The task of historians might well be compared with that of Sisyphus, the ancient Greek king who, having offended the gods, was condemned to eternally roll a large rock up a mountain, only to have it ceaselessly fall back down. Like Sisyphus, historians work at a mission that can never be completely successful—to recapture the past before it is lost forever in the mists of time and fading memory. The evidence available is always partial and fragmentary. Historians themselves are limited and fallible, for they operate often at a great distance—in both time and culture—from those they are studying. And they rarely agree on important matters, divided as they are by sex, nationality, race, and values, all of which shape their understandings of the past.

Despite these challenges, scholars and students alike have long found their revisiting of the past a compelling project—intensely interesting, personally meaningful, and even fun—particularly when working with “primary” or “original” sources, which are the building blocks of all historical accounts. These sources include written documents, such as letters, diaries, law codes, official records, sacred texts, and much more, as well as visual sources, including artistic products, buildings, and artifacts—all of them generated at the time of or soon after the events that they describe or depict. Such sources are windows into the lives of our ancestors, though these windows are often smudged and foggy. Primary sources enable us to listen in on multiple conversations from the past, eavesdropping, as it were, on our ancestors, though frequently hearing only snippets. According to one witty observer, this is history as gossip.

Using primary sources effectively is no easy task. Unlike contemporary history books, which are designed explicitly for a modern audience, the sources that historians work with were produced in circumstances and with cultural assumptions that are often quite unfamiliar to twenty-first-century students. Furthermore, our ancestors’ understandings of their own lives and time were subject to distortions, fabrications, misunderstandings, and ambiguity. And so working with sources requires effort—very careful reading or observation, systematic analysis, and historical imagination.

The documents and visual sources at the end of each chapter of Ways of the World provide an opportunity for you to practice the work of historians. It is a kind of guided “history laboratory.” In working with these materials, you are “doing history,” much like lab experiments in chemistry courses represent “doing science.” Since each document or visual sources feature explores some theme of the chapter, the chapter narrative itself provides a broad context for analyzing these sources. The introduction to each feature and to each document or image offers more specific context or background information, while questions provide specific things to look for as you examine each document or image as well as a focus for using those sources collectively to probe larger historical issues.