Sources of Historical Data - 0
Sources of Historical Data - 0
Sources of Historical Data - 0
• Are sourced from artifacts that have been left by the past.
• ARTIFACTS
1. Relics or Remains
2. Testimonies of Witnesses to the past.
Historical Source
Historical sources: materials from which the historians construct meaning.
A source is an object from the past or a testimony concerning the past on which
historians depend to create their own depiction of that past.
A historical work or interpretation is thus the result such depiction.
The source provides evidence about the existence of an event; a historical
interpretation is an argument about the event.
Interpretative Vs Descriptive
Three Categories
1. Narrative or Literary
2. Diplomatic or Juridical
3. Social Documents
Narrative or Literature
• Chronicles or tracts presented in narrative form, written to impart a message whose
motives for their composition vary widely.
• For examples, a scientific tract is typically composed in order to inform
contemporaries or succeeding generations; Newspaper article: to shape opinion;
Ego document or personal narrative such as diary or memoir; Novel or film;
Biography; Panegyric: a public speech or published text in praise of someone;
Hagiography : writing of the lives of saints.
Diplomatic Sources
• Understood to be those which document/ record an existing legal situation or
create a new one.
• It is treated as the purest, the best source by professional historians.
Examples: Charter , Judicial proceedings, Will, Mortgage agreement, Papal Bull etc
• Diplomatic sources possess specific formal properties such as hand and print style,
the ink, the seal, for external properties and rhetorical devices and images for
internal properties.
Social Documents
• information pertaining to economic, social, political, or judicial
significance.
• They are records kept by bureaucracies.
Examples:
Government reports ( municipal accounts, research findings, and
documents like these parliamentary procedures, civil registry records,
property registers, and records of census.
Non-written Sources of History
Two Types
1. Material Evidence
2. Oral Evidence
Material Evidence
• Also known as Archaeological evidence
• Examples: artistic creations such as pottery, jewelry, dwellings,
graves, churches, roads, and others that tell a story about the past.
• They can tell about the ways of life of people in the past and their
culture.
• Historians can also get from drawings, etchings, paintings, films
and photographs (visual representations of the past).
Oral Evidence