16 Introduction CHAPTER ONE

very often decidedly more progressive in tone. Such

historiography typically seeks to include a wider variety of
The Source: The Basis of Our Knowledge about the Past
historical actors than historians of the past thought worthy of
study. It often seeks, moreover, to expose the ways the political, A. What is Source?
social, and intellectual hierarchies that we have inherited from
the past were fashioned, in this way working to demystify those Sources are artifacts that have been left by the past. They exist
hierarchies, making what once seemed natural and either as relics, what we might call “remains,” or as the
unchangeable appear artificial and malleable. Historians today testimonies of witnesses to the past.
thus employ methodologies somewhat different from those of The first kinds of sources, relics or remain, offer the researcher
their predecessors. Almost all are also more skeptical about the a clue about the past simply by virtue of their existence. The
kinds of truths the historians can discover, about the kinds of wooden columns found at the site of a prehistoric settlement
truth buried in sources. Most approach their evidence with testify, for example, to the existence of a people and tell
many more questions about its provenance and its limitations historians something about their culture. The pegs or dowels
than their predecessors might have had. This does not mean, they used to fasten building materials further enlighten scholars
however, that historians today are free of the past. The best of about their technical skills and artistic capacities. By comparing
them borrow heavily from their predecessors, using their tools to their artifacts with those from other places, historians can further
place and decipher sources, often relying on similar strategies to learn something of their commercial or intellectual relations (for
manipulate and order them. While they do not write the same example, by comparing frescos from the Cycladen island of
kind of histories as their predecessors, they could not write Santorini with those from Crete).
history at all, at least not as they understand it, if they did not
have this rich legacy. In contrast, testimonies are the oral or written reports that
describe an event, whether simple or complex, such as the
record of a property exchange (for example, the donation of
land to a medieval monastery or the sale of shares on the New
York Stock Exchange). Speeches or commentaries are also
testimonies. Vaclav Havel’s speech during the “Velvet
Revolution” in Prague in 1989 is one such example; in it, he
fulminated against the communist hard-liners and reformers and
claimed the “Prague Spring” of 1968 as historical precedent for
18 The Source What is a Source? 19
his own revolution. The authors of such testimonies can provide designed for one purpose may come to have very different uses
the historian information about what happened, how and in for vertently captured another might well be “unintentional” in
what circumstances the event occurred, and why it occurred. conception as was the film of President John F. Kennedy’s
Nevertheless, few sources yield this information in equal assassination taken by a bystander who meant only to record the
measure, and it is the historian’s job to supplement the raw parade for his private enjoyment. This film’s role in history and
material available in the source itself. in historical interpretation has, however, been profoundly more
important. A memoir written to explain a life, a legal brief
Both relics and testimonies were usually created for the specific
designed to prove a case in court, and a portrait commissioned
purposes of the age in which they were made. What are called
by a noblewoman obviously are not innocent of design and
relics were, typically, objects of practical use in daily life and only
motive, for they were produced with specific purposes in mind.
later, in the ages that followed, came to be treated as historical
To distinguish an “intentional” source from an “unintentional” is
sources. The same is true of most testimonies, whether oral or
not to argue that one is more transparent, more reliable than
written. They were composed to provide contemporaries proof
another. Unintentional sources are unintentional only in the
of an act or of a right, or in order to inform them about a fact.
sense that they were not produced with the historian’s questions
Only rarely were they designed for the use of posterity, although
in mind; they are not, however, otherwise “innocent.”
that sometimes occurred. In contrast to a relic, the content of a
Conversely, intentional source contain features not under the
testimony is thus usually more important than its form. Still, the
control of their authors and have lives beyond their original
form of such a report often tells the alert historian a great deal;
intentions. A memoir intended to justify the choices its author
to this point we will later return. It is perhaps unnecessary to
made during her life may, in fact, inadvertently reveal the
point out that one of the historian’s principal tasks is to uncover
uncertainties and untruths that she sought to conceal. It may,
the original purpose or function of the relics or testimonies that
moreover, have been received in totally unexpected ways,
have come down to posterity, to divine what use they were
therefore affecting the future in ways the author would never
intended to serve and what purposes they actually served at the
have intended.
time they were created.
Historians must thus always consider the conditions under
Testimonies and artifacts, whether oral or written, may have
which a source was produced---the intentions that motivated it---
been intentionally created, perhaps to serve as records, or they
but they must not assume that such knowledge tells them all they
might have been created for some other purpose entirely.
need to know about its “reliability.” They must also consider the
Scholars sometimes think of the first as having had an
historical context in which it was produced---the events that
“intention,” the second as being “unintentional.” In source
precede it, and those that followed, for the significance of any source might be an eighteen-century inventory listing the letters
event recorded and books found in an educated woman’s study, from which
scholars could deduce something about the kind of training she
20 The Source
Source Typologies 21
depends as much on what comes after as it does on what comes
before. Had the Boston Tea Party of 1773 not been followed by had received and her intellectual interests; or, to pursue the
the American Revolution, it would have had considerably less examples given here, it might be an eleventh-century register
significance than historians have since given it, and the very same cataloging the contents of a princely archive that named the
newspaper report of the uprising, in the very same archive, ninth-century code; or it could be a computer printout of sales
would have had a very different status from the one it actually of poetry volumes from the Barnes and Noble at Broadway and
acquired. Thus, historians are never in a position---and should 82nd in Manhattan.
never imagine themselves as being in a position---to read a
The boundaries between a source (whether direct or indirect)
source without attention to both the historical and the
and a historical study are not always, however, so clear.
historiographical contexts that give it meaning. This, of course, is
Although an ancient weapon---a spear or a catapult, for instance--
the heart of historical interpretation.
-or a deed transferring ownership of a piece of land is, obviously,
Sources are thus those materials from which historians construct a source in the usual sense, certain documents have an
meanings. Put another way, a source is an object from the past ambiguous and shifting status. Herodotus and Thucydides, for
in testimony concerning the past on which historians depend in example, each of whom provided accounts of events in their
order to create their own depiction. The relationship between own days, can be considered both historians of their ages---
the two can be illustrated by an example: The diary left by a creators of historical interpretations---and authors of sources in
midwife who lived in colonial New England constitutes a source. that they provide modern-day historians evidence both about
On the basis of such a source, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich created a these events and about the intellectual culture of the ages in
prize-winning historical study, A Midwife’s Tale (1990). A which they wrote. In many cases, moreover, the sources that
source provides us evidence about the existence of an event; a former historians used to compile their own accounts are lost to
historical interpretation is an argument about the event. the present, so the historical interpretation they constructed
serves present-day historians also as a “source of sources,” their
Although when we use the term “source” we have in mind these
only route to lost evidence. The church history left by Eusebius
primary sources, such sources can themselves be direct or
of Caesarea (ca. 265-340 C.E.), for example, mentions countless
indirect. A direct source might be the letters or chronicles that
texts that are now lost; his work thus serves not only as a
come to us from eighteenth-century businessmen, a law code
historical interpretation concerning the first Christian centuries,
written in 846, or a poem penned just yesterday. An indirect
but also as an indirect source about this era.
It is thus one of the primary responsibilities of the historian to to entertain, to deliver a moral teaching, or to further a religious
distinguish carefully for readers between information that comes cause; a biography might be written in praise of the subject’s
literally out of the source itself (in footnotes or by some other worth and achievements (a panegyric or hagiography). Such
sources thus take many different forms, which are highly
22 The Source
dependent upon the
means) and that which is a personal---what is transcribed from
Source Typologies 23
the source itself---historians have no ethical responsibility; for the
meaning they impart to that material, of course, they are entirely conventions of the ages in which they were written. The category
responsible. of “narrative source” is therefore considerably broader than
what we usually consider “fiction.” Novels and poetry – the
B. Source Typologies, Their Evolution And
archtypical fictions – are; nevertheless, a subset of this category,
Complementarity a kind of source, although they were not composed with the
purpose of informing successors about the time in which they
Written sources are usually categorized according to a tripartite were written.
scheme: as narrative or “literary,” as diplomatic/juridical, or as
social documents. Although these categories are arbitrary and, as Questions of intentionally, discussed above, become especially
we shall see, can distort as much as clarify the status of the important in the case of “ego documents.” Diaries, for example,
evidence a particular source can provide, it is important to can almost never treated as reliable reports about an event, but
recognize that source do, in fact, have generic qualities. One must be read in terms of the very individual perspective from
kind of source cannot be read exactly like another, and each which they were written, as an index of what the author (that is,
should be analyzed in terms of its formal properties as well as in the “intellectual author,” a term we will define later) considers
terms of content. his truth. Memoirs are similarly selective accounts, always highly
edited versions of the life being recorded, almost always highly
Sources traditionally classified as narrative or literary include teleological in structure (in that they are written to explain the
chronicles or tracts presented in narrative form, written in order outcome of a life, not to record its process). In general, then,
to impart a particular message. The motives for their ego documents record the author’s perception of events,
composition vary widely. A scientific tract is typically composed perhaps even his memory of how he experienced them, and
in order to inform contemporaries or succeeding generation; a they can often tell us a great deal about the writer’s political
newspaper article might be intended to shape opinion; the so- intentions and his tactics, as well as his ideology and the culture
called ego document or personal narrative such as a diary or of the age.
memoir might be composed on order to persuade readers of
the justice of the author’s actions; a novel or film might be made
Diplomatic sources are understood to be those which Technically, a diplomatic source is composed of three parts.
document an existing legal situation or create a new one, and it The first is the “protocol,” which is generally quite
is this kinds of sources that professional historians once treated stereotypical; it includes the names of the author or issuer
as the purest, the “best” source. The classic diplomatic source is and of the recipient, a standard opening or salutation, and an
the charter, a “legal instrument,” what Germans called the appeal to some higher authority that legitimates the legal act
Urkunde, the French the charte or diplome. This is a – perhaps a god (“in the name of the Father . . .”), a secular
document, usually sealed or authenticated in some other way, lord (“by the power invested in me . . .”), or a principle of
intended to provide evidence of the completion of a legal justice (“we hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”). The
transaction or proof of the existence of second is
24 The Source
juristic fact and which could serve as evidence in a judicial Source Typologies 25
proceeding in the event of dispute. Scholars differentiate those
the content itself, the recitation of the case and its
legal instruments issued by public authorities (such as kings or
determination. Here the form is variable, being determined
popes, the New York Court of Appeals or the U.S Congress)
largely by the purpose of the document. The third is the
from those involving only private parties (such as a will or a
closing (the eschatocol); again, the form is stereotypical,
mortgage agreement).
containing various authenticating formulas, witnesses, dates,
The form of any particular legal instrument is fixed. It possesses and so on.
specific formal properties (external, such as the hand or print
These charters can also be categorized according to
style, the ink,
function. Some are law-giving (ordinances, declarations of
1. “Truth” is, to be sure, a slippery notion for the individual recounting an law, statues, etc.). Others are juridical (judgments of courts
event. See, for further discussion, Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truth and
Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (New York,
and of other legal authorities); still others record voluntary
1982). agreements between individuals authenticated by public
notaries, by officials of bishops, or by aldermen of cities.
the seal; internal, such as particular rhetorical devices and
They deal with contracts, wills, marriage licenses, and all
images) which are determined by the norms of law and by
other forms of social agreements.
tradition. Such characteristics thus vary in time (each
generation has its own norms) and according to provenance What historians often refer to as social documents are the
(each bureaucracy has its own traditions-the emperor’s has products of record-keeping by bureaucracies such as state
one style, the pope’s another, the United States House of ministries, charitable organizations, foundations, churches,
Representatives’ still another). and schools. Containing information of economic, social,
political, or judicial import, these documents provide Sometimes the archaeological object is little more than the
accounts of particular charges or agencies (ambassador’s trace of a former settlement, a scar left on a landscape. Even
reports, municipal accounts, the findings of a particular relics as apparently insignificant as the charred beams of a
commission), of meetings (parliamentary debates), of burned house, especially if they have been left untouched
business policy. Or they give a survey of an administrative through time, can provide the historian valuable
structure (the property registers of a monastery), of a fiscal information. Archaeological sites of interest to historians are
structure (tax rolls), of a social structure (registers of births, sometimes buried under present-day structures and first
marriages, and deaths, lists of citizenship registrations), or of unearthed during excavations undertaken in the course of
a political administration (lists of rulers, cabinet officers building a modern construction such as a subway or sewer
legislators). line. For example, in 1993, Native American burial grounds
were discovered in New York City during excavations for
26 The Source
new subway construction.
Written sources of these kinds, although certainly essential
Source Typologies 27
to most historians’ work and although sometimes imagined
to be the exclusive suppliers of historical data, are by no Coin hoards, and sometimes hoards of paper currencies,
means the only kind of historical source. Unwritten sources, have similarly provided historians which valuable
both material and oral, are as essential elements of the information about the institutions of government, about
historian’s arsenal. Like written sources, they are of different economic conditions, about trade relations, about fiscal
types, or genres. policy. In addition, historians rely heavily on visual
representations, whether handmade or hand-finished, such
Archaeological evidence, whether articles from daily life,
as paintings, etchings, and drawings, or machine-produced,
artistic creations, such as jewelry or vases, dwellings, graves,
such as films and photographs.
roads, churches, or fortifications, counts as one of the most
important categories of unwritten evidence. Such artifacts Oral evidence is also an important source for historians.
can tell historians a great deal about the culture of the area, Much comes from the very distant past, in the form of tales
the ways of life, the artistic ambitions of the people who lived and the sagas of ancient peoples, or from the pre-modern
there. If the objects unearthed in one place can be identified period of Western history in the form of folk songs or
as having been made in another, they can also reveal a great popular rituals. Such evidence also comes, however, from
deal about the commercial and sociocultural our own day, in the form, for example, of protest songs or
interconnections of the age. other kinds of artistic performances. The interview is
another of the major forms of oral evidence produced in our
age. In their original form, all these sources were purely oral
(or visual), and few were recorded in permanent ways. quantity, of documents of all kinds-news reports, statutes,
Hence, they are lost to scholars today. But some were letters, fictions, poetry, drawings-thus assuring their long
preserved in one way or another, and it is thanks to those survival and wide circulation. The introduction of writing
preservations, often accidental, that historians can still have and printing had an enormous influence on intellectual
access to them. In the present age of film and radio, a great history as well, for they gave scholars more extensive and
many oral or otherwise ephemeral sources have thus been more accurate access to the thoughts of their predecessors.
rendered “written,” so that in some ways historians are today
Nevertheless, historians do not rely entirely on written
even more likely to use “oral” sources.
sources of their knowledge even of those ages in which the
The degree to which any historian uses oral or material printed text existed. Moreover, the boundaries between
evidence depends, to a large extent, on the period being written and oral, or for that matter between verbal and
studied or on the particular subject under investigation. material, are arbitrary. Although historians have traditionally
Historians’ knowledge about prehistoric times-that is, the age categorized material and oral sources apart from written,
28 The Source Source Typologies 29
before written records-is necessarily based entirely on the thereby calling attention to the generic differences among
material or, indirectly, on the oral record. Beginning about them and the dangers of treating them the same, skilled
3000 B.C.E., writing was invented in Mesopotamia, thus researchers know not to assume the differences, but to
inaugurating the “historical” age in human history. consider them critically. Today most scholars are use a
Thereafter, Greeks and Romans developed writing to an art, mixture of oral, written, and other material sources as the
to a highly sophisticated form of communication, and it is situation requires.
for that reason that scholars have so much deeper and more
What scholars know, for example, about the people of the
nuanced knowledge of these ancient societies than of others.
“Ancien Regime” (the term used in much of France and
This is also the explanation for the profound influence these
Western Europe to refer to the period from the late Middle
cultures have had on our own. During the early Middle
Ages to about 1800) – about their actions, ideas, beliefs, and
Ages, however, oral communication became relatively more
fantasies – comes to the through a wide variety of sources,
important, and it was only around the twelfth century that
some originally written, some written only after the fact,
written communication achieved dominance even in elite
some never written. Folk songs, monuments, stories and
circles in medieval Europe. With the invention of the
tales, miniatures, drawings and other visual representations
printings press at the end of the fifteenth century, western
(vanity alone saw to it that we have countless portraits from
European history came to be based principally on written
the age) take their places alongside newspapers and
sources. The press permitted exact reproduction, in
diplomatic documents to provide the material on which information on a grand scale began, however, with the tape
historians have based extraordinarily rich accounts. recording, first made (out of mental) in 1931, and around
1940 produced synthetically.
Technical innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries have yielded new kinds of sources that continue to The radio began in 1896 and was publicly available after
blur the boundaries between written, oral, and “material.” 1902; regular transmission began in the United States after
To a certain extent, such innovation involved simply an 1920. Television saw the first experiments in 1927; in 1936it
improvement in quality: the photograph and, above all, the was made publicly available in London, in 1941 in New
film provide representations that are in some ways more York. Ten years later it came to most of the European
realistic than the painted or drawn image. The years between countries. This medium did not, however, constitute a true
1802, when Thomas Wedgwood invented the photogram on source, at least not in its early years, for the transmissions via
silver nitrate paper, and 1888, when Kodak introduced the television were mostly live, and were rarely recorded or
film roll, were the decisive decades in the history of the still saved. In contrast, tape or celluloid film recording events
photograph. The period between 1832, when Joseph had a much greater chance of being saved, but it was only
between about 1940 and 1970 that these media were widely
30 The Source
Source Typologies 31
Plateau began experiments with moving film, and 1893,
when Thomas Edison perfected techniques, was the crucial used. These tapes do not, however, constitute a secure
age for the development of technology for moving pictures. source. Typically, they have not lasted, and as they have
It was only around 1950, however, that the technology deteriorated, information has been lost. Even the saved
became available to preserve films adequately, and it is still information is sometimes inaccessible. The French TV
more recently that efforts have been made to copy and thus system, to cite just one example, has over 500,000
preserve films made before that period. Until 1900, most documentaries on tape – but has no way to make them easily
films were what we call “documentaries,” reports of current accessible to researchers. Television’s potential as a
events or of natural phenomena. Dramatic films were made historical source has, then, some distance to go.
after that date, although it was not until after 1927 that we
Similar problems beset the computer files on which a huge
had “talkies.”
quantity of recent decades’ social documents are stored.
Sound recordings date from the late nineteenth century, at Many are at risk of erasure or inaccessibility; an even greater
least from Thomas Edison’s creation of 1877. The problem is posed by the rapid changes in hardware and
gramophone recording followed, and since the 1980s we software, for a record made today may be unreadable with
have had the compact disk. The collection of oral the technology of tomorrow. In 1983, for example, it was
discovered that a huge portion of the fiscal records kept by stylistically coherent, that is, does the witness’s or reporter’s
the United States government were inaccessible, because the tale conform to the linguistic, stylistic, ritualistic, and juridical
Japanese company which had supplied the original norms of the period and the place from which his tale is told
technology for reading these records was no longer making [or pretends to originate]?). Vansina’s contribution to
it. The problem here is not so much technical as historical methodology was significant, for historians had by
organizational; what is needed is a political and financial and large not understood that in many societies (including
commitment to maintaining the accessibility of these Europe of the tenth and eleventh centuries), social relations
materials. were sustained through oral acts, and that the most
important legal transactions achieved their authenticity by
All these sources, although different from one another, are
means of oral witnessing and the like. Oral communication
in many ways complementary. Oral records obviously can
thus rarely indicates arbitrary action and social anarchy; it
complement the written, a realization that was for too long
can, in fact, be the mark of a complex and well-ordered
lost on most professional historians. One of the first to
sociopolitical system.
recognize the relation of oral traditions to written texts was
Jan Vansina, a Flemish historian who is now teaching in the Still, historians can place trust in oral sources only to the
United States. A student of West African culture, he extent that they can be verified by means of external
evidence of another kind, such as archeological, linguistic, or
32 The Source
Source Typologies 33
established that the stories handed down from one
generation to another in that culture were as stable and cultural. In one case, for example, researchers studying
reliable accounts of their past as were the written chronicles travelers’ reports from sixteenth-century Africa were able to
and personal narratives that have survived from the western make sense of attitudes and practices described in those
European past, that in fact they were of the same genre. reports by comparing them to similar behaviors
characteristic of modern, better-understood cultures and by
Vansina’s argument was, in essence, methodological, for he
analysis of the archaeological record. Thus, in this case
was not saying that all oral accounts achieves this level of
historians were able to use the present to understand the
reliability, they do so only if they meet several tests.
past. It would, however, be a mistake to conclude from tis
Vansina’s tests concerned both matters external to the text
instance that such
(is the narrator [or witness] a member of the group that
controls the transmission of the narrative? Does the 2. J. Vansina, De la tradition orale. Essai de methode historique (Tervuren,
1961, ); in English as Oral Tradition as History (Madison, Wis., 1985)
narrative come to the researcher via a social institution or via
a closed caste?) and those internal (is the narrative
comparisons will always be fruitful. Human cultures do not asked must be carefully designed, in accordance with an
remain unchanged over time. Even before the period of overall plan about the kind of information sought and about
colonial rule in Africa, we know, sociocultural uphcavals of the tests of reliability to which it will be subjected; at the
enormous importance took place on that continent; thus, same time, however, the interviewer must be flexible, able to
neither there nor anywhere else dare we assume that the shift the terms of the interview to pursue unexpected
social codes and cultural patterns are in any sense “eternal.” avenues and avoid dead ends. In general, “hard” interviews
Indeed, the anthropologist’s impulse, to look for basic-and can be distinguished from “soft.” In the first-the kind of real
somehow unchanging-patterns, should be complemented by value to historians-the interviewer has worked hard to
the historian’s bias-to expect and look for change. reconstruct the historical situation in which the informant
lived in order to get beyond the simple narrative about what
It is not only pre-modern cultures that produce oral sources
did or did not happen. A good interview is one in which the
of use to the historians. All cultures do so, and in certain
story becomes richer, more nuanced, more understandable
instances oral reports can provide critically important
in the telling, not one in which guilt or innocence is proved,
evidence. In times of social upheaval (during wars, revolts,
a cause is vindicated, a person found out. Thus, even an
and strikes, for example), witnesses are not inclined to write
interview constructed as though it were a “fact-finding”
down their experiences-resisters have to fear their occupiers,
expedition is something much more; it is in itself an
strikers their bosses and the law. For that reason, interviews
interpretation, a source that must be analyzed with extreme
can sometimes substitute for the personal account that
care.
cannot be written. Al Santoli’s oral history of the Vietnam
34 The Source The Impact of Communication and Information Tecnology 35

War provides one revealing example of the value of such 3. Al Santoli, Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War
techniques. Santoli interviewed thirty-three veterans of the by Thirty-three American Soldiers Who Fought It (New York, 1981);
conflict who reported events that never made it into the see also Mark Baker, Nam; The Vietnam War in the Words of Men
and Women Who Fought It (New York, 1981).
official documents constituting the military archives. The
C. The Impact Of Communication And Information
men interviewed told of their initial optimism and bravado
Technology On The Production Of Sources
and then how the realities of combat – the body bags,
carnage on the battlefield, terror, shock, and loss – destroyed Although historians make choices among the materials left
morale and humanity among them. by the past, treating one object or text as a source and
rejecting another or relegating it to secondary status in the
Interviewing – or the kind of interviewing that can serve the
hierarchy of evidence, they must choose from what is
careful historian – is, however, no simple art. The ‘questions
available. Only certain kinds of potential evidence was
produced in any given age, only some of that was preserved, In the second phase, information was transported using pack
and only a portion of that is accessible to any given historian. animals. This phase began about 2000 B.C.E in central Asia,
If they are to make wise choices among potential sources, about 1000 B.C.E in the Mediterranean area, and sometime
historians must thus consider the ways a given source was during the sixteenth century among the Incas in Peru, and is
created, why and how it was preserved, and why it has been still used in some parts of South America and Africa.
stored in an archive, museum, library, or any such research Average speeds using this form of transportation were at
site. least double, often triple, those in areas where information
was carried by people.
The availability of sources is, in general, very much
determined by technology, that is by the conditions under Other technical developments further improved this mode
which a given culture received and collected information. of transmission. By 3000 B.C.E., Mesopotamians were using
The mechanisms of communication and the speed at which clay tablets to record information; around 1000 B.C.E the
information circulated are both elements of this Phoenicians developed an alphabet, which made writing
technological history of sources. This history can be divided much more efficient. Persian kings created the courier
into three periods. system of transport, in which messages were hand-carried by
specially designated agents, a method later used both in
In the first, information was transmitted by people who
Byzantium and in Rome. By the thirteenth century an
walked or ran with the news, at a rate probably never
elaborate system for delivering the mail had been worked
exceeding six miles per hour. The medium of transmission
out to connect the Florentine banking and merchant houses
was thus the messenger himself. Sometimes messages were
to the trade fairs in Champagne (France); the system was
36 The Source The Impact of Communication and Information Technology 37
also sent by visual signal (flags) or by sound (drums), and adopted by the pope in the following century. By the end of
thus news traveled faster, but in none of these cases could a the fifteenth century Europe had a net of postal connections
complex message be delivered with great precision, and in that had been developed by the Milanese firm of Thurn and
all of the geographic on climatic conditions could radically Taxis; in 1505 the firm was granted a monopoly for the
limit the range and speed of transmission. Today, such Spanish post.
methods are of course rarely used, but some conventions
have survive-the custom, for example, of flying flags at half- In 1436, a trip between London and Venice took 23 to 51
mast to mark a death or the practice of ringing sirens to days, and in 1442, a journey from Genoa to Bruges lasted 22
sound an alarm. to 25 days. Thus, distance traveled daily averaged 30 to
about 50 miles. Between the fifteenth and the nineteenth
century, this rate of travel was to double, takes to the long- instantaneous and practically universal. Accompanying this
distance routes that were constructed during this period. technological revolution were organizational changes in the
way information was gathered and delivered. The nineteenth
Three categories of information were transported in this
century saw the emergence of huge wire services such as
period, each of which required a slightly different technology
Reuters and U.P.I., which provide news services to
of literacy. The first included secret correspondence
thousands of small clients; most newspapers rely entirely on
(“litterae clausae”) of various kinds (economic or business,
these services for information from beyond their own
diplomatic, military) which had to be written in code.the
locality and thus have no independent sources by which they
second was general correspondence (“litterae patentes”)
can verify the data they receive.
which, in time, was taken over by the newspaper, the third
category. The forerunners in the production of this genre It is evident that the speed at which a piece of information
were the Venetians, who regularly penned commentaries can be transmitted, along with its ubiquitousness, directly
(called avisi) to accompany the business correspondence affects its influence. Today’s media (CNN, for example)
they sent all over Europe; they were followed by the German make the world a “global village,” and that is in some sensea
trade cities like Nuremberg and Wittenberg, which cheerful thought, for it means that people today increasingly
produced what they still call Zeitungen (newspaper). True, have access to exactly the same information at the same time
printed newspaper with a regular periodicity appeared first in and often react similarly. But it also means that an incident
Strasbourg (1609) and Antwerp (1629). It was only later that such as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 elicits an
a distinction was made between simple newssheets (which immediate reaction, in Moscow and Washington alike, with
had no explicit editorial content) and “newspapers of all the risk that such speed entails. Still, there are real
opinion.”
38 The Source The Impact of Communication and Information Technology 39
The third phase of communication is, of course, defined by advantages to the speed of communication possible today.
mechanical media. In 1830, the train increased the speed at Consider, for example, that when the harvest failed in
which information could be transmitted to 30 to 35 miles fifteenth-century England or the Low Countries, it took two
per hour. With the invention of the telegraph in 1844, months before grain could be purchased in the Baltic area
information transmission became almost instantaneous. By and another two months before it arrived where needed-far
1896it required only seven minutes to transmit a message too late for a huge portion of the population.
from one place on the globe to another. The more recent
innovations such as telephone, fax, radio, television, and The power of modern-day communications, with their
satellite have made information transmission truly steady stream of fashion changes and technical innovations,
 depends, however, not just on the speed at which messages stability and to preserve useful ways of doing things and
travel but also on the quality of the carrier and of the to preserve evidence for possible future legal
distribution system. It also depends on the readiness of the proceedings. In a more technical sense, however, the
audience to accept the innovation. It is, for example, no term “archive” means the place or the institution itself
accident that the first mechanical clocks were developed in that holds and manage the collection. In principle,
Italy in the fourteenth century and were first imitated and diplomatic sources and social documents are kept in
distributed in Flanders and England, where Italy had good archives, narrative sources in libraries. But of course
commercial relations and where the commercial there are expectations. By chance, as a results of gifts
infrastructure and socioeconomic system were similar. made to special institution or the like, we sometimes find
the reverse.
Mass communication can also create collective memories.
By this, we mean that when information about an event, or The Source phoria that followed the end of French
series of event, is broadcast widely and simultaneously, the occupation; the volumes contain important (Latin) sources
event becomes part of a shared experience, part of historical for German history. The Racueil de Historiens de la France,
memory. The Vietnam War in the late sixties and early although fist begun in 1738, was reedited and republished in
seventies provides a perfect example: the daily news reports 1899 as a celebration of the French state; like the
about the war created for great many Americans especially Monumenta, the Recueil is a collection of Latin texts from
young Americans, a single experience, an experienced that the French past. Elsewhere, such publications had a
galvanize political resistance to the war. This lesson, it somewhat less nationalist impulse, there more often being
should be noted, was not lost on the American Military. the products of learned societies such as England’s Camden
Society or its Selden Society. Whatever their roots in
romanticism’s nationalistic impulse, all these editions are
40 The Source
Storing and Delivering Information 41
D. The archive is often considered the historian’s principal
positivist in method in that they rigorously limit themselves
source of information. The term has two meanings. In
to the “provable fact” and seek, I the famous words of
the most general sense, an archive is the collection of
Ranke, to tell the story “as it actually occurred” (“wie es
documents held by a natural or a legal person (for
eigentich geweren [ist]”). They owe to positivist in method as
example, a government agency), and possibly also the
well the high editorial standards employed, the
copies of documents send by these bodies to others.
incorporation of learning and technical skills borrowed from
They are kept, of course, for practical reasons-to have a
philology, classics, and Germanic studies. Although these
record of previous actions, both to assure administrative
published collections have long served and will long
 continue to serve scholars, it is clear that we will never be Dwight Eisenhower to his wife Mamie the date it was actually
able to edit and publish “all” the known historical sources,. written? Is the place indicated within the source the actual place
And in recent years scholar have begun to explore new ways of composition? If the document does not itself provide such
of getting archival sources into the public domain. evidence --- or if there is any reason to doubt the ostensible
Microfilms have been made of serial data like fiscal accounts evidence --- is there internal evidence that can be used to
and census data; indexes of archival holdings have been determine a probable date, or a time period within which the
printed and published. Texts have been reproduced document was created? Can we tell from the content of the
electronically so that they can be searched and indexed by document itself or its relationship to other similar documents
means of sophisticated software programs, a procedure where it was composed?
which allows unparalleled scrutiny of a text’s rhetorical and
linguistic features and thus promises to open entirely new
avenues of research and analysis.
CHAPTER TWO
Technical Analysis of Source
In order for a source to be used as evidence in a historical
argument, certain basic matters about its form and content mut
be settled. First, it must be (or must be made) comprehensive at
the most basic leel of language, handwriting, and vocabulary. Is
the language o the document archaic, its vocabulary, highly
technical, its handwriting or typeface unfamiliar? Obviously,
these are more important for some documents than for others,
and always more problematic when the source is very old or has
originated in other culture, but they are never absent. A scholar
using letters written in the early twentieth century must be as
attentive to these matters as must any medievalist working with
handwritten parchments. Second, the source must be carefully
located in place and time: when was it composed, where, in what
country or city, in what social setting, by which individual? Are
these apparent “facts” of composition correct? --- that is , is the
date indicated, let us say, in a letter written from the front by