From Reliable Sources is a lively introduction to historical methodology, an overview of the techniques historians must master in order to reconstruct the past. Its focus on the basics of source criticism, rather than on how to find references or on the process of writing, makes it an invaluable guide for all students of history and for anyone who must extract meaning from written and unwritten sources.
Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier explore the methods employed by historians to establish the reliability of materials; how they choose, authenticate, decode, compare, and, finally, interpret those sources. Illustrating their discussion with examples from the distant past as well as more contemporary events, they pay particular attention to recent information media, such as television, film, and videotape.
The authors do not subscribe to the positivist belief that the historian can attain objective and total knowledge of the past. Instead, they argue that each generation of historians develops its own perspective, and that our understanding of the past is constantly reshaped by the historian and the world he or she inhabits.
A substantially revised and updated edition of Prevenier's Uit goede bron, originally published in Belgium and now in its seventh edition, From Reliable Sources also provides a survey of western historiography and an extensive research bibliography.
I. The Source: The Basis of Our Knowledge about the Past
A. What Is a Source?
B. Source Typologies, Their Evolution and Complementarity
C. The Impact of Communication and Information Technology on the Production of Sources
D. Storing and Delivering InformationII. Technical Analysis of Sources
A. Clio's Laboratory
Paleography
Diplomatics
Archaeology
Statistics
Additional Technical ToolsB. Source Criticism: The Great Tradition
The "Genealogy" of the Document
Genesis of a Document
The "Originality" of the Document
Interpretation of the Document
Authorial Authority
Competence of the Observer
The Trustworthiness of the ObserverIII. Historical Interpretation: The Traditional Basics
A. Comparison of Sources
B. Establishing Evidentiary Satisfaction
C. The "Facts" That MatterIV. New Interpretive Approaches
A. Interdisciplinarity
The Social Sciences
The HumanitiesB. The Politics of History Writing
The Annales
The "New Left" and New Histories
The New Cultural HistoryV. The Nature of Historical Knowledge
A. Change and ContinuityB. Causality
Causal Factors (Religious Ideology, Clericalism, and Anticlericalism; Social and Economic Factors; Biology and "Race"; Environment; Science, Technology, and Inventions; Power; Public Opinion and the Mass Media)
The Role of the IndividualC. History Today
The Problem of Objectivity
The Status of the "Fact"Research BibliographyIndex
