Historical Methods, Sources, and Historiography
This domain assesses how historians construct knowledge: source classification, criticism, corroboration, and changing interpretive schools.
Sources and criticism
Primary sources are produced in or near the period under study; secondary sources interpret them later. For any source, establish provenance: author, date, audience, purpose, and survival. A colonial governor's report may be valuable for administrative priorities and rhetoric, but limited for Indigenous perspectives. Corroborate across independent sources and note silences - who could not write or be archived.
Historiography
Ranke emphasized archival documents and "as it actually happened," though his method had blind spots. Annales historians foregrounded long-term geography and mentalities. Marxist history analyzed class and production; social history recovered ordinary lives; postcolonial and gender historians challenged whose experiences counted. Memory studies examine commemoration and forgetting.
Worked example
Assess a 19th-century missionary letter describing a colonial village. Reasoning: its origin and purpose are religious persuasion and fundraising; its value lies in details of daily life and missionary attitudes; its limitation is conversion bias and limited local voices. Corroborate with census data, court records, and oral testimony. Conclusion: useful as evidence of missionary ideology and some observed practice, not as a neutral village portrait.
Traps that cost marks
- Equating "biased" with "useless."
- Treating primary sources as automatically true.
- Ignoring provenance, audience, and genre.
- Presentism: judging past actors only by current norms without explaining context.
- Assuming archives are neutral or complete.