Historical sources - tangible remains of the
past. It is an object from the past or testimony
concerning the past on which historians
depend in order to create their own depiction
of the past.
Three kinds of sources
 Primary Source- a testimony of an
individual who was a participant in or a
direct witness to the event that is being
described. It is a document or physical
object which was written or created
during the time under a study.
Five main categories of primary sources
1. Written sources- The most common are
written sources or documents. They are
written or printed materials that have
been produced in one form or another
sometime in the past.
They may be published materials such as
travelogue, transcription of speech,
autobiographies, journals or newspapers (La
Solidaridad). They can be also in manuscript
form or any handwritten or type record that
has not been printed.
Example: archival materials, memoirs,
diary, personal letter or correspondence
2. Numerical- which include any type of
numerical data in printed or handwritten
form.
3. Oral Statements- which include any
form of statement made orally by an
eyewitness. It maybe through video
recordings, audio recordings, or
transcribed.
4. Relics- or any objects whose physical or
visual characteristics can provide some
information about the past. These
include artifacts, ruins and fossils.
5. Image- It includes photograph, posters,
paintings, drawing cartoons and maps.
 Secondary Source- interprets and
analyzes primary sources.
- It is prepared by an individual who was
not direct witness to an event, but not
who obtained his or her description of
the event from someone else.
Example:
Textbook, printed materials (serials or
periodicals which interpret previews
research), biographies, nonfiction text such
as newspaper, magazine, journals, works of
criticism and interpretation.
- Tertiary Sources- It provides third
hand information by reporting ideas and
details from secondary source. This does
not mean that tertiary sources have no
value, merely that they include potential
for an additional layer of bias.
Example:
Encyclopedia, almanac, Wikipedia,
YouTube, dictionaries, message boards,
social media sites and other search sites.
Historical Criticism- is a branch of
criticism that investigates the origin of
text or source in order to understand the
word behind the text. The primary goal of
historical criticism is to discover the text
primitive original historical context and
its literal sense. The secondary goal seeks
to establish a reconstruction of historical
situation of the author and recipients of
the text.
Two types of Historical Criticism
- External criticism- investigates the
documents form. This type of criticism
looks for the obvious sign of forgery or
misrepresentation. This type of criticism
tests the authenticity of the sources. It is
interested in the writing styles of the
eyewitness and his ignorance of the
facts. The historian also analyzes the
 original manuscript; its integrity,
localization and the date it was written.
4.
- To ascertain if a particular data is
fabricated, forge, fake, corrupted or a
hoax, that source must undergo the test
of authenticity.
Test of Authenticity
1. Determine the date of document to see
whether it is anachronistic (means out of
time or order), something that could not
have been there at that particular time. It
could be a person, thing or idea placed
in a wrong time
Example:
- Rizal’s allegedly first poem “Sa Aking
Mga Kabata” where we could find the
word “kalayaan”. Rizal admitted that he
first encountered the word through a
Marcelo H. Del Pilar’s translation of
Rizal’s essay “El Amor Patrio”. Rizal
wrote this essay in 1882 while the poem
supposedly was written by him in the
year 1869.

2. Determine the author’s handwriting,

signature or seal. We can compare the
handwriting of particular author to his
other writings. Obvious sign of forgery
in include patch writing, hesitation as
revealed by ink blobs, pauses in the
writing, tremor causing poor line quality
and erasures.

3. Examine idiomatic expression or the

orthography used in the documents. An
idiom is an expression, word or phrase
that has a figurative meaning
conventionally understood by native
speakers. When we say ‘break a leg’ we
all know that it means good luck.
Orthography is a set of conventions for
writing a language. It includes norms of
spelling, hyphenation, capitalization,
word breaks, emphasis and punctuation.
23…..