Historical Method, Sources and Historiography
Historical method, sources and historiography tests how historians know what they claim. Expect questions on primary and secondary sources, external and internal criticism, corroboration, bias, periodisation and schools of interpretation.
Sources and criticism
- Primary: inscriptions, coins, manuscripts, archives, oral testimony, material remains. Secondary: later syntheses.
- External criticism: authenticity, provenance, date, authorship. Internal criticism: meaning, reliability, intended audience, genre.
- Corroboration across independent sources; silences and bias are evidence too.
- Disciplines: epigraphy, numismatics, archaeology, palaeography, diplomatics.
Historiography
- Colonial and imperial, nationalist, Marxist, Annales, Subaltern, feminist, postcolonial and environmental approaches; each selects problems and evidence differently.
- Periodisation is a convention, not a natural fact.
Worked example
You have a colonial district gazetteer and a village land deed. Which is better for peasant debt? Reasoning: the gazetteer is a later administrative compilation with classificatory aims; the deed is contemporary and local but covers one transaction. Use the deed for a micro-claim, the gazetteer for context, and corroborate with revenue records or oral history. Neither is automatically “true”.
Traps
Do not assume primary equals unbiased; avoid presentism and anachronism; do not confuse historiography with chronology; cite provenance and date when evaluating a source.