Historical research

Present traces of the past Problems: History is a selection of a selection – historians select from available evidence which is a selection of what happened in the past. Present traces of the past Problems: Too little evidence Too much evidence Who decides what is significant?

Problems: Memory fallible Evidence can be ambiguous Prejudice common

historians cannot travel back to the past to re-observe and take better notes – can use only what was left behind Language – means for eyewitness to give us their personal knowledge (records Records require interpretation Historians cannot describe everything; respond to a question they ask; they select evidence relevant to stories they want to tell Make conjectures about the past Should historical writing be objective, and denotative rather than connotative, given the fact that emotion is a part of human experience Cause cannot be observed- has to be inferred

Problems of primary sources: Fallible eye witness Social bias Deliberate manipulation Weakness of the raw material (sources) - most people that ever lived and most events that ever happened were not recorded Have to use sources never intended for future interpretations History interprets – constructs plausible meanings from evidence left behind Text can never correspond to the past as it was (because past was not a text)_. Topic choice bias Confirmation bias National bias

Reflection: Reflect on what the investigation revealed to you about the methods used by historians and the challenges they face when investigation topics like your own Section worth 4 marks Discuss challenges and limitations of studying history Consider some of the following questions to address in your reflection section:

Pg. 245 – move to global war – more questions What is history? Is it more creative and interpretative as opposed to scientific and objective? How did the nature of your investigation present specific challenges to finding reliable evidence? What methods did historians sue? Is it plausible to capture the entirety of an event? What are the challenges of causation?