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Working with Written Sources

Written sources or 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, for what audience, and under what circumstances?
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?

In all of this, historical imagination is essential. Informed by knowledge of the context and the content of the document, your imagination will help you read it through the eyes of its author and its audience. You should ask yourself: 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. And so historians sometimes speak about reading documents “against the grain,” looking for meanings that the author might not have intended to convey.

While each source must be read and understood individually, historians typically draw their strongest conclusions when they analyze a number of such sources 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 Persian victims of Mongol aggression. And in Chapter 22, you will encounter a debate among Muslims about the relationship between their faith and the modern world, with positions ranging from those that advocate the removal of Islam from public life to those that seek to embed Islamic law in the social and cultural fabric of their countries.