conduct to superiors; the genre is an official report written before any inquiry. This does not make it false, but it limits what it can establish. Corroborate with an IRA brigade statement collected by the Bureau of Military History (1947–57) and a local newspaper report. Agreement on time, place and casualties is stronger than any single claim about who fired first. Judgement: the report is reliable for sequence and police procedure, less reliable for the moral framing of the encounter.
Traps
- Treating 'biased' as 'worthless': bias limits use, it does not erase evidence.
- Assuming official or contemporary sources are neutral.
- Ignoring audience and genre; a speech and a minute serve different purposes.
- Quoting a source without naming author, date or context.
- Confusing memory, later recollection and hindsight with contemporaneous evidence.