Historical Perspectives and Skills
What the exam tests
This domain covers how historians build knowledge: sourcing, corroboration, contextualization, and the difference between evidence and interpretation. Expect items on primary versus secondary sources, point of view, periodization, and evaluating competing accounts.
Core rules and concepts
- A primary source is produced by a participant or witness; a secondary source interprets primary evidence. A textbook printed in 2020 about 1787 is still secondary.
- Sourcing asks who made the document, when, for whom, and why. Purpose shapes content more than a vague charge of "bias."
- Corroboration compares independent accounts. Agreement raises confidence; disagreement identifies what needs explaining.
- Contextualization places a source in its own era. Presentism - judging past actors by current norms - is a distinct error from moral judgment.
- Causation distinguishes long-term structural causes, triggers, and proximate causes. Correlation is not causation.
- Periodization is an argument, not a fact: labels such as "the Middle Ages" serve particular questions.
Worked example
Two sources describe an 1892 steel strike: a newspaper editorial calling strikers "lawless" and a company payroll ledger showing wages cut 20 percent before the strike. The editorial is primary but reflects its publisher's audience; the ledger is primary with different limits - it shows wages, not workers' motives. Neither alone explains why the strike occurred. Together, the wage cut corroborates a grievance while the editorial shows how opposition was framed publicly. A strong answer cites both and states each source's limits.
Traps
Equating "primary" with "accurate"; dismissing a source because it has a viewpoint; treating a secondary source's age as primary status; and reporting a correlation as a cause.