boxy but good This book is intended primarily for serious students of history. It discusses the foundations of historical research--what kinds of questions do historians ask, what constitutes evidence, what makes a source reliable, and the epistomology that underguards historical inquiry. The language is somewhat dense at times and examples are frequently pulled from European history, a not always felicitous choice for students of American history. Still, the reader leaves the book with an arsenal of questions that he can use in tackling his own research questions or in critiquing the work of others. I am still searching for the brief handbook that will provide the amateur historian with a guide towards writing honest, vital, and accurate local histories. To the best of my knowledge, it does not exist.
Solid introductory reference The trouble with studying history is that it is exceedingly boring in many respects. Unless you are a graduate student of history or just a real history buff, you probably have better ways to spend your time. I like this book a lot, and I only say that because this book is a good, solid introduction to the issue of sources. Oh my goodness, sources. How many biased books are there on every imaginable subject that come to faulty conclusions based on an obvious lack of in-depth research? Anyone can "research" a subject by cherry picking sources and then drawing a conclusion based on someone else's research which is often a compilation of opinions. No one will admit to doing this, but it happens frequently.
What I particularly like about this book is that it approaches history from the standpoint of evaluating sources critically. Certainly history is just a compilation of facts, but how reliable are those facts? No one alive today knew George Washington personally, so how do we really know anything about him? That depends on the nature of the source. We have diaries of first hand accounts. There are letters that he wrote. We know what he looks like based on portraits painted of him. We also know what other people said about him. The problem is that we have to interpret all that information. The key is compiling and evaluating sources. This book addresses many different areas of that and gives various methods for evaluating the credibility of a source. There is a certain amount of critical thinking that goes into such an evaluation and for many people a source is only as credible as the honesty of the person from whom it originated. This usually involves personal attacks and questions about a person's character. This book goes beyond that into other methods of corroborating evidence.
I keep this in my personal library next to other standard books on the subject of researching and writing about history. This book is not about writing history as much as it is an introductory book on researching and evaluating sources. The overall tone of the book is definitely college level. It is probably a bit much for undergraduate history students except for history majors who plan to do a lot of history research. It is definitely suitable for graduate students.
I occasionally refer back to section II (Technical Analysis of Sources) and Section III (Historical Interpretation: The Traditional Basics). Both sections combined are contained in pages 43 through 87 which is not a whole lot of reading. Section II covers a broad range of topics including "Source Criticism: The Great Tradition." I particularly like that part, and I refer back to it on occasion. This subsection covers the analysis of a document from whether the document is an original or a copy down to "The Trustworthiness of the Observer."
Overall, this is an excellent book for the history student, the historian and the history buff. I plan to keep it for the long term for occasional reference whenever I need to brush up on the basics of source criticism and document analysis.
Very helpful introduction History used to be a subject that one could view as somewhat ancillary, as an interesting subject but one that was not really needed to function in the modern world. One could dispense with studying history and still maintain a proper perspective of world events. Any inaccuracies in the reporting of world events were the responsibility of reporters, and historians were viewed in general as occupiers of an ivory tower. They were held to be trustworthy because not much weight was assigned to their scholarly activities.
In general, this attitude about history and historians is now considered to be a mistake. Because of some very volatile and dangerous events in the early twenty-first century, the study of history should be viewed now as one of the most important, if not the most important scholarly activity. One can easily observe the enormous weight that is placed on events of the past, due in part to the ideological agendas that are deeply embedded in contemporary politics. And some historians have chosen to use historical analysis to justify a political agenda, or have acted as sycophants for the institutions that host them. It would be fair to say that some historians are now viewed with extreme skepticism, and many are therefore looking into the historical record and seeking answers on their own. These historical auto-didactics are hungry for tools of analysis in which to study and interpret past events.
This short book gives an introduction to these tools, and any reader, whether of the afore-mentioned type or not, will gain a lot from its perusal. It gives much insight into how historians view and find sources, and is primarily written for non-experts (such as this reviewer) in historical analysis. Philosophers and economists will also discover how the study of history also intersects to a large degree with their own fields.
There is a wealth of information in the book, and many questions are answered as well as raised. Some of these include:
1. What is the nature of historical interpretation? Can historians put themselves in a position where an historical source can be read without giving attention to the historical context that give it meaning? 2. How can an historical source be characterized? 3. Are historians ethically responsible for the content of their works, and if so, to what degree? 4. Is there any value in oral records for historical analysis? In interviewing? 5. What impact has information technology had on historical analysis? 6. How are archives useful for the historian, and does a given archive, taken to be reliable, expand or shrink with time? 7. Will the advent of software to analyze historical texts eventually result in the automation of historical analysis? 8. How do historians assess the accuracy or authenticity of sources? 9. Does the interpretation of an historical document always involve the determination of its intended meaning? 10. Should "firsthand" reports of events always be taken as true? 11. How do historians compare different sources relating to the same historical event? 12. The authors refer to `reasoning by interpolation' or `by analogy'. What exactly is the nature of this kind of reasoning? 13. When can a historian claim that his analysis is correct? Is there a way of quantifying the point at which enough evidence has been collected? 14. Can participants in events claim any special insight into these events over and above what can be obtained by an observer (an historian) who is not, or has not, participated in these events? 15. Can historians view events and documents from an apodictic point of view, i.e. free from bias and any implicit assumptions? 16. Should historians focus on what people did in the past rather than what they thought or felt? 17. Should historians concentrate on deducing the motives of the people in history from their visible actions? 18. The authors point to the use of fields such as psychology to study the "feelings in history." Could the relatively new field of cognitive neuroscience be used to do the same, or even more generally to study the motives, decisions, and mental limitations of people in history? One could view this use as a kind of "historical neurocriticism" and its use could possibly shed considerable light on how people, through their cultures, construct meanings of their experiences and make history. 19. The authors refer to human life as being "too complex" to be analyzed with historical models. What notion of complexity is being used here, and given current methods for dealing with complexity in model-building, would these be of any assistance in the study of history, especially those that attempt to understand to what extent events are caused by human actions? 20. Should historians focus more on studies of "popular culture" and not on "learned culture", i.e. should they analyze historical events in terms of what has recently been called "people's history?" 21. What is the difference between a `linear' theory of history and a `cyclical theory', and is the former always more optimistic than the latter? 22. Can technological innovations and development be used as a reference of time for historical change, i.e. as a kind of clock or calendar in which historians are to delineate events? Such a calendar would not necessarily be a linear ordering of events like the ones that are currently used. In periods of rapid technological development, time will be more compressed than in periods of slow technological development. History could thus be viewed as moving more quickly in the former than in the latter.
A book every graduate student and historian should have. Finding the right sources for a book, article, paper, or project is much more difficult than it seems. Every subject generally has a large list of material available for use. But in order to generate a significant contribution to this field, historians need to sort out the reliable sources that fit their topic. From Reliable Sources helps this process by producing a "guideline" to finding the best material and how it can be put to use. This book is a useful guide to the various techniques professional historians have devised for analyzing sources. It gets across the point of finding the best sources in order to produce quality historical scholarship. The critical analysis of a source is the first step to this process. What follows is whether or not the historian believes that the source is reliable. An important message conveyed by the authors is that no source is perfectly reliable. This leads to the limitations faced by historians today, such as change and causality, and how they deal with them. Its significance to historical writing is vital because historians today use different methodologies than their predecessors. Historiography is a daily changing profession where scholars and historians continually struggle with finding the right sources.
Always check out your source of information History writing is usually considered to have begun with the Greek Herodotus in the 4th century BC with his efforts to distinguish between myth and verifiable stories and that has been the basic problem of writing history ever since. In his history of the Gallic Wars Julius Caesar celebrated the military power of the Romans, along with his own formidable talents as a military leader. Livy fed Roman chauvinism with a history that celebrated eight proud centuries of the Roman past. Thucydides, Polybius, Sallust, Plutarch and Suetonius each brought their own approach or treatment of characters. Augustine portrayed history as an enactment of God's plan. Others wrote accounts to convince readers of the justice of a cause while Guibert of Nogent painted Mohammed in the worst possible light, not caring if the tales were true but only if they helped his case. Matthias Flacius Illyricus's chief purpose was to demonstrate that the Roman Church's claim to be the direct heir of first-century Christianity had no historical basis. Medieval historiography was designed to serve Christianity and in the Middle Ages historians entered the service of lords, monarchs and the state where their primary task was to create glorious pasts, fabricate evidence or select information to give legitimacy to the elite to whom it was offered.
Leopold von Ranke is credited with the founding of the scientific method of history writing but even so he betrays an unclerical ideology and a commitment to the national state so historians must always consider the conditions under which a source was produced, the intentions that motivated it and the reliability of that source. They must also consider the historical context in which it was produced - the events that preceded it, and those that followed, for the significance of any event recorded depends as much on what comes after as it does on what comes before. Had the Boston Tea Party of 1773 not been followed by the American Revolution, it would have had considerably less significance than historians have since given it, and the very same newspaper report of the uprising, in the very same archive, would have had a very different status from the one it actually acquired. Thus, historians are never in a position - and should never imagine themselves being in a position - to read a source without attention to both the historical and the historiographical contexts that give it meaning.
Recording history today has become more complicated because we have such a wealth of information such as television recordings, audiotapes, and videos from the man in the street and not just the written word. This book was written as a guide on how to handle this overload of information and to provide ethical ground rules so that we have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
But the deeper underlying significance of this book is something that all of us must reflect on because we receive viewpoints from different sides of a conflict or different political views and we must understand that any report may also have a hidden agenda or bias. We may not have received the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. If we then go back in history, our beliefs may be founded on the "truths" handed down to us by the victorious faction and may not truly reflect the real truth. As the authors point out: "It is thus one of the primary responsibilities of the historian to distinguish carefully for readers between information that comes literally out of the source itself (in footnotes or by some other means) and that which is a personal interpretation of the material. For the literal content of a citation - what is transcribed from the source itself - historians have no ethical responsibility; for the meaning they impart to that material, of course, they are entirely responsible."
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
