System of classification: Primary sources Range of primary sources Secondary sources System of classification: Published/printed // unpublished/manuscript Authorship: government, private corporations, etc

How do we use sources? Source-oriented approach Problem-oriented approach Problems with these?

Analysing Sources

Reliability of the evidence contained in historical documents Scholarly source criticism Postmodernist critique Consensus view

Source: Jenkins, K. (1991) Re-thinking History, London: Routledge Postmodernism History and the Past Source: Jenkins, K. (1991) Re-thinking History, London: Routledge ‘... History is one of a series of discourses about the world. These discourses do not create the world (the physical stuff on which we apparently live) but they do appropriate it and give it all the meanings it has. That bit of the world which is history’s (ostensible) object of enquiry is the past. History as discourse is thus in a different category to that which it discourses about, that is, the past and history are not stitched into each other such that only one historical reading of the past is absolutely necessary. The past and history float free of each other, they are ages and miles apart.’

History: A Personal Construct Source: Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (Routledge, London, 1991) ‘… no matter how verifiable, how widely acceptable or checkable, history remains inevitably a personal construct, a manifestation of the historian’s perspective as a ‘narrator’. Unlike direct memory (itself suspect) history relies on someone else’s eyes and voice; we see through an interpreter who stands between past events & our readings of them. Of course, as Lowenthal says, written history ‘in practice’ cuts down the historian’s logical freedom to write anything by allowing the reader access to his/her sources, but the historian’s viewpoint and predilections still shape the choice of historical materials, and our own personal constructs determine what we make of them. The past that we ‘know’ is always contingent upon our own views, our own ‘present’. Just as we are ourselves products of the past so the known past (history) is an artefact of ours. Nobody, however immersed in the past, can divest himself/herself of his/her own knowledge & assumptions. ‘

John Tosh (2002 ed. ) The Pursuit of History, Harlow: Longman, pp ‘…daily life tells us that language works extremely well in many situations where meaning is clearly communicated and correctly inferred. On any other assumption human interaction would break down completely. If language demonstrably serves these practical functions in the present, there is no reason why it should not be understood in a similar spirit when preserved in documents dating from the past. Of course there is an element of indeterminacy about all language; the lapse of time serves to increase it …. Historians frequently acknowledge that they cannot fathom all the levels of meaning contained in their documents. But to maintain that no text from the past can be read as an accurate reflection of something outside itself flies in the face of common experience…. The meanings that link words and things are not arbitrary and infinite, but follow conventions created by real culture and real social relations. The task of scholarship is to identify these conventions in their historical specificity, and to take full account of them in interpreting the sources’.

What was the author doing in creating a text? Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics I, Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002) What was the author doing in creating a text? Texts = linguistic actions Literal meaning Intended force (illocutionary force) Uptake needs to occur: understanding meanings = understanding intentions

Prevailing conventions ‘… we need first to grasp the nature and range of things that could recognizably have been done using that particular concept, in the treatment of that particular theme, at that particular time’.

Key task for the historian Deciding upon the most appropriate lines of enquiry for interpreting particular texts Not limited to the texts themselves Wider discursive fields of social interaction

Cortes: Hero or Villian?