very often decidedly more progressive in tone.

Such historiography typi­

cally seeks to include a wider variety of historical actors than historians of �iuel[ -f f�tfol'lf«; Tram. RaC.JR,, �. Ff--bg
the past thought worthy of study. It often seeks, moreover, co expose the
ways the political, social, and intellectual hierarchies that we have inher­
ited from the past were fashioned, in this way working to demystify those t CHAPTER ONE

hi�rai:chies,making what once seemed natural and unchan geable appear

arufic1al and malleable. Historians today thus employ methodologies
somewhat different from those of their predecessors. Almost all are also
more skeptical about the kinds of u-uths the hist01ian can discover about
the kinds of truth buried in sources. Most approach their eviden�e \\"ith e Basis of
many more questions about its provenance and its limitations than their
predecessors might have had. This does not mean, however, that histori­
ans today are free of the past. The best of them borrow heavily from their Our.Knowledge ab01.tt the Past
�redece ss_ �
rs, using their tools to place and decipher source;, often rely­
m� on s1m1lar strategies to manipulate and order them. While they do not
wr'.te �e same kinds of histories as their predecessors, they could not
wnte history at all, at.least not as they understand it, if they did not have
A. \Vhat Is a Source?
this rich legacy.
�rces are artifacts that have been left by the past. They exist either
S as relics, what we might call "remains," or as the testimonies of wit-
nesses to tl).e past.
The first kinds ofsources;-relics or remains, offer the researcher a clue
about the p�t simply py.yirtue of their existence. The wooden columns
found at the site ofa:prehistoric settlement testif\, for example, to the ex­
istence of a people and·t�Ilhistorians something about their culture. The
pegs or dowels th¢y,'usecfto .fasten building materials further enlighten
scholars about their,technica,1 skills and artistic capacities. By comp::i.ring
their artifacts wit!). thosp from other places, histci1ians can further learn
something of theircoromercial or intellectual relations (for example, by
comparing frescos fi:. om the· Cycladen island of Santorini with those from
Crete).
In contrast; testimonies are the oi,al or written reports that describe an
event, whether simple or complex, such as the record of a property ex­
change (for· example; the. d�hation of land to a medieval monastery or
the sale of shares on the N�w York Stock Exchange). Speeches or com­
mentaries are also testimonies. Yaclav Havel's speech during the "Velvet
Revolution" in Prague in 1989 \s one such example; in it, he fulminated
against the communist hard0liners and reformers and claimed the
"Prague Spring" of 1968 as historical precedent for his own revolution.
The authors of such testimonies can provide rhe hiscorian information
about what happened, fuwLand in what circumsrances the event occurred,
and why it occurred. Nevertheless, few sm,rccs \ield Lhis information in

equal measure, and it is the historian's job to supplement the raw mate­
rial available in the source itself.
�th relics and testimonies were usually created for the specific pur­
poses of the age in which they were made. What are called relics were, tJP:
ically, objects ofpractical use in daily life and only later, in the ages that
followed, .came to be created as historical sources. The same is true of
most testimonies, whether oral or written. They were composed to pro­
vide _contemporaries proof of an act or of a right, or in order to inform
them about a fact: Only rarely were they designed for the use of posterity,
although that sometimes occurred. In contrast to a relic, the content of a
testimony is thus usually more important than its form. Still, the form of
such a report often tells the alert historian a great deal; to this point we
will later return. It is perhaps unnecessary to point out that one of the his­
torian's principal tasks is to tincover the original puq>ose or function of
the relics or testimonies that have come down to poste1ity, to divine what
�ey were intended to serve and what purposes they actually served at
the time they were created.
Testimonies and artifacts, whether oral or written, may have been in­
tentionally created, perhaps to serve as records,.or they might have been
created for some other purpose entirely. Scholars sometimes think of the
first as having had an "intentio!l," the second as being uunintentional." In
fact, however, the distinction is not as clear at it may at first seem, for a
sourcedesignecl for one purpose may come to have very different uses for
historians. For example, a film taken to record one event but which inad­
vertently captun;d another might well be "unintentional" in conception,
as was the film ofPresidentJohn F. Kennedy's assassination taken by a by­
stander who meant only to record the parade for his private enjoyment.
That film's role in history and in historical interpretation has, however,
been profoundly more important. A memoir written to explain a life, a
legal briefdesigned to prove a case in court, and a portrait commissioned
by a noblewoman obviously are not innocent of design and motive, for
they were produced with specific purposes in mind. To distinguish an "in­
tentional" source from an "unintentional" is not.co argue that one is more
transparent, more reliable than another. Unintentional sources are unin­
tentional only in the sense that they were not produced with the histo­
rian 's questions in mind; they are not, however, otherwise "innocent."
Conversely, intentional sources contain features not under the control of
their authors and have lives beyond their original intentions. A memoir
intended to justify the choices its author made du1ing her life may, in
fact, inadvertently reveal tl1e uncertainties and untruths that she sought.
to conceal. It may, moreover, have been received in totally unexpected
What Is a Source?
ways, therefore affecting the future in ways the author would never have
intended.
Historians must thus always consider the conditions under which a
source was roduced-the intentions that motivated it-but they must
---
not assume that such.knowle ge tells them all they need to know about its
"reliabili�." They must also consider
. the histo1ical context in which it was
.
produced-the events that preceded it, and those that followed, for the
significance of any event recorded depends as much on what comes after
as it does on what comes before. Had the Boston Tea Party of 1773 not
been followed by the American Revolution, it would have had consider­
ably less significance than historians have since given it, and the very same
newspaper report of'the uprising, in the very same archive, would have
had a very different status from the one it actually acquired. Thus, histori­
ans are never in a position-and .should never imagine themselves as
being in a position-to read a source,withouc attention to both the histor­
ical and the historiographical .contexts. that giYe it meaning. This, of
course, is the heart.of historical interpretation.
Sources are thus those materials from which historians construct
meanings. Put ane.ther way; a source is an object from the past or testi­
mony concerning the past on which historians depend in order to cre,;1.te
their own depiction of that past. A historical work or interpretation is
thus the resul.t of this depiction. The relationship between the two can
be illustrated by an �xample: The diary left by a midwife who lived in
colonial New England constitutes a source.. On the basis of such a
source, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich created a prize-winning historical study,
A Midwife's Tale ( 1990). A source provides us evidence about the exis­
tence of an event; a historical interpretation is an argument about the
event.
Although when we use the term ''source" we have in mind these pri­
mary sources, such sources.can themselves be direct or indirect, �ct
source might be the letters or chronicles that come to us from eighteenth­
century businessmen, a law code written in 846, or a poem penned just
yesterday. An indirect source ,might be an eighteenth-century inventory
listing the letters and books found in an educated woman's stt_!iiy, from
which scholars could deduce something about rhe kind of training she
had received and her intellectual interests; or, to pui·sue the examples
given here, it might be ari eleventh-century register cataloging the con­
tents of a princely archive that named the ninth-century code; or it could
be a computer printout of sales of poetry volumes from the Barn_es and
Noble at Broadway and 82nd in Manhattan.
The boundaries between a source (whether direct or indirect) and a

historical study are not always, however, so _dear. .although an ancient
weapon-a spear or a catapult, for inscance--or a:·deed transferring own­
ership of a piece ofland is, obviously. a source in the us11al sense, certain
documents have an ambiguous and shifting status. Herodotus and Thucy­
dides, for example, each of whom provided accounts of events in their
own days, can be considered bot11 historians of their ages--creators of
hiscoricai. interpretations-and authors of sources in that they provide
modern-day historians evidence both about these events and about the in­
tellectual culture of the ages in which they wrote. In manycases, moreover,
the sources that former historians used to compile their own accounts are
lost to the present, so the historical interpretation they constructed serves
present-day historians also as a "source of sources," their only route t'b lost
evidence. The church history left by Eusebius ofCaesarea (ca. 265-340
C.E.), for example, mentions countless texts that are now lost; his work thus
serves not only as a historical interpretation concerning the first Christian
centuries, but also as an indirect source about this era.
It is thus one of the primary responsibilities of the historian co distin­
guish carefully for readers between information that comes literally out of
the source it.self (in footnotes or by some other means) and that which is
a personal interpretation of tl1e material. For the literal content of a cita­
tion-what is transcribed from the source itself�historians;have no ethi­
cal responsibility; for the meaning they impart to that material, of course,
they are entirely responsible.
B. Source Typologies, Their Evolution and
Complementarity
Written sources are usually categorized according to a tripartite scheme:
as narrative or "liter�," as diplomatic/juridical, or as social documents.
Although these categories are arbitrary and, as we shall see, can distort as
much as clarify the status of me evidence a particular source can provide,
it is important to recognize t11at sources do, in fact, have generic qualities.
One kind of source can not be read exactly like another, _and each should
be analyzed in terms of its formal properties as well as in terms of content.
Sources u-aditionally classified as narrative or literary include chronicles
or tracts presented in narrative form, written in order to imp,1rt a particu­
lar message. The motives for their composition vary widely. A scientiijc
tract is typically composed in order to inform contemporaries or succeed­
ing generations; a newspaper article might be intended to shape opinion;
the so-called ego document or personal narrative such as a diary or mem-
$.&urce Typologies 21
air mighl be compose&in qrder to persuade readers of the justice of the
author's actions; a novel or fil� might be made to entertain, to deliver a
moral teaching, or to further. a :religious cause; a biography might be writ­
ten in praise of th.e subject's worth and achievements (a panegyric or ha­
giography). Such sot1rces thus take many different forms, which are
highly dependent upon the conventions of the age in which they were
written. The category of ':'narrative source" is therefore considerably
broader than what we usually c::onsider "fiction," Novels and poetry-the
archtypical fictio��3.fe, .�evertheless, a subset of this category, a kind of
source; although they were ·not composed with the purpose of informing
successors about the time inwhich they were written.
Questions of intentionality, discussed above, become especially impor­
tant in the case of "ego documents." Diaries, for example, can almost
never treated as reliable "reports about an event, but must be read in tem1s
of the very individual persp�ctive from which they were Wlitten, as an
index of what the author (that is, the "intellectual author," a term we will
define later) considers his truth.1 Memoirs are similarly selective ac­
counts, always highly edited versions ofthe life being recorded, almost al­
ways highly teleologicaiin structure (in that they are written to explain
the outcome ofa life, not to re.cord its process). In general, then, ego doc­
uments record the author's perception of.events, perhaps even his mem­
ory of how he experienced-thet_n,and they can often tell us a great deal
about the writer's political int:ehtions and his tactics, as well as his ideol­
ogy and the culture ofthe age.•
Diplnmatic sources are unders_tood to be those which document an exist­
ing legal situation or create a new one, and it is these kinds of sources that
professional histor.ian.s OiiCe .treated as the purest, the "best" source. The
classic diplomaticsource is the cJ:iarter, a "legal instrument," what Ger­
mans call the Urkunde, the :French the charte or dip!.ome. This is a docu­
ment, usually sealed or authenticated insome other way, intended to pro­
vide evidence of the completion of a legal transaction or proof of the
a
existence of juristic facf nd \vh1th could se1ve as evidence in a judicial
proceeding in the eyent ofdispute. Scholars differentiate those legal in­
struments issued bY public auih.orities (such as kings or popes, the New
win
York Court of Appeals or-:�e_JJ.S. Congress) from those involving only
private parties <such as a or_ a mortgage agreement).
The form of any particuici.r 1egal instrument is fixed. It possesses spe­
cific formal properties (ext�rna.l, such.as the hand or print style, the ink,
1. "Truth" is, to be _su1·e, a slippery riotion..for the individual recounLing ,m e,·ent. See, for
r'11nher discussion; Donald P. Speric¢;,Nan·ative Truth 1mil H�1/-0rii:ol Truth: Mm11ing a11d Inter·
Jm•tatuin in l'sychoa11alysis (New York, 1'982).
 Arch�eological evidence, whether articles fr.om daily life, artistic cre­
the seal; internal, such as particular rhetorical devices and images) which
ations such as jewelry or:_vases, d:wellings, graves, roads, churches or for­
are determined by the norms of law and by tradition. Such ·characteristics '.
tifications, counts as one of the most important categories of unwntten ev­
th us vary in time (each generation has its own norms) and according to
idence. Such artifacts can tell histo1ia.ns a great deal about the culture of
provenance.(each bureaucracy has its own tradition5-'the emperor's has
the area, the ways of life, the artistic ambitions of the people who li�ed
one style, the pope's another, the United States House of Representatives'
there. If the objects unearthed in one place can be identified as havmg
still another).
been made in another, they can also reveal a :great deal about the com­
Technically, a diplomatic source is composed of three parts. The first is
mercial and sociocultural i11terconnections ofthe age.
the "protocol, w which is generally quite stereotypical; it includes the
Sometimes the archaeoiogica l object is little more than the tr.ace of a for­
names of the author or issuer and of the recipient, a standard opening or
mer settlement, a scar left on a landscape. Even relics as apparently insig nif­
salutation, and an appeal to some higher authority that legitimates the
icant a5 the charred beams of a burned house, especially if tl1ey have been
legal act-perhaps a god ( "in the name of the Father . . . "), a secular lord
left untouched through tin1e, c.an provide the historian valuable info�a­
( "by the power invested in me . . . "), or a principle of justice ("we hold
tion. Archaeological sites of interest to histo1ians are sometimes buned
these truths to be self-evident . . . "). The second is the content itself, the
under present-<lay structures and first unearthed during excavations under­
recitation of the case and its determination. Here the form is variable,
taken in the course of building a modern construction such as a subway or
being determined largely by the purpose of the document. The third is
sewer line. For example, in 1993, Nati,·e American burial grounds wer� dis­
the closing (the eschatowl); again, the form is stereotypical, containing
covered in New York City during excavations for new subway construcuon.
various authenticating formulas, witnesses, dates, and so on.
Coin hoards, and sometimes hoards of paper currencies, have similarly
These charters can also be categorized according to function. Some ,.
provided historians with valuable information about the !nstitutions of
are law-giving (ordinances, declarations of law, statutes, etc.). Others are
government, about economic conditions, about trade relauons, a.bo�t fis­
juridical Uudgments of courts and of other legal authorities); still others.
cal policy. In addition, historians rely heavily on :1s�al repres�ntauons,
record voluntary agreements between individuals authenticated by pulr
whether handmade or hand-finished, such as pamtmgs, etchmgs, and
lic notaries, by officials of bishops, or by aldermen of cities. They dea,1
dra,vi.ngs, or machine-produced, such as .films and photographs.
with contracts, wills, marriage licenses, and all other forms of social
Oral evidence is ajso an hnportaJJ.� source for historians. Much comes
agreements.
from the very distant past, in d1e form of tales and the sagas of ancient peo­
What historians often refer to as social documents are the products of
record-keeping by bureaucracies such as state ministries, charitable or­ ples, or from the premodem peiiod of Western history in the form offQ!k
songs or popular rituals. Such evidence also �omes, how�ver, from�� own
&!nizacions, foundations, churches, and schools. Containing information,
day, in the form, for example, of protest songs o�other kinds of arus�c per­
of economic, social, political, or judicial import, these documents provide
formances. The' inteiview isanother of the W<ijOC forms of oral evidence
accounts of particular charges or agencies (ambassadors' reports, munici­
produced in our age. In their origi�al form, all these sources were purely
pal accounts, the findings of a particular commission), of meetings (pare·
.oral (or ,isnal), and few were.recorded in permanent ways. Hence, they are
liamentary debates), of business policy. Or they give a suneey of an admin- ·.·
losL to scholars today. But some were preserved in one way or another; a�d
istrative structure (the property registers of a monastery), of a fiscal
it is thanks to those preservations, 9ften accidental, that historians can sull
structure (tax rolls), of a social structure (registers of births, marriages,
and deaths, lists of citizenship registrations), or of a political administra­ have access to them. In the present age of film and radio, a great many oral
or othenvise ephemeral sources have thus been rendered "w1itten," so that
tion (lists of rulers, cabinet officers, legislators).
Written sources of these kinds, although certainly essential co most hiss in some wavs historians are today even more likely to use "oral" sources.
The deg;·ee to which any hiscorian uses oral or material eviden�e de­
tori ans' work and although sometimes imagined to be the exclusive sup­
pends, co ;1 large extent, on the period being studied or on the par�1cul�r
pliers of historical data, are by no means the only kind of historical
sul·*·cc under investigation. Historians' knowl�dge about preh1stonc
source. Unwritten sources, both material and oral, are as essential ele­
times-that is, the age before ,n-itten records-is necessanly based en­
ments of the historian's arsenal. Like written sources, they are of different
tirely on the material or, indirectly, on the oral record. Beginning about
types, or genres.
 .)OUrce 1ypowgies

��oo B_.c.�wri�ing was 'invented in Mesopotamia, thus inaugurating th e than J.he painted or drawn image. The years between 1802, when Thomas
h1stoncal age m human histo11 Ihereafter, Greeks and Roman Wedgwood invented the photogramm on silver nitrate paper, and 1888,
_. s devel­
ope d writing co an art, to a highly sophisticated form of comm when Kodak inu-oduced the film roll, were the decisive decades in the his­
unication,
and it is for that reason that scholars have so much deepe
r and more nu­ tory of the still photograph. The period between � whe n Joseph
anced knowledge of these ancient societies than ·Of others
. .This is also the Plateau b egan experiments with moving film, and 1893, when Thomas
explanation for the profound influence these cu ltures have
had on our Edison perfected techniques, was the crucial age for the development of
own. During the early Middle Ages, however, oral comm technology for moving pictures. It was only around 1950, however, that
unication be­
came relati\'ely more important, and it was only around the the technology became available to preserve films adequately, and it is
twelfth cen­
tury that written communication achieved dominance even
in elite circles still more recently that efforts have been made to copy and thus preserve
in medieval Europe. With the invention of the printing
press-;t the end of films made before that period. Until 1900, most films were whatwe call
the fifteenth century, western European hist01y came
to be based princi­ "documentaries," reports of current events or of natura! -phe11omena.
pally on ,.vritten sources. The press permitted exact
reproduction, in . Dramatic films were made after that date, although it was not until after
q uan tity, of documents of all kinds-n e ws reports, statut
es, letters, fic­ 191?7 that we had "talkies."
tions, poetry, drawings-thus assuring their long .surviva
l and wide circu­ Smmd r.ecordings date from the late nineteenth. century, at least from
lation. The introduction of writing and printing had an
enormous influ­ Thomas Edison's creation of 1877. The gramophone recording followed,
e nee on intellectual history as we ll, for
they gave scholars more extensive and since the 1980s we have had the compact disk. The collection of oral
and more accurate access to the thoughts of their prede
cessors. informati on on a grand scale began, however, with the tape recording, first
Nevertheless, historians do not rely entirely on WTitten
sources for their made (out of metal) in 1931, and around 1940 produced synthetically.
knowledge even of those ages in which the printed text
existed. More­ The radio began in 1896 and was publicly available after 1902; regular
over, the boundaries between written and oral, or for that
matter between u·ansmission began in the United States after 19:w. Television saw the
verbal and material, are arbitrary. Although histor
ians have tradicionalh·. first experiments in 1927; in 1936 it was made publicly available in Lon­
cate g�rized material and oral sources apart from writte
n, thereby calling don, in 1941 in New York. Ten years later it came to most of th e Euro­
�ttent1on to the ge neric differences among them and the dangers of treat­ pean countries. This medium did not, howeve r, constitute a true source ,
mg them the same, skilled research ers know not to
assume the differ­ at least not in its early years, for the transmissions via television were
e nces, but to consider them critica
lly. Today most scholars are use a mix­ mostly live, and were rarely recorded or saved. In contrast, tape or cellu­
ture of oral, written, and other material sources as the
situation requires. 'ioid film recording events had a much greater chance of being saved, but
\rVhat scholars know, for example, about the people of
the ''A.n cien it was only betwe en about 1940 and 1970 that these media were widely
Regi me" (the term used in much of France and western Europ
e to refer used. These tapes do not, however, constitute a secure source. Typ ically,
to the period from the late Middle Ages to about 1800)
-about their ac­ they have not lasted, and as they have deteriorated, information has been
tions, ideas, beliefs, and fantasies-comes to them throu
gh
� a wide varietv, lost. Even th e saved information is sometimes inaccessible. The French
of sources, some originally written, some writte n only after the
fan. some TV system, to cite just one example, has over 500,000 documentaries on
never written. Fo lk songs, monuments, stories and tal es, miniat
ures, draw­ tape-but has no way to make. them easily accessible to researchers. Tele­
ings and other visual representations (vanity alone saw to
it that \\'e ha\'e vision's pot e ntial as a historical source has, then, some distance to go.
count� ess por� raits from the age) t.1.ke their places alongs
ide newspapers Similar problem� beset the computer file s on whi ch a huge quantity of
and d1plomat1c documents to provide the material on
which historians recent decades' social documents are stored. Many are at risk of e rasure
have bas ed t");:traordinarily rich accounts.
or inaccessibility; an even greater problem is pose::d by the rapid changes
T�chnical innovations of the nineteenth and Lwentieth centu.r
ies haw in hardware and software, for a record made today may be unreadable
)'i e lded new kinds of source s that continue to blur the
boundaries be­ with the technology of tomorrow. In 1983. for example, iL was discovered
twe e1 vritten, oral. and "materia "To a cerr.ai 1 1 extenL, such i 1111 u1·ation that a huge poni on of the liscal records kept by the UuiLed States govern­
involved simply an improvement in quality: the hoto raph
p g and, above ment were inaccessible , because the Japanese company which had sup-
all, theJH!.11 provide represe ntations that are in some ways
more realistic pli ed the oriainal
b b these
t,, for readin,r
t.echnolorr\· recurcls was no longer
 un­
. Human cultures do not remain
comparisons will always be fruitful we
maki�1g it. The _ proble here is not so much technical as organizational; period of c olonial rule in Africa,
�
what 1� eded is a pohucal and financial commitment to maintaining the chan�d OY.cr..tirne. Even before the took place o n
enormous importance
�� know, sociocultural upheavals of that
access1b1hty of these materials. nor anywhere else dare we assume
that continent; thus, neither there l." Ind eed ,
�l these sources, although different from one another, are in many terns are in any sense "eterna
the social codes and cultural pat han g­
ways comRien_i�tary. O,ral records obvio usly can complement the writ­ k for basic-and somehow un c
the anthropologist's impul�e. to loo to ex-
�· a reahzauon that was for too long lost on most professional histori­ mented by the historian's bias-
ans. One of the first to recognize the relation of oral traditions to written ing�patt.erns, sho uld be comple
pect and look for change. to
texts was Jan Vansina, a Flemish historian who is now teaching in the that pro duce oral sourc es of use
.It is not only premodern cultures an
Uni�ed States. 2 A student of West African culture, he established that the nd in certain instances oral rep orts
c
the historians. All cultures do so, .a ri 1 g
stones handed down from one generation to anothe� in that cult1.ffe were e. In.times of social uphe_aval (du '.
as stable and reliable accounts of their past as were the written chronicles provide critically important evidenc line d t wn te
le), witnesses are not inc o
wars, revolts, and strikes, for examp ker s
and pers nal narratives that have survived from the western European have to fear their occupiers, stri
� doMl the ir experiences-resisters·
past, that m fact they were of the same genre. n, inten1iews can sometimes substi­
their bosses and the law. For that reaso l his­
Vansina's argument was, in essence, methodological, for he was not say­
.mg that all oral accounts achieve this level of reliability; they do so only .iJ cannot be written. Al Santoli's ura
tute for the personai account that e of
one revealing example of the valu
torv of the Vietnam War provides Hict
they mee� several tests. Vansina's tests concerned both matters external to d thirty-three veterans of the con
t�t (1;_ t�e naITator [or witness] a member of the group that controls sudh techniques. Santoli interviewe do um ent s on­
de it into the official
c
_ who reported events that never ma
c
the transm1 ssion of the narrative? does t he narrative come to the researcher hei r init ial
e men interviewed told of
stituting the military archives. Th
t
VIa a so cial �nstituti on or via a closed caste?) and those internal (is the nar­ ow the realities of co
mbat-the body
. optimism and bravado and then h -oyed
rative styhst1 ally co� erent, that is, does the witness's or reporter's tale co n­ , terror, shock, an d loss-clesu
�
form to the lmgu1suc, s�listic, ritualistic, and juridic al norms of the peiiod bags, carnage on the battlefield
'
_ morale and humanity among them.:
and the place frorr:1 which lus tale is told [or pretends to oiiginar.e)?). wing that can ser e the careful his-
v
. lnterviev1:ing--0 r the kin d of inte rvie
fully
�an.Sm.a S contnbuoon to historical methodology was signifi cant, for histo­ The questio ns asked must be care
nans had by and large not understood that in many societies (including· Eu­ torian-is, however, no simple art. d of i n a­
rallpi;;;bout the kin � orm
rope of the tenth and eleventh centuries), social relations were :;ust;ined c;g:signed, in accordance with an ove sub . 1 � _;
reliability to which it. will be ecte
tion sought and abounhe tests of sh1 tt
thr�ugh oral _a�ts, and that the most important legal u-ansactions achieved rviewer must be flexible, able to
at the saine time , however, the inte d
the ir authent1c1ty by means of oral witnessing and the like. Oral communi­ unexpected ave nues and avoid dea
_
cat:J.on thus rarely indicates arbitral)' a ction and social anarchy; it can, in the terms of the interview to pursue ed from "sof t." In
can be distinguish
ends. In general, "hard" interviews
fact, be �e m�rk of a complex and well-ordered sociopolitical system. orians-the inter\'ie wer has worked
_ the first-the kind of real value to hist in
Still, h 1stonans can place trust in oral sources only to the extent that ation in which the informant lived
hard to reconstruct th e historical situ hap­
they can be ve rified by means of external evidence of another kind. such rative about what did ur did not
as archaeologi �al, linguistic, or cultural. In one case. for example, re­ order to get beyond the simple nar ri hcr , n 1'.u­
ch the story becon1es : � : ore

searchers studymg travelers' reports from sixteenth-century Africa were pen. A good interview is one in whi g � · 111-
telling, not one 111 which
anced, more understandable in the
rn
able to �ake sense of �tti_nides and practices described in those reports by · pe1:�on foun_d o.�ll. Thu:·. eve1�
companng them to s1mdar behaviors characteristic o f mode rn, bette1:. �e is proved� cause is vindica_ted, a 1�
1t were a fa ct-findmg exp edition
u�derstood cultures and by analysis of the archaeological record. Th us in an incerview constructed as though , a sou rce tha t mu st
. sorn. ethina0 much .
more; it is in itself an interpretation
this case historians were able to use the resen t to u�clcrstand the ns�. It
wot'.ld, however, be a mista ·e to conclude from this insrance rhar stich be analyzed with extreme care.
·'.· :\mti:iw.,1 !Sol�
3· Al Sanwli, Everything We H,ad: An Oml History oftlu: \!frlna/11 1-\'i,.r_h,· I·,_'f,irl_HhnHar rn lhe H11ul.,
also Mark Bak er, Nam : /
diers Who Fought It (New York 19H L); see
I,,· 11·/ 111111:

2. J. v. a lls,·n_ . a, Dr. la_ traditiu-n om/e. EsS(li dt 111illwdr. hi.llorim., (Tc1,,11·<·

• .r,. 1�p1
c· ): 111 E11glish as , •-!JS 1).
Oml r,HI_ d1t1011 as fhstory (Madison, Wis., !!)8:,). ofMet. and Wouum WlioFnught Tl (New York
11•

C. The Impact of Communication and Information
Technology on the Production of Sources
Although historians make choices among the materials left by the past,
treating one object or text as a source and rejecting another or relegating
it to secondary status in the hierarchy·of evidence, they must choose from
what is available. Only certain kinds of potential e\'idence was produced
in any given age, only some of thatwas preserved, and only a ponion of
chat is accessible to any given historian. If they are to make wise choices
among potential sources, historians must thus consider the ways a given
source was created, why and how it was preserved, and why it has been
scoi-cd in an archive, museum, library, or any such research site.
The availability of sources is, in genernl, very much determined by tech­
nology, that is by the conditions under which a given culture received and
collected information. The mechanisms of communication and the speed
at which information circulated are both elements of this technological
history of sources. This history can be divided into three periods.
In the first, information was transmitted by people who walked or ran
with the news, at a rate probably never exceeding six miles per hour. The
medium of transmission was thus the messenger himself. Sometimes mes­
sage s were also sent by visual signal (flags) or by sound (drums), and thus
news traveled faster, but in none of these cases could a complex message
be delivered with great precision, and in all of them geographic or cli­
mati c conditions could radically limit the range and speed of transmis­
sion. Today, such methods are of course rarely used, but some conven­
tions have survived�the custom, for example, of fl)ing flags at half mast
to mark a death or the practice of ringing sirens to sound an alarm.
In the second ph�e, information was transported using pack animals.
This phase began about 2000 B.C;E: in central Asia, abo�oo H.C.E. in the
Mediterranean area, and sometime during the sixteenth cenrn1-r among
the fncas in Peru, and is still used iu some parts of South America and
Africa. Average speeds using this form of transportation were at least dou­
ble, often triple, those in areas where information was carried by people.
Other technical developments further improved this mode of transn'l.is­
sion. By 3000 B.C.E., Mesopotamians were using cla,· tablets to record in­
formation; around 1000 B.C.E. the Phoenicians de1·elopcd an alphabet,
which made ,vriting much more efficient. Persian kings created cbe
courier system of transport, in which messages were lundc.1rriccl I J ," spe­
cially designated agents, a method later psed both in Bvzamium and in
Rome. By the thirteenth century an elaborate system fc;r delivering the
mail badbeei:l worked out to cqnnect the Florentine banking and mer­
chant houses to the trade fairs in Champagne (France); the system was
adopt�d by the pope in the following century. By the encl of the fifteenth
century Europe had a net of postal connections that had been developed
by the Milanese firm of Thum and Taxis; in 1505 the firm was granted a
monopoly for the Spanish post.
In 1436, a trip, betwee1)London and Venice took 2:� to 51 days, and in
1442, ajoumey from Genoa to Bruges lasted 22 to 25 clays. Thus, dis­
tance traveled daily averaged 30 to about 5-0 miles. Between the fifteenth
and the nineteenth century, this rate of travel was to double, thanks to the
long-distance routes that were constructed during this period.
Three categories of information were transported in this period, each
of which required a slightly different technology ofliteracy. The first in-
.rllided secret correspondence ("litterae clausae") of various kinds (eco­
nomic or business, diplomatic, military) which had to be 'A'rinen iu code.
The second was general correspondence ("litterae patentes") which, in
time, was taken over by the newspaper, the third category. The forerun­
ners in the production of this genre were the Venetians, who regularly
penned commentaries (called avvisi) to accompany the business corre­
spondence they sent all over Europe; they were followed by the Genmin
trade cities like Nuremberg and Wittenberg, which produced what they
stiHcallZeitungen (newspapers). True, printed newspapers with a regular
pe1iodicity appeared first in Strasbourg (1609) and Antwerp ( 1 fo9). It
was only later that a distinction was made between simple newssheet$
(which llad no explicit editorial content) and "newspapers of opinion."
The third phase of communication is, of course, defined bv mechani­
cal media. In 1830, the train increased the speed at which information
could be u·ansmitted to 30 to 35 miles per hour. With the invention of
the telegraph in 1844, information transmission became almost instanta­
neous. By 1896 it required only seven minutes to transmit a message
from one place on the ·globe to another. The more recent innovations
such .as telephone, fax, radio, television, and satellite have made informa­
tion transmission truly instantaneous and practically universal. Accompa­
nying this technological revolution were organizational changes in the
way information was gathered and delivered. The nineteenth century saw
the emergence of huge wire sen·ices such as Reuters and ll.P.I, which
ptovide news services to thousands.of small clients; most newspapers rdy
entirely on these services for information from beyond their own locality
and thus have no independent suurc:es by which they cau \'Crit,· the data
they receive.
It is evident that the speed at which a piece of infonnatiou can be trans-
 young Americans,
thewar creat ed for a great many Americans, especially
mitt�d, along with its ubiquitousness, directly affects its influence. Today's ized political resistance to
a single expeiience, an experience that galvan
�edia (�, for example) make the world a «global village," and that i s lost on the American mil­
the war. The lesson, it should be noted, was not
�n some sense a cheerful thought, for it rnean .s that people today increas­ -g 1) was much more re­
itary. Media cove-rage of the Gulf War ( 199o
ingly have a�c�ss to exactly the same infor mation at the same time and that war, it will surely be of
stricted, and if a collective memory survives of
of�en reac_t �1milarly. But it also means that an i�cident such as the Cuban itself. The Velvet Revolu­
. th e way it was covered rather tl:ian the conflict
M1ss1le Cns1s of 196 2 erIClts · an 1mme
· d1at e reactjpn, in Moscow and Wash- Tiananmen Square, all in
. .. . tion in Prague, the fa!Lof the Berlin Wall and
·gton ahke, Wlth all the ri sks that such sp eed eb�ils :4 Still, there are real ory, la rgely as a result of
� _ 1989, s�milarly joined i.he West's collective mem
dvantages to the speed of communication po�:;ible today. Consider, for
the mass media.
example, th�t w�en th e harvest failed in fifteenu.l\-<:entury England or the ble have thus utte rly
Mass. media and the··.te chnology that 1nakes it possi
Low Counuies, It took two months before grzip could he purchased in relationship to scholar­
changed the character of ne ws reporting and its
th e Baltic area and another two months before i( anivedwhere needed- e press , however, even in the
days of the
ship. Very early in the history of th
far too late for a huge portion of tl1 e populatiori. . n businessmen, the mass
sixteenth-century avvisi written strictly for Italia
T�e power of modern-day communications, with their steady scream of that dev elopment came
w tential of the press was recognized, and with
fash10n changes and technical innovations, depends, howeve�,-noLjt.ist<>�� .J t to limit the press's po­
. political control. Even then, governments sough
the spee d at w �1ch messages travel but also on the quality of the carri er ch newspapers obtain of­
_ _ tentially subvers ive character by requiring that su
a � d of the distnbuoon system. It also depends on th e readiness of the au­ ry , western European
ficial iicenses to publish. In the nineteenth centu
dience to ac�ept the innovation. It is , for e xample, no accident that the newspapers, a practice
governments often imposed onerous taxes on
fir mecharnc �l clocks were developed in Italy in t11e fourteenth century and circulate news; it wa s
: _ which restricted their ability to collect, publish,
n were first 1m1tated a �d distributed in Flanders and England, where ca.xes were abolished,
: l only under the pressure of public opinion that such
ta y had good c?mmerc1al rdations and where th e comm ercial infra- , and France in 1881.
in Belgium in 1848, for example, England in 1855
s tructure and soc10economic system were similar. their fin ancial support
Today, mo st newspapers in tlte West dependr for
Th e �1aterial qualitie s of the message its elf affect its influence as well for exa mple), private
on governments (the former Soviet Union' s P avda,
Wh en, m the human past . , messages were first wntten
. and then l)rinted te fi ms (Starnpa., in Italy, is
. . .. interest groups (L'Ossen.,atare Romano) or priva
r
t he tr sumvab1hcy and distribunon · potenual. mcreased
. enormously but cal and.ideological p res­
. some ways become owned by Fi at). Thus, most are subject to politi
WI"th the advent of rad·o 1 · an d. 1V·, messages have 111 delivered implicitly; some­
, e eph meral. In . sures of various kinds. Sometimes it is subtle,
mor general, one can say that the quality and accuracv of gone even further. often
� times it is more direct. Dictatorial regimes have
1:1essages mcreased when letters and manuscripts replaced oral trans�1is- highpoint (or low­
even prescribing what is to be published. An early
s10ns and the n,· I ac· e· r, prmt · ed matenals replaced handwritten. Mar�hall was r ache d by Hitler's minis­
---- point) in government control of the press
e
McLuhan has �amously argued, in fact, that tl1e "m ediu m is the message " sterium fur Volksaufk­
ter for propaganda,Joseph Goebbels, with his Mini
tha t the for� m which information comes i s often more sicmifican t th;1 nces of this ominous
larung und Propaganda. The historical conseque
th� messa?� itself. Th e centuries-long dominatio11 of the written word im­
_ move are well known.
phci tly pr rvdeged-and developed capaciti es for-abstract chinking; " 1V ," in that they function in-
_ In contrast, som� presses are relatively ufree
and film, m contrast, emphasize the visual, the concr-ete. r direct control. The London
dependeritly of political affiliation or othe
Mass communications can also cr eate coll ective memories. Bv1 this ' we r of this genr�; on the conti­
· Times was for years the archetypal newspape
mean th at wh en rn · f ormauon about an event, or series of events, is broad- kfurter Allgerneine Zeitung rep­
. nent, France's Le Monde a nd Germany's Fran
a handful of nationally circu­
��st wid el� anci �imu!taneously, the event becomes part of a shared expe­ resent the o·adition. In the United States,
rience, pa1 t _of h1sto�1cal .memory. The Vietnam War in the !ace sixti es and Time.J and the Washington Post
lated newspapers such as the New York
early seventres provides a perfect example: th e daily news rl'.'pc)rt!:i about powerfully able to mobilize
provide critical coverage of policies and are
elopmencs of recent ye ar s­
public opinion. The rapid technological de,·
, for example-are often
. . !vi ay anct p . o . ze 1t>.OW, those m aking CNN or the Internet possible
·•· • · ··
. . ' E. R
4· See, on the.Cuban missile crisis 7hr. Ktmnrd\' f ,,/1r1: fmirf,.• 1111'
White House .,.
,,111111g
. lie
I Cuban Mustle.Cnsi.1 (Cambiidge, Mass., 1997).
 considered part of this tradition:ofpress "freedom." Although the growth
be.en e:)f�ed for making up facts or, in the case. of a recent erro�eous
of these media is driven by con,unercial motives, it is frequent ly argued
CNN-Time story about the U.S. government's us e of nerve g ases m t�e
that t hey provide such easy access; both for -the public and for newsmak­ _
Glµf :War, have been shown co have done sloppy investigations of their
ers, that they help preseive the "freedom of the press.n · ·
sour<:es. . . · .·· . ·· ·
The press, then, .including the nonprint press, is considerably more
Let us clo�e this discussion of the press' s functions with a few commen ts
t han a purveyor of news; it can play a decisive role in p olitical proce sse s
for. the scholar who would use the pr ess-whether the pre modern avvisi
themselves. Consider, for example, the importance of the Washington
Post's coverage of Watergate; or .more re ce ntly of the New Yark Times's
or the modern Internet flash-as a source. To employ these s ources use­
.
fully� the historian muse consid�j us t th� co 1te nt of tl�e text, bu��
April 13, 1995, r ep ort that Serbiac- President Sloboda.11 Milosevic was di­ _ _ �
author and is suer, the publisher and Its lllSUtUtlOnal locat10l1, �\:e at�d� ­
rectly associate d with the Bosnian concentration camps 1ui1 ·by Serb para­
ence, and theimmediate (political, social, economic) conte xt of Its ong1-
militari es and th e syst ematic exte rminati on ofMuslim populati ons in th e
territory. Ted Turner's CNN goes a step further, providing uniform, 24-
;;a1 -publication.. Jt is s urely U-Ue that sensational or tendent:IOUS r eports
�have a bigger effect on public opinion than a sober, care ful r port,
hour per day 1V coverage around the world. In Twrn::r\ hands, the news �
andit m.i.y be that the historian will have to take the firs mo re senousl
be comes a purely commercial, unifonn product, and simultaneously an � ?'
than the second, for it was the first that had the greater impact. In addi­
import ant vehicle by which politicians and governments seek to influence
tion, the bisrorian must remember that the emission of a report itself can
wo rld events. In 1991, a pan-Arab channel (MBC) was begun ( out of Lon­
affectthe .events being reporte d, that there is no clear se paration between
don), and in 1993, the Europeans launched their own competitor (Eu­
th e event and the rep ort of the eve nt. No rmally, we imagine, a re port of
ronews). In the same y ear, the United Kingdom' s BBC went global.
an event is about the event, not part of it. But some tim es this relationship
N o matte r the medium in which it is delivered and n o mat ter th e car e
is distorte d, as whe n participant5 in a protest listen to reports about their
with which editorial freedom is protected, however, every news report is
action s as th.ey go to the streets (a common event during the student re­
in some sen se sel ective and therefore "biased." The j ournalist who com­
t volts in the United States and Europe in the late 1960s and early 197 0s ),
pose s it-or the team ofjournalis s and editors who put it together-::.i§
.Yi.hen v�ter� ha�e news of early r eturns in an electi on, or when rep orts of
choosing among t he thousands and thousands of pi eces of information
polls influ_ence the ne x t poll-or the vo t e itse�.
available, on t h e basis of what might interest or please th e "public," the
finally, the car eful scholar will be attennve to what we might c� ll
�er, the sta t e, one or another int�rest rou ,_or a certain ideolo ical
·�sh9 rt-circuiting" of information flows, the distortion tha t occurs as t11-
position. One journa 1st 'may ec1de· th�t. having been told of one in­
formatio11 pass<!s from hand to hand. Scho lars u sing sources fr?m oral
stance of a devel opment-let us say the first heart transplant-the public
cultures-;.folktales, for example-are very sensitive t o such nsks, for
does not need to knowabout sub sequentoperations ofthe same type; an­
tales.�t<>ld,oi.allg.an easily change in the�g, bu t ev n tho e histori­
other j ournalist , in contrast, may depd� Jhat the successful repetition of : :
ans using priµted sourc es or the re ports from electrom media are n o t
the operation is the importa.J)t point, ari<f she will thus continue to "foll ow �
fre e of these p�obl e ms of in te rpre tation. A message dehv�red electron­
the story." In fact, she is not"following'' the story; she is creating it. The
ically can be literally distorted, ju::_as can a line of p rmt or a �o ry
point is not, h owever, that onejoµrn.alist is righ t and another wrong. The . .
pa �mouth from �e neration co eneration :...The list ener or reade r
po int is tha t journalists are always affecting the news, making one story �
can lllisiqterprt!t what 1s re ported, simply because he or she doe s not
"important," and another "unimportant," making "news" on one hand
und erstand. the, linguistic or cultural code in which the mes age was
�
and "not-news" on the other.
Of course, no matt er what st ory he or she is choosing to cell, Lhe jour­
written, or d o es n o t grasp the context of the me ssage. Let us 1llustra�e
with a�v:ery simpkexample: what would a foreigner with very littl e ab1�­
nalist is responsibl e for verifying sources, for making sure that the bits of
icyin :the English language make of an exchange between two A nen­
information used are accurate. Recent scandals in the U.S. press have .�
cans bein.K:formaJly introduced?-one offers her hand and ays , How
dem onstra tcd how easily such responsibility can be abdicated. In Llie rush �
do you do?";the other replies in kind. Only someone deep in the cul-
t o "scoop," to keep up with the co mpetiti on, j ournalists have sometimes .
t ure cart_ "re .ad''. that te xt!
 the :region: might be the province, or even the county) established a de­
D. Storing and Delivering Information pository to which were sent all documents originating in �nstit�tions that
had once �een. at least partiallysubject to the rulers of tlus region. Thus,
Th e archive is often considered the hist01ian 's principal the colle�tions of the Council of Flanders finally ended up the state
_ . s�urce of infor­
mation. The term has two meanings. In the most general archive in Ghent, capital city of East Flanders. Similarly, the archives of
_ sense, an _
archive 1s the collection of documents held by a natural or confiscated ecclesiastical institutions, of noble families, of the notane s
a legal person
(for exampl e, a government agency), and possibly :also who had worked in the district, and of the cities and parishes located in a
the copies of doc­
�ments sent by these bodies to others. Th e y are kept, of course, for prac­ French departement found their way co t he re gional archive in the capital
tical �easons-to have a record of previous actions., both city of th_is {}.e-pan.ement. Typically, the �1ational capital (Paris, The Ha�e,
to assure cidmin­
istrative st�bility and to preserve useful ways of doil1g Berlin, etc.) sexved as depository both for the region and for the naaon,
things and co
preserve evid ence for poss ibl e future legal proceedings. In in the latter capacity holding the docum ents em�nating from the ce ntral
a more techni­
�al s�nse , however, the term "archive" means the place or the institution government. . ..
itself that .h9lds and manage s the colle.cti-on. In princi Some loci archives, particularly those of big cities, escaped this confis­
ple, diplomatic
source s and �ocial documents are kept in archives, narra cation and today retain their own collections. In some parts of Europe,
tive sources in li­
braries . But of cour e t�ere are exceptions. By chance, partirularly in England, France, Belgium and The Netherl�nds, a great
� as a-result of gifts .
made to s p e cial mstnuuons or the like, we sometimes marry additional local institutions have similarly kept their arch1ves­
find the reverse .
So long as an archive is growing and acquiring new mater parishes, monasteries, bishoprics, and private institutions. An� eve�·­
ial because
the �wner or the institu tion for which it is the repos where there are some government agencies whose archives remain their
_ itoryis still active, i t is
considered a ''living archive · " When a collecn'· on, 1· own,just as there are still a few ordinary people (to be sure, p eople of
_ n pare or 1n · wl10 Ie, 1s
·
separated from the living archive, pe rhaps becau some influence) who keep private archives.
se it is considered of no
value for ou�·oin p erations, perhaps because In addition, �n recent years some new independent archives have been
�? the firm or the ope ration
no long er exists, i t 1s conside red "old" or "historicaL" created, usually attached to research institutes focused on a particul�r
In that case the doc-
uments have lost their officialorjuridical status. a
problem, gr.oup of pe"c>ple, or a place. The new Holocaust Museum m
Until th e end of the eighteenth centti in the West, almos Washington, D.C., is one such example. In The Netherlands, a cente� - w as
ry t all archival _
material was held by its original owners or by the fom::ided ip. 1945 for research and study of the Second World War; 1� its
institution that prC>--'
duced the document�. Churches, monasteries, cities, and colle�tion is the original Anne Frank diary. Germany has special archives
noble families
kep t their mm papers and treasured obje c;ts themselv for business affairs in Cologne and Dortmund, and the United S tat�s has,
_ es, usual ly in a spe­
cial room or s torage chest. Princes typically r:nade their for e:x;arnple, a Ford archive in Detroit.
_ castles their de­
po.mones , and the archives traveled with the m as they Until crecently it was generally accepted that public archives should
changed the se at of
th eir op erat.1on s . The medieval Council of Flanders, ·the hold only public documents, that they should not, in fact, acquire the
highest court of,
the c ount of Flanders, kep t its archive successively i holdings ofprivate familie s and p1;vate institutions, no matt�� how i�­
n Lille, Audenard e,
Chen t, Ypres. then again, as of 1498, in Ghent. portan.t historically. Now that has change d. Since 1959 the Bnush Pubhc
The French Revoly tion brought a re ve rsal of practice. Record Office has welcomed gifts of private papers, and a law of 1955 al­
The new state
c?nfisca � ct much of the ropeny of the monasteries.a lowed the Royal Archive of Belgium to collect private. pape rs of familie s,
� � nd lordsh ips, along
Wlth r heu archives, and simultaneously demolis hed most films, and .political figures. But th ese efforts are in many instan� e s �oo
of the adminis­
trative apparaws of the old regime; the result was a huge late. As a. result, the collections of many private individuals and mstitu­
_ and sudden in­
flux of documenL� co the new central state. In res ponse tions, if th eyh�ve been prese rved at all, are he ld in universities (Ha1vard
, the new govern­
r�1ent created a central state archive, which was public Universitv, for example, houses an archive concerning the industrial h!s­
; most other
European bncls soon followed suit. cory of th� United Sta,tes), in pri\'ale archives (the presidential archive s 111
Th� origina l structure of the new c entral archive was different locations of the United Scates), or in muse ums (Gladstone's pa­
as follows: eac h
constJtuted reg i on or the coun t.1-y (in France, each dejJart pers are ii1 the British Museum Libr ary).
ement; elsewhere