3.1.1 How Historians Build Knowledge Notes

Historians Work With Incomplete Information On Unrepeatable Events

1. Unlike scientists who design controlled experiments, historians work with materials that were never intended to provide complete or accurate information for future scholars studying unrepeatable events.
2. These include propaganda, personal communication, administrative record-keeping, artistic expression.
3. This creates fundamental constraints on what historical knowledge can achieve.
4. The past must always be interpreted through surviving fragments that reflect the biases, limitations, and agendas of their creators.

The Source Reliability Problem

1. Historical sources are shaped by the motivations, biases, and limitations of the people who created them:
   1. A general's memoir emphasizes how strategic and smart they were.
   2. A newspaper deadline shapes which details get included
   3. Personal diaries record what people think are worth remembering.
2. So, instead of seeking objective truth about past events, historians interpret subjective accounts to understand how people experienced and made sense of their circumstances.

Corroboration and Its Limits

1. Historians seek corroboration by comparing multiple sources, but this can still complicate things.
2. When sources agree, it might indicate reliable evidence.
3. Or, that they're all copying from the same original source, reflecting shared propaganda, or representing similar social positions rather than independent verification.
4. Disagreement between sources can be equally informative.
5. When Union and Confederate soldiers described Gettysburg differently, both accounts contained valuable information about how the battle was experienced from different perspectives.
6. The Union emphasis on strategic victory reflected morale-building needs, while Confederate focus on miscommunication revealed internal problems with command structure.

The Construction of Historical Narratives

1. Historians make interpretive choices about causation, significance, and emphasis that fundamentally shape what becomes accepted as historical knowledge.
2. The same evidence supports radically different explanations for major events.
3. For example, World War I can be understood through political alliances, economic competition, nationalist tensions, or individual decision-making.
4. Each framework highlights certain aspects of available evidence while marginalizing others.
5. And while these choices aren't arbitrary, they aren't determined by evidence alone either.
6. Social concerns, available analytical tools, and cultural values frame the questions historians ask and how they interpret answers.

Reading Sources Against Their Intended Purpose

1. To Historians, context becomes more important than content in many cases.
2. They read sources "against the grain" to uncover unintended information.

Example

• A 1960s newspaper article about civil rights reflects period attitudes as much as it reports events.
• Understanding those attitudes becomes crucial historical knowledge, even when the factual reporting is questionable.

History Is Written by People Who Could Write

1. For most of human history, literacy was restricted to small elites: priests, government officials, wealthy merchants.
2. Their concerns dominated the historical record yes because they were more "important" but more importantly because they were the only ones creating records.
3. The result is that we know far more about palace politics than peasant life, more about wars than daily routines, more about men's public activities than women's experiences.
4. These create structural features of how information gets preserved across time.

What Historians Do About Missing Evidence

1. These gaps become more problematic when historians don't recognize them.
2. Traditional narratives about "primitive" societies often reflect the biases of literate colonizers and what looks like absence of civilization might actually be absence of the particular kind of record-keeping that historians were trained to recognize.
3. That's why modern historians develop creative approaches to work around incomplete evidence:
   1. Archaeological analysis of garbage dumps reveals consumption patterns that official records never mention.
   2. Statistical analysis of church records can reconstruct demographic patterns.
   3. Linguistic analysis traces cultural exchanges that left no written documentation.
4. But still, these methods have limitations.
5. Material evidence can show what people used but not what they thought about it.
6. Statistical patterns reveal trends but obscure individual experiences.