Working with evidence

Who made it, when, and why

HintBefore you trust a document, ask where it came from and whose hand produced it.

The whyProvenance is the backstory of the source. A diary kept on the day and a memoir dictated forty years later can describe the same event with very different reliability.

The thirteenth century

HintTake the leading digits and add one; the 1200s sit a number higher than you expect.

The whyCounting starts at year 1, so years 1 to 100 are the first hundred-year block and the 1200s are the thirteenth. This off-by-one catches almost everybody at first.

250 BC

HintBefore the count restarts at year one, the numbers run backwards towards it.

The whyBC years count down towards year 1, so a larger BC number is further in the past. AD years, sometimes written CE, count upwards in the way we expect.

primary

HintThe first-hand kind, made by someone who was actually there.

The whyA soldier's letter home from 1916 is one; a book about the war written in 2020 is not. The same object can change category depending on the question you are asking of it.

A secondary source

HintIt was written long after the events, by someone drawing on other people's work.

The whyIt repackages research done by others. It would count differently for a different question, though, such as how schools in the 2020s chose to teach the Tudors.

A judgement worked out from clues in a source

HintReading between the lines: what a picture suggests, not what its caption states.

The whyA good one names the exact detail it rests on. Saying a family was wealthy because servants stand behind them in the photograph is an inference; saying they were wealthy on its own is only an assertion.

Street names

HintLook up at the sign on the corner; Tanner Row and Foundry Hill were not chosen at random.

The whyNames like Shambles, Wharf Road or Colliery Lane preserve vanished trades. Old buildings, churches, war memorials and maps do the same job, which makes local history evidence you can walk to.

The diary

HintMemory fades and reshapes itself, whereas a record made on the spot has had no time to drift.

The whyCloseness in time usually helps accuracy, but not always: the man writing on the night saw only his own corner of the field, while the older writer may have learned the wider picture since.

Cross-referencing

HintTwo accounts that agree independently give you far more confidence than one on its own.

The whyWhere sources agree you can be more confident. Where they disagree you have found the interesting question: why would two people describe the same event so differently?

What its maker wanted people to believe

HintEven a lie is solid evidence of one thing: the aim behind telling it.

The whyUsefulness and reliability are separate tests. A government poster is unreliable about the facts of a battle but excellent evidence of the mood the government was trying to create.

To persuade people to think or act a certain way

HintIt was not made to inform you; it was made to move you.

The whyBecause it is designed to work on an audience, it shows what its makers feared and wanted. A wartime poster urging silence reveals a genuine official worry about careless talk.

Who collected them, and how

HintNumbers look neutral, but a person decided which cases counted and which did not.

The whyA census may miss people who avoided officials, and casualty lists may exclude civilians or the missing. Numbers deserve the same sharp questions you would ask of words.