Historical Method, Sources and Historiography
Historical Method, Sources and Historiography. This domain checks whether you can reason like a historian: identify a source, test it, and place an interpretation within a school of thought.
Core rules and concepts
- Source types: primary (inscriptions, coins, charters, letters, testimony recorded at the time) versus secondary (later reconstructions). Material sources - archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, architecture - carry weight where texts are silent or partisan.
- The method: heuristics (locating sources) → external criticism (authenticity: script, language, provenance, chronology, whether the document is what it claims to be) → internal criticism (credibility: author, purpose, audience, bias, corroboration) → synthesis → exposition with citation.
- Schools: Ranke's source-based positivism; Marxist historiography reading change through class and mode of production; the Annales school's long-term structures and attention to climate, demography and everyday life; Subaltern studies (Ranajit Guha) recovering peasants and marginal groups; feminist historiography questioning the public/private divide; Said's Orientalism exposing how knowledge about the East was produced within colonial power.
Worked example
A copper plate says a king granted a village to a Brahmin. How reliable is it? It is authentic as a record of a transaction if script, regnal year and provenance check out. But it tells you what the donor wanted remembered - generosity and legitimacy. It cannot by itself show the peasants' condition, and needs corroboration from land records or archaeology.
Marks-losing traps
- Treating a later textbook or a feature film as a primary source.
- Confusing external criticism (is it genuine?) with internal criticism (is it credible?).
- Dismissing oral tradition entirely, or accepting it uncritically.
- Describing Subaltern studies as a study of colonial administrators.