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Published/printed // unpublished/manuscript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

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

3. Analysing Sources

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 Reliability of the evidence contained in historical documents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

5. 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.’

6. 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. ‘

7. 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’.

8. 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

9. 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’.

10. 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

11. Cortes: Hero or Villian?