Finding perspectives in your sources
Where perspectives are recorded
- Sources made to persuade. Letters to editors, speeches, pamphlets, campaign material, editorials. The position is explicit and the reasons are stated, because persuading requires both.
- Sources made to record. Minutes, court records, reports. They record actions and rarely reasons — a vote tells you the position and not the reasoning.
- Sources made in private. Letters, diaries. Rare in school research and extremely valuable, because the person had no audience to manage.
- Sources made later. Recollections, oral history, memoirs. Strong on how a position felt and why it seemed right; weak on the sequence, and shaped by everything that happened since.
- Historians' writing. Explicit reasoning, published to be checked. The most transparent perspectives you will find, and the ones students least often use.
Reading a source for a perspective, in five steps
- Find the position. What did they want to happen or not happen?
- Find the stated reason. What justification did they give, in their own words? Quote it short.
- Find the reason not given. What interest did they have that the source does not mention? Say it as an inference, not as a fact.
- Find the action. What did they do — vote, write, subscribe, organise, stay away? The action is the most certain part.
- Find the argument they did not make. What alternative case was available and unused? This is where the best observations come from, because a choice among arguments is evidence about the audience.
Getting perspectives from a group rather than an individual
- The standard permits perspectives drawn from an identified historical context — a group's position established from the period.
- A group perspective needs several sources, not one person speaking for many. One letter is one person; three letters making the same argument is the beginning of a group position.
- Say how representative you think it is, and why. These are three of perhaps a dozen ratepayers who wrote to the paper, so this is a position held publicly by an articulate minority — I cannot show how widely it was shared.
- Watch for the silent. People without access to print leave no perspective in most archives. Naming who is missing is a strong move, and often the honest one.
- Actions can evidence a group perspective where words cannot. A subscription list, a turnout, a vote count, a petition. What people did in numbers is the best evidence of what groups held.
Using historians as perspectives
- The standard names historians' viewpoints as a permitted source of perspective, and it is the most under-used option in the whole standard.
- Historians make their reasoning explicit — they state what they are explaining, what evidence they use, and where they differ from others. That gives you all five parts of a perspective in one place.
- Two historians reading the same event differently is a ready-made pair. The interpretation question is then: what accounts for the difference?
- Usually it is one of three things: they had different evidence; they were explaining different things; or they weight the same evidence differently because they are asking different questions. Naming which is a discernment move.
- You do not need many. Two historians, read properly, are worth more than a list of names.
Testing that your perspectives are genuinely different
- Different positions, not different wording. Two people can phrase a shared position differently and hold one perspective between them.
- Ask what each would have wanted to happen. If the answers are the same, it is one perspective.
- Ask what each had at stake. Different interests usually mean genuinely different perspectives even where the stated positions overlap.
- Ask whether they disagreed about facts, about meaning, or about what should follow. These are three different kinds of disagreement, and saying which you have is depth.
- Two well-evidenced perspectives beat four thin ones, and at Excellence the descriptor asks for significant supporting evidence — which means substantial evidence per perspective, not per submission.
Worked Example
Worked example
A student researching the Waipuna borough dispute (invented) has four candidate perspectives.
- 1: The 1906 letter-writer, "A Ratepayer of Twenty Years" — opposed.
- 2: The 1907 letter-writer, another ratepayer — also opposed, differently worded.
- 3: Miss Alice Renwick's 1911 campaign committee — in favour.
- 4: Two historians writing in 1994 and 2019 about the same borough.
Which should they use?
Answer:
Step 1 — test 1 and 2 for genuine difference. Both opposed; both wanted the same outcome. Ask what each had at stake and what reason each gave. If both argued from commercial competence, they are one perspective with two authors — and using both is describing a position twice rather than interpreting two.
Unless the reasons differ. If the first argues from competence and the second from law or propriety, they are two perspectives inside one camp, which is a more interesting finding than an opposed pair — because it shows the opposition was not unified.
Step 2 — assess 3. A campaign committee gives a position, a stated reason (nine years on the Hospital Ladies' Committee), and an action (organising and printing). Three of the five parts are directly evidenced, which makes it a strong perspective.
But note its limitation: a handbill is a committee's public case, not necessarily Renwick's own view. Say which you are claiming. This is the committee's presented perspective; I have no source for what Renwick herself thought.
Step 3 — assess 4, which is the strongest and the one most students would skip. Two historians, twenty-five years apart, writing about the same borough. All five parts are explicit: their positions, their reasons, their evidence, and — in a good monograph — their disagreement with each other.
The interpretive question is what accounts for the difference, and there are three usual answers: different evidence (the later one may have used records unavailable in 1994), different questions (one explaining the council's decision, the other explaining the campaign), or the same evidence weighted differently. Establishing which is a discernment move, and it is checkable from their footnotes.
Step 4 — the selection. Use 3 and 4, plus 1 or 2 but not both — unless their reasons genuinely differ, in which case use both and drop 3.
Step 5 — name who is missing. Every perspective in my set belonged to someone who could publish or was written about. The women of Waipuna who did not stand, and the ratepayers who neither wrote nor voted, are absent from my sources entirely. That sentence is worth writing.