Lesson 2

Sources of Historical Data

 Historical Data

• Are sourced from artifacts that have been left by the past.
• ARTIFACTS
1. Relics or Remains
2. Testimonies of Witnesses to the past.
 Historical Source
Historical sources: materials from which the historians construct meaning.
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 such depiction.
The source provides evidence about the existence of an event; a historical
interpretation is an argument about the event.
 Interpretative Vs Descriptive

Interpretative: explain why and how things

happened and were interrelated.
Descriptive: telling what happened, when and
where, and who took part.
 Written Sources of History

Three Categories
1. Narrative or Literary
2. Diplomatic or Juridical
3. Social Documents
 Narrative or Literature
• Chronicles or tracts presented in narrative form, written to impart a message whose
motives for their composition vary widely.
• For examples, a scientific tract is typically composed in order to inform
contemporaries or succeeding generations; Newspaper article: to shape opinion;
Ego document or personal narrative such as diary or memoir; Novel or film;
Biography; Panegyric: a public speech or published text in praise of someone;
Hagiography : writing of the lives of saints.
 Diplomatic Sources
• Understood to be those which document/ record an existing legal situation or
create a new one.
• It is treated as the purest, the best source by professional historians.
Examples: Charter , Judicial proceedings, Will, Mortgage agreement, Papal Bull etc
• 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.
 Social Documents
• information pertaining to economic, social, political, or judicial
significance.
• They are records kept by bureaucracies.
Examples:
Government reports ( municipal accounts, research findings, and
documents like these parliamentary procedures, civil registry records,
property registers, and records of census.
 Non-written Sources of History

Two Types
1. Material Evidence
2. Oral Evidence
 Material Evidence
• Also known as Archaeological evidence
• Examples: artistic creations such as pottery, jewelry, dwellings,
graves, churches, roads, and others that tell a story about the past.
• They can tell about the ways of life of people in the past and their
culture.
• Historians can also get from drawings, etchings, paintings, films
and photographs (visual representations of the past).
 Oral Evidence

Examples: tales or sagas of ancient peoples, folk

songs or popular rituals from the premodern period of
Philippine history.
Interviews: another major form or oral evidence in
the present age.
 Two General Kinds of Historical Sources
1. Primary Sources (Direct)
- original, first-hand account of
an event or period that are usually
written or made during or close to the
event or period.
- the sources are original and
factual, not interpretive.
Key Function: to provide facts
Examples:
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.
 Two General Kinds of Historical Sources
2. Secondary Sources Examples:
- Materials made by people long after
Biographies, histories, literary
the events being described had taken
place to provide valuable criticism, books written by a third
interpretations of historical events. party about a historical event, art
- analyzes and interprets primary and theater reviews, newspaper or
sources journal articles that interpret.
- An interpretation of second-had
account of a historical event.