History: sources, evidence and methods
This domain tests whether you can classify evidence, judge reliability and build a historical argument rather than simply retell a story.
Core rules
- A primary source is produced at the time or by a participant: letters, court records, oral testimony, artefacts, photographs. A secondary source interprets later. Age alone does not make a source primary.
- Oral tradition is evidence, not automatically fact. Ask who tells it, to whom, in what setting, and how memory has been shaped by later events.
- Archaeology supplies independent material evidence: settlement layout, tools, imports, burials. Dating methods give ranges, not exact years.
- Assess provenance, purpose, audience and silence. What does the source not say, and why?
- Corroborate before concluding. A historian's claim needs evidence plus explicit reasoning.
Worked example
Two sources describe the 1915 Chilembwe uprising. A colonial newspaper calls it a “native rebellion”; a family oral account stresses land loss and forced labour. Neither is automatically reliable. The newspaper was produced for settler readers and may exaggerate danger; the oral account may compress events and omit internal disputes. The historian compares both with court records, mission letters and administrative reports, separates the established fact of the attack from competing explanations of motive, and concludes cautiously.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating “primary” as “unbiased”.
- Dismissing oral evidence as mere gossip.
- Relying on one source or ignoring its author.
- Confusing chronology: a later writer describing an event is not an eyewitness.
- Using present-day categories to explain past choices without saying so.