Session 1: Sources

Introduction: Why and How is History Produced?

“History” is not “What happened in the past” or even “The surviving evidence of what happened in the past”.
It means “What historians choose to interpret from the surviving evidence of the past”
To reduce this to a formula, we might say:
Sources + Historians = Histories
So it is important to consider what the nature of the surviving evidence is, and how historians then choose to select and present it.
In these three TOK sessions, I therefore investigate three ways in which we gain a “knowledge” of History:
- Session 1. The Sources: What are the limitations of the surviving evidence?
- Session 2. The Historians: What are the limitations of the historians using that evidence?
- Session 3. The Histories: What, therefore, are the limitations of the histories produced?

The first way in which we gain knowledge of the past is through historical evidence (“sources”). Two questions raise themselves:
- How can we extract knowledge from the sources? (issues of quality and quantity)
- How useful is the knowledge that we extract in this way? (issues of comprehensibility and the ‘language gap’)