When conducting your historical research, it is important to understand some key points about both history and primary sources:
History is created by historians.
- History is not a series of past events; history is a historian's reconstruction of the past.
- Historians rely on primary sources to reconstruct the past.
History is based on subjective accounts and interpretation.
- Primary sources are subjective accounts that reflect the biases, emotional state, knowledge, and experiences of the creator at a particular moment, rather than an objective account of facts.
- A historian brings his or her particular knowledge, experiences, and biases to the interpretation of primary sources.
History is always changing.
- Historians' ideas about the past are constantly changing as new information is discovered and new interpretations are applied to primary sources.
- Written history never remains the same. Historians continually employ new information and new interpretations to revise written history.
As you conduct your research and apply your own ideas to primary sources, you too are creating a history that could alter how we think of the past. In historical research, the past and the present speak to each other and shape the ways we understand both.
quick review
History is an objective chronology of past events.