THE MEANING OF HISTORY, SOURCES OF HISTORICAL DATA, &

HISTORICAL CRITICISMS Overview

Lesson 1 introduces history as a discipline and as a narrative. It discusses the limitation of

historical knowledge, history as the subjective process of re-creation, and historical method and
historiography. Lesson 2 presents the sources of historical data, the written and non-written
sources of history, as well as the differentiation of primary and secondary sources of information or
data. Lesson 3 discusses historical criticisms, namely, external and internal criticisms. These are
important aspects in ascertaining the authenticity and reliability of primary sources upon which
narratives are crafted.

Lesson 1: THE MEANING OF HISTORY

History is derived from the Greek word historia which means learning by inquiry. The Greek
philosopher, Aristotle, looked upon historyas the systematic accounting of a set of natural
phenomena, that is, taking into consideration the chronological arrangement of the account. This
explained that knowledge is derived through conducting a process of scientific investigation of past
events. The word History is referred usually for accounts of phenomena, especially human affairs in
chronological order. There are theories constructed by historians in investigating history: the
factual history and the speculative history. Factual history presents readers the plain and basic
information vis-à-vis the events that took place (what), the time and date with which the events
happened (when), the place with which the events took place, and the people that were involved
(who). Speculative history, on the other hand, goes beyond facts because itis concerned about the
reasons for which events happened (why), and the way they happened (how). It tries to speculate
on the cause and effect of an event (Cantal, Cardinal, Espino & Galindo, 2014).

History deals with the study of past events. Individuals who write about history are called
historians. They seek to understand the present by examining what went before. They undertake
arduous historical research to come up with a meaningful and organized rebuilding of the past. But
whose past are we talking about? This is the basic question that the historian needs to answer
because this sets the purpose and framework of a historical account. Hence, a salient feature of
historical writing is the facility to give meaning and impact value to a group of people about their
past.
The practice of historical writing is called historiography, the 2 traditional method in doing
historical research that focus on gathering of documents from different libraries and archives to
form a pool of evidence needed in making a descriptive or analytical narrative. The modern
historical writing does not only include examination of documents but also the use of research
methods from related areas of study such as archeology and geography.

The Limitation of Historical Knowledge The incompleteness of records has limited man‘s
knowledge of history. Most human affairs happen without leaving any evidence or records of any
kind, no artifacts, or if there are, no further evidence of the human setting in which to place
surviving artifacts. Although it may have happened, but the past has perished forever with only
occasional traces. The whole history of the past (called history-as-actuality) can be known to a
historian only through the surviving records (history-as-record), and most of history-as-record is
only a tiny part the whole phenomenon. Even the archeological and anthropological discoveries are
only small parts discovered from the total past. Historians study the records or evidences that
survived the time. They tell history from what they understood as a credible part of the record.
However, their claims may remain variable as there can be historical records that could be
discovered, which may affirm or refute those that they have already presented. This explains the
―incompleteness‖ of the ―object‖ that historian’s study.

History as the Subjective Process of Re-creation From the incomplete evidence, historians
strive to restore the total past of mankind. They do it from the point of view that human beings live
in different times and that their experiences maybe somehow comparable, or that their experiences
may have significantly differed contingent on the place and time. For the historian, history becomes
only that part of the human past which can be meaningfully reconstructed from the available
records and from inferences regarding their setting. In short, the historian ‘s aim is verisimilitude
(the truth, authenticity, plausibility) about a past. Unlike the study of the natural science that has
objectively measurable phenomena, the study of history is a subjective process as documents and
relics are scattered and do not together comprise the total object that the historian is studying.
Some of the natural scientists, such as geologists and paleo-zoologists who study fossils from the
traces of a perished past, greatly resemble historians in this regard, but they differ at certain points
since historians deal with human testimonies as well as physical traces. 3

Historical Method and Historiography

The process of critically examining and analyzing the records and survivals of the past is
called historical method. The imaginative reconstruction of the past from the data derived by that
process is called historiography. By means of historical method and historiography (both of which
are frequently grouped together simply as historical method) the historian endeavors to reconstruct
as much of the past of mankind as he/she can. Even in this limited effort, however, the historian is
handicapped. He rarely can tell the story even of a part of the past as it occurred. For the past
conceived of as something that ―actually occurred‖ places obvious limits upon the kinds of record
and of imagination that the historian may use. These limits distinguish history from fiction, poetry,
drama, and fantasy. Historical analysis is also an important element of historical method. In
historical analysis, historians: (1) select the subject to investigate; (2) collect probable sources of
information on the subject; (3) examine the sources genuineness, in part of in whole; and (4)
extract credible ―particulars‖ from the sources (or parts of sources). The synthesis of the
―particulars‖ thus derived is historiography. Synthesis and analysis cannot be entirely separated
since they have a common ground, which is the ability to understand the past through some
meaningful, evocative and convincing historical or cross-disciplinary connections between a given
historical issue and other historical contexts, periods, or themes.
SOURCES OF HISTORICAL DATA

Historical data are sourced from artifacts that have been left by the past. These artifacts can
either be relics or remains, or the testimonies of witnesses to the past. Thus, historical sources are
those materials from which the historians construct meaning. To rearticulate, a source is an object
from the past or a testimony concerning the past on which historians depend to create their own
depiction of that past. A historical work or interpretation is thus the result of such depiction. The
source provides evidence about the existence of an event; and a historical interpretation is an
argument about the event. Relics or ―remains, ‖ whose existence offer researchers a clue about
the past. For example, the relics or remains of a prehistoric settlement. Artifacts can be found
where relics of human happenings can be found, for example, a potsherd, a coin, a ruin, a
manuscript, a book, a portrait, a stamp, a piece of wreckage, a strand of hair, or other archeological
or anthropological remains.
These objects, however, are never the happenings or the events; if written documents, they
may be the results or the records of events. Whether artifacts or documents, they are materials out
of which history may be written (Howell and Prevenier, 2001). Testimonies of witnesses, whether
oral or written, may have been created to serve as records or they might have been created for
some other purposes. All these describe an event, such as the record of a property exchange,
speeches, and commentaries. The historian deals with the dynamic or genetic (the becoming) as
well as the static (the being) and aims at being interpretative (explaining why and how things
happened and were interrelated) as well as descriptive (telling what happened, when and where,
and who took part). Besides, such descriptive data as can be derived directly and immediately from
surviving artifacts are only small parts of the periods to which they belong.
A historical context can be given to them only if they can be placed in a human setting. The
lives of human beings can be assumed from the retrieved artifacts, but without further evidence the
human contexts of these artifacts can never be recaptured with any degree of certainty. Written
Sources of History Written sources are usually categorized in three ways: (1) narrative or literary,
(2) diplomatic or juridical, and(3)social documents.

Narrative or literature are chronicles or tracts presented in narrative form, written to impart
a message whose motives for their composition vary widely. For example, a scientific tract is
typically composed in order to inform contemporaries or succeeding generations; a newspaper
article might be intended to shape opinion; the so-called ego document or personal narrative such
as a diary or memoir might be composed in order to persuade readers of the justice of the author‘s
actions; a 7
novel or film might be made to entertain, to deliver a moral teaching, or to further a religious cause;
a biography might be written in praise of the subject‘s worth and achievements (a panegyric,a
public speech or published text in praise of someone or something or hagiography, the writing of
the lives of saints). A narrative source is therefore broader than what is usually considered
fiction(Howell & Prevenier, 2001). Diplomatic sources are understood to be those which
document/record an existing legal situation or create a new one, and it is these kinds of sources
that professional historians once treated as the purest, the ―best‖ source.
The classic diplomatic source is the charter, which a legal instrument.A legal document
isusually sealed or authenticated to provide evidence that a legal transaction has been completed
and can be used as evidence in a judicial proceeding in case of dispute. Scholars differentiate those
legal instruments issued by public authorities (such as kings or popes, the Supreme Court of the
Philippines and Philippine Congress) from those involving only private parties (such as a will or a
mortgage agreement). Diplomatic sources possess specific formal properties, such as hand and
print style, the ink, the seal, for external properties and rhetorical devices and images for internal
properties, which are determined by the norms of laws and by tradition. Such characters also vary
in time (each generation has its own norms) and according to origin (each bureaucracy has its own
traditions). Social documents areinformation pertaining to economic, social, political, or judicial
significance. They are records kept by bureaucracies.
A few examples are government reports, such as municipal accounts, research findings, and
documents like these parliamentary procedures, civil registry records, property registers, and
records of census. Non-written Sources of History Unwritten sources are as essential as written
sources. They aretwo types: the material evidence and oralevidence. Material evidence, also
known as archeological evidenceis one of the most important unwritten evidences. This include
artistic creations such as pottery, jewelry, dwellings, graves, churches, roads, and others that tell a
story about the past. These artifacts can tell a great deal about the ways of life of people in the
past, and their culture. These artifacts can also reveal a great deal about the socio-cultural
interconnections of the different groups of people especially when an object is unearthed in more
one place. Commercial exchange may also be revealed by the presence of artifacts in different
places. Evenplaces that are thought to be insignificant, such as garbage pits, can provide valuable
information to historians as these can be traces of a former settlement.
Sometimes, archeological sites that are of interest to historians are unearthed during
excavations for roads, sewer lines, and big building structures. Known historical sites are purposely
excavated with the hope of reconstructing and 8
understanding their meaningful past. Moreover, archeological finds such as coins or monies can
provide historians with significant information relating to government transactionsduring which the
currencies were in circulation. Similarly, historians can get substantial information from drawings,
etchings, paintings, films, and photographs. These are the visual representations of the past. Oral
evidence is also an important source of information for historians. Much are told by the tales or
sagas of ancient peoples and the folk songs or popular rituals from the premodern period of
Philippine history. During the present age, interviews is another major form of oral evidence.

Primary Versus Secondary Sources

There are two general kinds of historical sources: direct or primary and indirect or
secondary. Primary sourcesare original, first-hand account of an event or period that are usually
written or made during or close to the event or period. These sources are original and factual, not
interpretive. Theirkey function is to provide facts. Examples of primary sources are diaries, journals,
letters, newspaper and magazine articles (factual accounts), government records (census, marriage,
military), photographs, maps, postcards, posters, recorded or transcribed speeches, interviews with
participants or witnesses, interviews with people who lived during a certain time, songs, plays,
novels, stories, paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Secondary sources, on the other hand, are
materials made by people long after the events being described had taken place to provide valuable
interpretations of historical events. A secondary source analyzes and interprets primary sources. It
is an interpretation of second-hand account of a historical event. Examples of secondary sources
are biographies, histories, literary criticism, books written by a third party about a historical event,
art and theater reviews, newspaper or journal articles that interpret.
 HISTORICAL CRITICISMS

Historical criticism examines the origins of earliest text to appreciate the underlying
circumstances upon which the text came to be (Soulen and Soulen, 2001). It has two important
goals: First, to discover the original meaning of the text in its primitive or historical context and its
literal sense or sensus literalis historicus. Second, to establish a reconstruction of the historical
situation of the author and recipients of the text. Historical criticism has two types, external
criticism and internal criticism. Historical criticism has its roots in the 17th century during the
Protestant Reformation and gained popular recognition in the 19th and 20th centuries (Ebeling,
1963). The absence of historical investigation paved the way for historical criticism to rest on
philosophical and theological interpretation. The passing of time has advanced historical criticism
into various methodologies used today such as source criticism (which analyzes and studies the
sources used by biblical authors), form criticism (which seeks to determine a unit‘s original form and
historical context of the literary tradition),redaction criticism (which regards the author of the text
as editor of the source materials), tradition criticism (which attempts to trace the developmental
stages of the oral tradition from its historical emergence to its literary presentation), canonical
criticism (which focusesits interpretation of the bible on the text of biblical canon), and related
methodologies (Soulen, 2001). There are two parts to a historical criticism.
The first part is to determine the authenticity of the material, also called provenance of a
source. The critic should determine the origin of the material, its author, and the sources of
information used. External criticism is used in determining these facts. The second part is to weigh
the testimony to the truth. The critic must examine the trustworthiness of the testimonies as well as
determine the probability of the statements to be true. This process is called internal criticism or
higher criticism since it deals with more important matters than the external form. External
criticism determines the authenticity of the source. The authenticity of the material may be tested
in two ways, by palaeographical (the deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts) and
diplomatic criticism (critical analysis of historical document to understand how the document came
to be, the information transmitted, and the relationships between the facts purported in the
document and the reality). The material must be investigated based on the time and place it is
written.
The critic must determine whether the material under investigation is raw, meaning
unaltered, and it exists exactly as the author left it. The content must be viewed in every possible
angle, as forgery was not unknown during the Middle Ages. The authenticity of the material can be
examined from other genuine sources having the same subject or written during the same period.
The similarities or agreementsand differences or disagreements of some common details, such as
the culture and traditions, and events during the period by which the document was made can be a
basis for judging the authenticity of the text. 12

Internal Criticism determines the historicity of the facts contained in the document. It is not
necessary to prove the authenticity of the material or document. However, the facts contained in
the document must first be tested before any conclusion pertaining to it can be admitted. In
determining the value of the facts, the character of the sources, the knowledge of the author, and
the influences prevalent at the time of writing must be carefully investigated. It must be ascertained
first that the critic knows exactly what the author said and that he/she understands the document
from the standpoint of the author. Moreover, the facts given by the author or writer must be firmly
established as having taken place exactly as reported.
Test of Authenticity

To distinguish a hoax or a misrepresentation from a genuine document, the historian must

use tests common in police and legal detection. Making the best guess of the date of the document,
he/she examines the materials to see whether they are not anachronistic: paper was rare in Europe
before the fifteenth century, and printing was unknown; pencils did not exist there before the 16th
century; typewriting was not invented until the 19th century; and Indian paper came only at the
end of that century. The historian also examines the inks for signs of age or of anachronistic
chemical composition. Making the best guess of the possible author of the document, he/she sees if
he/she can identify the handwriting, signature, seal, letterhead, or watermark.
Even when the handwriting is unfamiliar, it can be compared with authenticated specimens.
One of the unfulfilled needs of the historian is more of what the French call ―isographies‖ or the
dictionaries of biography giving examples of handwriting. For some period of history, experts using
techniques known as paleography and diplomatics have long known that in certain regions at
certain times handwriting and the style and form of official documents were conventionalized. The
disciplines of paleography and diplomatics were founded in 17 th century by Dom Jean Mabillon, a
French Benedictine monk and scholar of the Congregation of Saint Maur. Seals have been the
subject of special study by sigillographers, and experts can detect fake ones. Anachronistic styles
(idiom, orthography, or punctuation) can be detected by specialists who are familiar with
contemporary writing. Often spelling particularly of proper names and signatures, reveal forgery as
would also unhistoric grammar. Anachronistic references to events (too early or too late or too
remote) or the dating of a document at a time when the alleged writer could not possibly have
been at the place designated (the alibi) uncovers fraud. Sometimes the skillful forger has all too
carefully followed the best historical sources and his product becomes too obviously a copy in
certain passages; by skillful paraphrase and invention, he/she is given away by the absence of trivia
and otherwise unknown details from his/her manufactured account. However, usually if the
document is where it ought to be (e.g., in a family‘s archives, of in the governmental bureau‘s
record) its provenance (custody, as the lawyers refer to it), creates a presumption of its genuineness
(Gottschalk, 1969).