Engaging with Primary Sources in a Historical Context
What the domain asks
This domain assesses how you engage with primary sources - material produced at the time or by participants - rather than simply summarising them. You must identify origin, purpose, audience and context, test reliability and usefulness, corroborate across sources, and use specific evidence to answer a historical question.
Core rules
- Origin and purpose first. For every source, ask: who made it, when, where, why, and for whom? A page from an 1893 suffrage petition and an anti-suffrage newspaper editorial were both made during the campaign, but their purposes differ.
- Primary does not mean true. A source can be genuine and still selective. Reliability depends on the question: a protest poster may be unreliable for crowd numbers but reliable evidence of protest messaging.
- Corroborate, don't just collect. Compare two or three sources for agreement and conflict. Explain the conflict using origin and purpose.
- Quote or point to detail. Use names, dates, phrases and visual elements. Link each detail to the focus question.
- Silences matter. Ask whose voices are missing and why, such as working-class women in suffrage sources or Māori signatures on the Treaty.
Worked example
Focus: What arguments did New Zealanders use for and against women's suffrage in 1893? Source A is a page from the suffragists' petition with signatures and addresses; Source B is a newspaper editorial arguing that politics would corrupt women. Reasoning: Source A's origin as an organised petition shows breadth of support, but signatures alone do not prove arguments; pair it with a suffrage speech or leaflet. Source B's purpose is to persuade readers, so it is useful for opposition arguments, not for measuring public opinion. Corroborating a third source, such as a parliamentary debate, shows the debate moved between claims about women's "natural role" and claims about equal citizenship.
Traps
Describing a source instead of analysing it; writing "biased" with no explanation; ignoring audience; treating one source as representing all women; failing to answer the focus question.