From: Kristi De Simone
Date: 1/19/00
Time: 4:12:39 PM
Remote Name: 155.247.244.53
Kristi De Simone History 67 T,TH 8:40- 10:10 William Cutler January 19, 2000 Week1 Historical records can be both extensive and limited because they contain literally billions of pieces of evidence about the past. Even though historical records are so large they only show a small part of the past. Only a tiny percentage of history is ever recorded or documented. Many sources of information about events and the way that people lived in the past get either destroyed or lost throughout the years. A majority of primary sources we refer today are usually stumbled on to. Primary sources are not always the most reliable way to look at history. On account of all primary sources are biased in someway. Historians analyze primary sources with a few basic rules to help find the reliability. Historians use a time and place rule to judge the quality of the primary source. The closer in time and place a source and its creator were to an event in the past, the more reliable the source will be. Historians also use a bias rule. It says that every source is biases in some way. Documents tell us only what the creator of the document thought happened, or what the creator wants us to think happened. Historian use different kinds of primary sources for different purposes. Published documents are things such as books, newspapers, government documents, literature of all kind, etc. Published documents can be useful toward finding dates of events, and what people's beliefs and values of the time were. The creators all contribute important parts of the puzzled past. Unpublished documents are things such as personal letters, diaries, and journals, wills, etc. They provide interesting clues about the past. They may be difficult to find though, because few copies exist Oral Traditions/ Oral Histories provide important historical evidence about people, especially minority groups, who were excluded from mainstream publications or did not leave behind written primary sources. Visual Documents include photographs, films, paintings, and other types of artwork. Visual documents capture moments in time; they provide evidence of changes overtime. History is based on a collaboration of both fact and opinion, people say," The winners write history". Everybody sees life and events differently and records them the way they experience it. We only know our history from evidence we find through primary sources. We need to always be aware that there is a bias in the sources and put the puzzled past together as accurate as possible.