How to Read a Document, or,

Nine Questions every Historian has to ask of her or his Sources

(Adapted from Mark Kishlansky, ed., Sources of the West.)

Documents are the historian’s bread and butter. They provide the evidence on which we
make claims about the past, the scenes and episodes with which we tell our stories. Some
documents seem very simple: they can only mean one thing. Others are more complicated:
we need other information if we want to know how to interpret them. In fact, most documents
can be read more than one way. (Which is why historians have to agree to disagree.)

But no document means anything one wants. Historical thinking, like legal judgment involves
a careful sifting of the evidence. That means both placing your evidence in context, and
reading it closely and carefully--being attentive to structure, language, and style.

Level One. These questions are fundamental.

1. Who wrote this document? A document is created by a person or group in a specific
setting for a particular purpose. Without this information--not just the author’s name(s), but
their social background, position, affiliation, et al.--we cannot know why it was created or
what meanings its author(s) intended. [In the case of the page you’re reading at the moment,
the unnamed author seems to be a teacher and a historian, invoking the name of a
(presumably) older, wiser, and better-known scholar and his (seemingly) authoritative text.]
2. Who is the intended audience? An e-mail to a friend is very different from a paper for a
professor. As is an international law from a Nixonian memo. Knowing the intended audience
tells you not just what kind of document you have, but also whether you can expect to
believe what you’re being told. [Here the unnamed audience is most likely the teacher’s
students. Which may make us think that the teacher will pack as much useful information
(and exhortation) as he can into a one-page handout (so saving trees and not asking too
much from the limited time of a hard-pressed undergraduate; compare with the original).]
3. What is the story line? As you read, keep asking yourself "what is going on here"? That
is, not the details--names, dates, and foreign terms can quickly bog you down--but the
general outlines of the story the author is telling, the argument they are making, and the
conclusions or moral they are trying to draw. [Our anonymous teacher is giving a set of
progressively more complex questions. If you ask these, he promises, then you will be a
historian. (And suggests that this is a more interesting way of thinking about things than
other, unspecified, possibilities.)]

Level Two. Here you start to probe behind the level one "facts." There the document
controlled you. Now you can begin to control the document. Be suspicious! Be critical!
4. Why was this document written? Understanding a document’s purpose is critical to
understanding the strategies employed in it. A document designed to persuade will employ
logic--though maybe an unfamiliar one. People use humor to entertain, emotion to motivate.
[Here the teacher wants his students to do something--with a carefully designed, easy to
follow procedure, spiced with a potent mixture of flattery (a lot of "us" and "we"), dramatic
contrasts, sparkling wit. (Adjectives and adverbs tell you a lot about the kind of rhetoric being
used.)]
5. What type of document is this? Form is vital to purpose. Phone books are alphabetized,
poems (usually) use meter, philosophy demands (often dense) prose. A law, for example,
can reveal the relationship between the issuing authority and the (hopefully) obedient
subjects--the (idealized) powers of the former and rights and responsibilities of the latter.
[This is a handout. The teacher has labored long and hard, but the students have full lives.
How can he best capture their attention and persuade them to do as he suggests?]
6. What are the basic assumptions made in this document? Any document makes
assumptions, about their audience, their purpose, and their form. Sometimes these are
spelled out, often they are left unsaid. Contracts assume that both parties accept the
premise of private property, anarchist manifestoes may challenge it explicitly. Does your
document assume a set of agreed upon norms? [Communications between teachers and
students are often fraught with negotiations about the structure of authority and the value of
learning.]

Level Three. The above questions usually have direct answers. Once you have the
information they yield, you are ready to start turning the document to your own purposes.
And since different people have different purposes, this is often where we have to agree to
disagree.
7. Can I believe this document? Outside fantastic and utopian writing, most documents try
to be believable. But this is exactly what you have to question. Be skeptical! (Which doesn’t
mean you can’t admire clever arguments and glittering rhetoric.) Often this means looking at
things from the other side. What would someone on less than the minimum wage think of the
claim that a free market is a fair market? [Here, there would clearly be consequences, albeit
unspecified, to not following the suggestions. They’re probably spelled out elsewhere:
syllabi; handbooks; et al. But there’s no way of knowing whether the students will follow
them.]
8. What can I learn about the society that produced this document? All documents
reveal things about their authors and their age. The mere existence of newspapers, for
example, points to the political ideal and institutionalized practice of a free press. (The
reporting of the news, though, reveals how "freedom" is constrained by the financial interests
of the papers’ proprietors.) [The fact of studying history implies a value to the liberal arts.
The rhetorical tricks used here, however, suggest that the value may have to be argued,
rather than assumed.]
9. What does this document mean to me? We work with the past, but we live in the
present. Sometimes, the relevance of a document is blindingly obvious. The US Constitution
is a living thing, which informs all aspects of our life and continues to be debated in the
present--in part because its meaning is far from evident. A Japanese philosophical treatise
from the 17th century may seem a bit more remote. Its very remoteness, however, may allow
us to picture other ways of living life, distributing wealth, relating to others--a leap of
imagination that can help us realize how people who seem very foreign in fact share many of
our preoccupations and concerns, and that can also reveal new possibilities for living
differently in the present.

And finally... How on earth am you meant to ask each question every time? Once you do it
once or twice, though, you’ll find that the questions become automatic and the suspicion
second nature. And once that happens, the past starts to come alive, and the present gets
much more interesting.