29 May 2014
Sources err. Sources quibble. Sources exaggerate. Sources misremember. Sources are biased. Sources have egos and ideologies. Sources jostle for a toehold in the marketplace of ideas.
So why do we invest so much of our own energy into the citation of those sources? Because all sources are not created equal. History is not a collection of raw facts we simply look up and copy down. The past is still a little-known world that we explore with curiosity and confusion. As we probe its depths, we appreciate resources that save us time. We crave materials we can confidently trust. Yet historical truths are rarely rooted in either shortcuts or comfort.
Historian Robert Winks once wrote, "The past was real, but truth is relative."* It is also intangible and indefinable. Unlike Justice Potter Stewart’s famed definition of obscenity, we cannot say, “I’ll know it when I see it.” We won’t. Historical truth is physically pliable. We begin every research project with a vision of that pot of truth awaiting us at the rainbow’s end. When we reach that end, we have only a mound of dough—dough that will be manipulated, stretched, shaped, and flavored by our own experience, judgment, and standards.
The principles covered in EE's Chapter 1, "Fundamentals of Evidence Analysis," and the practices explained in the other 13 chapters, are designed to help history’s truthseekers sift their sources, mix them well, and then knead their their dough into something that resembles probability.
Extracted from EE 1.1 and 1.11.
*Robert Winks, The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1968), 39.