Working with Primary Sources

Working with Written Documents

Written documents are the most common type of primary source that historians use. Analysis of documents usually begins with the basics:

Who wrote the document?
When and where was it written?
What type of document is it (for example, a letter to a friend, a political decree, an exposition of a religious teaching)?

Sometimes the document itself will provide answers to these questions. On other occasions you may need to rely on the introductions.

Once these basics have been established, a historian is then likely to consider several further questions, which situate the document in its particular historical context:

Why was the document written and for what audience? Under what circumstances was it composed?
What point of view does it reflect? What other views or opinions is the document arguing against?

Inspiration and intention are crucial factors that shape the form and content of a source. For instance, one might examine a document differently depending on whether it was composed for a private or a public readership or whether it was intended to be read by a small elite or a wider audience.

Still another level of analysis seeks to elicit useful information from the document.

What material in the document is believable, and what is not?
What might historians learn from this document?
What can the document tell us about the individual who produced it and the society from which he or she came?

Here historical imagination is essential. Informed by knowledge of the context and the content of the document, your imagination will help you to read it through the eyes of its author and its audience. How might this document have been understood at the time it was written? But in using your imagination, you must take care not to read into the documents your own assumptions and understandings. It is a delicate balance, a kind of dance that historians constantly undertake. Even documents that contain material that historians find unbelievable can be useful, for we seek not only to know what actually happened in the past but also to grasp the world as the people who lived that past understood it. Historians sometimes speak about reading documents “against the grain,” looking for meanings that the author might not have intended to convey. For example, the Law Code of Hammurabi in the document feature of Chapter 2 depicts an impressive system of justice in ancient Mesopotamia, but it can also be read as an account of the numerous problems or conflicts that the society had to confront.

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While each document must be read and understood individually, historians typically draw their strongest conclusions when they analyze a number of documents together. The document features in Ways of the World are designed to explore sets of primary sources that address a central theme of the chapter by drawing on several related texts. In the documents for Chapter 11, for example, you can reflect on the Mongol Empire by reading several accounts written by Mongols themselves and several others composed by Russian or Chinese victims of Mongol aggression. Or in Chapter 21, you will need to balance several quite positive assessments of life under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin with others that are devastatingly critical of that communist regime during the 1930s.