SOURCES OF HISTORY

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Gehla Dana Marie B. Tumanan

SOURCES OF HISTORY

Primary Sources

Imagine you are a detective investigating a crime. What would you need to help you find out what

happened? What would you be looking for when you visited the scene of the crime? That's right - clues

or evidence. Historians are no different. When they want to find out what happened in the past they

need to look at the evidence. We call evidence that was created at the time of the event, primary

evidence. Lots of sources can be counted as primary sources or evidence - letters, newspapers, maps,

photographs, pictures, objects and film (just to name a few).

Primary evidence can be broken down into four main categories: written sources, images, artefacts and

oral testimony.

Written sources

If you asked people to give you example of a historical record or primary source, most would people

would probably mention some kind of written source. They might say official reports, files, court

documents, financial papers, newspapers, old family papers or official files. All these written sources can

be used by historians to find out about the past. They might not have been created for that purpose but

they are still very useful.

We're going to take a look at some examples - an official document, entries from a diary, an inventory,

extracts from a newspaper and a map - to see how written sources can be used. When you look at the

sources think about why they were made or created and how this differs from how we use them today.

Images

Every day we find things out by looking at different kinds of images. We look at photographs, cartoons,

watch television and look at the internet. Historians are no different. They can use different kinds of

images from the past to find things out. We are going to use three examples - photographs, cartoons

and film - to discover what they can tell us about the past and how we can use them

Artefacts

As well as using books, documents, images and oral testimony, historians also use artefacts or objects to

help them learn about the past. People have learnt a lot about history by looking at things that

archaeologists have found. We know things about the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, the Romans and

Medieval history that we wouldn't have known if we only had written evidence to look at. But using

artefacts is not just useful for the study of ancient and medieval history, artefacts can enliven any period

of history.

Oral testimony

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Gehla Dana Marie B. Tumanan SOURCES OF HISTORY Primary Sources Imagine you are a detective investigating a crime. What would you need to help you find out what happened? What would you be looking for when you visited the scene of the crime? That's right - clues or evidence. Historians are no different. When they want to find out what happened in the past they need to look at the evidence. We call evidence that was created at the time of the event, primary evidence. Lots of sources can be counted as primary sources or evidence - letters, newspapers, maps, photographs, pictures, objects and f ...
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