Sources, Evidence, and How Historians Work

History is not simply a list of things that happened. It is an argument about the past built from evidence, and the quality of that argument depends on how carefully a historian handles the traces the past has left behind. This lesson introduces the raw material of the discipline: sources, and the way trained historians turn them into evidence.

Sources versus evidence

A source is any surviving trace of the past: a letter, a photograph, a tax record, a speech, a piece of pottery, a folk song. A source only becomes evidence when a historian uses it to answer a specific question. The same source can be evidence for very different things. A wartime propaganda poster is weak evidence for what the war was actually like, but it is excellent evidence for what a government wanted its citizens to be