A Student's Online Guide to History
HOW TO RESEARCH A PAPER: USING EVIDENCE

Types of Evidence
Primary sources
There are two basic forms of historical evidence: primary and secondary. Primary sources record the actual words of someone who participated in or witnessed the events described or of someone who got his or her information from participants. These can be:

  • Newspaper accounts
  • Diaries, notebooks, and letters
  • Minutes
  • Interviews
  • Any works written by persons who claim firsthand knowledge of an event
  • Official statements by established organizations or significant personages such as royal decrees, church edicts, political party platforms, laws, and speeches
  • Official records and statistics, such as those concerning births, marriages, deaths, taxes, deeds, and court trials
  • Artifacts, or things people made in the past, such as houses, public buildings, tools, clothing, and much more

Recent history has also been recorded by:

  • Photographs
  • Films
  • Audio- and videotapes

These recordings of events as they actually happened are also primary forms of evidence.

Secondary sources
Secondary sources record the findings of someone who did not observe the event but who investigated primary evidence. Most history books and articles fall into this category, although some are actually tertiary (third level) evidence because they rely not on primary evidence but are themselves drawn from secondary sources. When your own history research paper is finished, it will be secondary or tertiary evidence to anyone who may use it in the future.

Determining the Reliability of Evidence
The problem of determining the reliability of evidence is a serious one. Secondary and even primary sources can be fraudulent, inaccurate, or biased. Eyewitness accounts may be purposely distorted in order to avert blame or to bestow praise on a particular individual or group. Without intending to misinform, even on-the-scene judgments can be incorrect. Sometimes, the closer you are to an event, the more emotionally involved you are, and this distorts your understanding of it. We can all recall events in which we completely misunderstood the feelings, actions, and even words of another person. Historians have to weigh evidence carefully to see if those who have participated in an event understood it well enough to accurately describe it, and whether later authors understood the meaning of the primary sources they used. Official statements present another problem — that of propaganda or concealment. A government, group, or institution may make statements that it wishes others to believe but that are not true. What a group says may not be what it does. This is especially true in politics.

Testing consistency and collaboration
To check the reliability of evidence, historians use the tests of consistency and corroboration: Does the evidence contradict itself and does it agree with evidence from other sources? Historical research always involves checking one source against another. It might turn out, for example, that parts of each account are correct and other parts are distorted in some way. Sometimes there is no one true source for the history of an event. Still, the more primary sources you read, the closer you will come to knowing the event in all its details and meanings.

Looking for bias
The bias of a source also presents difficulties. People’s attitudes toward the world influence the way they interpret events. For example, you and your parents may have different attitudes toward music, sex, religion, or politics. These differences can cause you to disagree with them about the value of a rock concert, a Sunday sermon, or the president. Historians have their own attitudes toward the subjects they are investigating, and these cause them to draw different conclusions about the character and importance of religious, political, intellectual, and other movements. Later historians must take these biases into account when weighing the reliability of evidence.

Interpreting and Organizing Evidence
In analyzing the evidence, historians must find some way of organizing it so that they can make clear its meaning. A mass of facts and opinions concerning a subject is not a historical study. The task of the trained historian is to arrange the material so that it supports a particular conclusion. This conclusion may have been in the historian’s mind at the outset, or it might be the result of investigation. If the evidence does not appear to support the conclusion, however, then the historian must either change that conclusion or seek other evidence to support it.

Once a historian is satisfied that research has uncovered sufficient evidence to support a particular conclusion, then he or she works to display the evidence in a manner that will clearly show that the conclusion drawn is a proper one. If any evidence that leads to other conclusions is uncovered, the historian has a responsibility to include it. In doing so, he or she must show how the supporting evidence is stronger than the nonsupporting evidence. There are many ways of organizing evidence in support of a conclusion. The historian’s arguments in favor of a particular conclusion must be strong and convincing, and the logic of these arguments must not be faulty.

You will confront the issue faced by all historians when you conduct your own historical research, an assignment that is part of all advanced (and some beginning) history courses.

The Computer and Historical Research
The computer has become an important way of gathering historical data in all fields, not just in quantitative history. Most historians do not use computers to generate new data but to gain easier access to existing sources of historical information. Unpublished information residing in archives scattered around the world can be made available online to historians (and students) with access to computers that are part of a network like the Internet. Primary sources that have been entered into computer databases can be read (and even printed out) by researchers anywhere. Secondary sources that are available only in special libraries can be read in this way also — provided that they have been put into computer-readable form. Already, history databases, containing millions of individual historical statistics, are available in many college libraries. The texts of documents, articles, and, in some cases, whole books, can be brought to your computer screen. With more advanced equipment, researchers can gain access to art, photographs, and even films that once resided only in faraway archives.