Examining sources
The one sentence everything here is built on
- Examining sources means using historical skills to select and explain relevant evidence from material you have not seen before.
- There are exactly three historical skills: close reading, comprehension, extracting meaning.
- Notice what is missing from that list: knowing the topic. Background knowledge is not the skill being used, and it cannot substitute for it.
- What matters is what you do with a page of text you have never seen before — and that is something you can drill until it is automatic.
- Mark the sources up. Annotating a source set is the fastest way to make it navigable, and it is impossible to hold six sources in your head at once.
Three things an examined source answer does
- Go beyond the immediately obvious information, to draw a conclusion. Repeating what a source says is comprehension. Working out what it shows is examining.
- Note the questions a source raises. A question you cannot answer from the sources, but which the sources make you want to ask, is a real historical response to them.
- Consider who created the source, and for what purpose. Every source was made by someone, for someone, for a reason. Those three facts change what the source can be trusted to tell you.
- Run all three over any answer. An answer with no conclusion, no question and no comment on who made the source has reported the sources rather than examined them.
The historical concepts a source set is read through
- Sources are examined through the same five concepts every time:
- perspectives — whose view the source gives, and whose it leaves out
- reliability and bias — how far the source can be trusted, and why
- continuity and change — what stayed the same across the set, and what did not
- intent and motivation — why the people in the source acted, and why the source was made
- cause and effect — what produced the event, and what followed from it
- Naming the concept a source speaks to is what turns a pile of documents into evidence about something.
Your own words first, then the source
- The single largest difference between a weak source answer and a strong one is sentence order, not extra knowledge.
- State your own conclusion first. Then attach the source to it as support.
- Opening with a quotation gives the source's answer instead of yours, and leaves the reader to work out what the quotation was for.
- Strong source work also corroborates — checks one source against another — and uses a wide range of the set rather than the two it can get away with.
Worked Example
A source in the set is a newspaper report of a council meeting. Here is a candidate's whole answer to Why did opposition to women standing for the council grow after 1906?
"Source C says that 'the meeting was disorderly and the resolution was carried by nine votes to four'. Source D says that a ratepayer wrote to the paper to complain. This shows there was opposition."
Improve it without adding any new information.
Step 1 — find what the answer is missing. It contains two accurate quotes and no claim of its own. The final sentence, this shows there was opposition, restates the question rather than answering it. Nothing here is wrong; it is simply comprehension.
Step 2 — put your own sentence first. The evidence supports a claim, so state the claim: opposition grew because the council vote made the issue real rather than theoretical, which brought ratepayers who had not previously engaged into the argument.
Step 3 — attach each piece of evidence to a part of that claim. The nine-to-four vote shows the question had moved from discussion to decision. The letter to the editor shows the argument spreading outside the council chamber.
Step 4 — add the element that lifts it. Note who created the source and why: a letter to the editor is written to be published and to persuade, so it is strong evidence that an argument was being made in public, and weak evidence for how many people agreed with it.
The rewritten answer: