Where do Historical Sources come from?
As we've seen, sources can come from anywhere. However,
there is a process by which most sources find their way into the hands
of historians. First, it needs to be stressed that the vast bulk of
material produced by the past has been destroyed, either deliberately or
by the ravages of time. A minuscule proportion of the clothes worn by
people in the past, for example, has survived to be exhibited in costume
and design museums. The same is true of the letters, articles and books
historians often rely upon; many have been torn up, burnt, misplaced or
ravaged by generations of peckish rodents. This is as true of recent
history as it is of the more distant past. The process by which some
pieces survive and come down to us can owe a huge amount to chance.
Attics and back rooms are often full of material from the past, most of
which will be cleared out at some point unless someone spots and keeps
some of the more valuable pieces. Many historians undertaking research
have tales of finding collections of letters or old diaries kept in old
shoe boxes among the family junk of the writer’s descendants. We often
have much more information about governments than about individuals or
society as a whole because many governments kept documents for future
reference from an early stage: in medieval England, for example,
documents were routinely stored, and many now survive, albeit not
without the occasional trace of damage at the hands of a peckish mouse!
Sometimes people recognise much later, however, that papers might be of more general interest and deposit them in an archive. People in modern public life often think about this in advance and sort their papers ready for deposit. The Churchill Archive Centre in Cambridge, for example, has the papers of Sir Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, both of whom had done a lot of preliminary sorting and editing before sending the papers to Cambridge. But it is equally possible even for a leading politician simply to bundle papers into boxes and hand them over. In either case, the archivists must sort them out, read through them, arrange them by category or date, prepare a catalogue giving reference numbers and an idea of the content, and store them in such a way that they can easily be retrieved if a researcher asks to see them. Sometimes papers have been damaged and have to be restored by skilled conservators. Sometimes even the best skill cannot save documents which have been damaged by fire, flood or careless users. At other times, documents simply go missing, or are stolen by unscrupulous users. Admiral Lord Nelson’s insignia, presented to him by the Ottoman Sultan for his victory at the Battle of the Nile, was stolen from the National Maritime Museum and has never been recovered.
To save papers from the effects of repeated use, archives have long sought to transfer their holdings into other forms. This is a massive undertaking and it has inevitably been overtaken by changes in technology. Many archives store holdings on microfilm, which is a reel of celluloid film spooled on to a reader machine with a large screen and read by winding the film from one spool to another. Some microfilm readers have a fast-spooling function, but others have to be operated manually. A later development was microfiche, a small rectangular sheet or fiche of acetate on which a number of documents can be stored and which is fed into a special microfiche reader; when one fiche is finished with it is taken out and the next one inserted. These techniques have been overtaken by the ease of scanning documents and putting them online, but few archives have the time or money to do this for all the documents which have already been put on microfilm or microfiche.
Online storage has the advantage of allowing people to see documents without having to visit the archive (although even this is no substitute for the real thing: experienced historians are aware of how often the most telling details can be found on the back of a document). Another important mode of access to archival documents for those who cannot travel to a particular archive is the published source collection. This can be a very handy way of keeping a collection of relevant source material close at hand, and it has the advantage of carrying notes about the sources. However, the user remains dependent on the compiler-editor's choice of documents. Though printed collections are an indispensable resource for experienced researchers as much as for undergraduates, they can never give a full picture of a particular archive in all its rich complexity, and are no real substitute for a trip to the reading room.
In each unit you will find a brief introduction to the period followed by documentary and visual source material. The sources are followed by some questions to help you make sense of what you are looking at, and you will then be invited to take all the sources of that unit together and to think about what they definitely show, what they might show, and what they definitely do not show.
Sometimes people recognise much later, however, that papers might be of more general interest and deposit them in an archive. People in modern public life often think about this in advance and sort their papers ready for deposit. The Churchill Archive Centre in Cambridge, for example, has the papers of Sir Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, both of whom had done a lot of preliminary sorting and editing before sending the papers to Cambridge. But it is equally possible even for a leading politician simply to bundle papers into boxes and hand them over. In either case, the archivists must sort them out, read through them, arrange them by category or date, prepare a catalogue giving reference numbers and an idea of the content, and store them in such a way that they can easily be retrieved if a researcher asks to see them. Sometimes papers have been damaged and have to be restored by skilled conservators. Sometimes even the best skill cannot save documents which have been damaged by fire, flood or careless users. At other times, documents simply go missing, or are stolen by unscrupulous users. Admiral Lord Nelson’s insignia, presented to him by the Ottoman Sultan for his victory at the Battle of the Nile, was stolen from the National Maritime Museum and has never been recovered.
To save papers from the effects of repeated use, archives have long sought to transfer their holdings into other forms. This is a massive undertaking and it has inevitably been overtaken by changes in technology. Many archives store holdings on microfilm, which is a reel of celluloid film spooled on to a reader machine with a large screen and read by winding the film from one spool to another. Some microfilm readers have a fast-spooling function, but others have to be operated manually. A later development was microfiche, a small rectangular sheet or fiche of acetate on which a number of documents can be stored and which is fed into a special microfiche reader; when one fiche is finished with it is taken out and the next one inserted. These techniques have been overtaken by the ease of scanning documents and putting them online, but few archives have the time or money to do this for all the documents which have already been put on microfilm or microfiche.
Online storage has the advantage of allowing people to see documents without having to visit the archive (although even this is no substitute for the real thing: experienced historians are aware of how often the most telling details can be found on the back of a document). Another important mode of access to archival documents for those who cannot travel to a particular archive is the published source collection. This can be a very handy way of keeping a collection of relevant source material close at hand, and it has the advantage of carrying notes about the sources. However, the user remains dependent on the compiler-editor's choice of documents. Though printed collections are an indispensable resource for experienced researchers as much as for undergraduates, they can never give a full picture of a particular archive in all its rich complexity, and are no real substitute for a trip to the reading room.
How to use Historical Sources
The best advice one can give is simply to look carefully at the source before you, and to ask the most basic question of all: What is this? In other words, what kind of source do we have here? If it is a written document, is it a personal recollection or an official report, a travel narrative or an historical account, a fictional reconstruction or a newspaper article striving for factual accuracy? Or, if it is an image, is it a satirical cartoon or a grand portrait, a cheap engraving or an opulent oil painting? But, to establish this, we must also ask a number of other significant questions. It often helps to picture how the source was originally produced, and the person who produced it: Who were they? Where were they? In what conditions? For whom did they produce this text or object, and why? By asking these questions, we can begin to understand the source, and to think about how it might be useful historical evidence.
In this section we have prepared a number of short collections of source material on a variety of very different areas of history, representing the sort of breadth you will find in the Cambridge History course. Many, perhaps all, of these periods will be unfamiliar to you. Don't let that put you off. You don't need to know anything at all about the periods to be able to read the sources and to glean something from them.In each unit you will find a brief introduction to the period followed by documentary and visual source material. The sources are followed by some questions to help you make sense of what you are looking at, and you will then be invited to take all the sources of that unit together and to think about what they definitely show, what they might show, and what they definitely do not show.
