Historical Methods

A social scientist is expected to understand the past in order to know the present properly and thus have the ability to predict or plan the future.  The understanding of the past is not as easy as it is sometimes made to appear. We are even unable to know quite often what is happening around us. Then how difficult it can be to know about the past which is shrouded in myster? Historical truth, ancient or recent, is always complex and always difficult to ascertain. A historian is not only required to be a voracious reader but also needs to show keen interest in all other branches of knowledge as history is all-pervasive. A historian ought to know something about other social sciences such as Economics, Geography, Sociology, Political Science, Psychology, Anthropology, Philosophical systems and hence be acquainted with all unpredictable matters that human lives contain. At least, he should be ready to use the results supplied by others in their studies (called monographs) upon the related topics that he encounters while pursuing his own.

The historical method   includes the guidelines and techniques by which the historians mainly use primary sources and other records in order to research or study and then to write histories in the form of accounts of the past history.

Core principles

Some of the core principles of the source criticism are mentioned below which were formulated by Thurén and Olden-Jørgensen.

• Human sources might be relics such as the fingerprint; or the narratives such as a letter or a statement. Relics are more believable sources than the narratives.
• Any given source may be corrupted or forged. Strong signs of the originality of the source raise its reliability.
•  The closer the source is to the even that it claims to describe, the more one could believe it to provide a correct historical description of what really happened.

Questionnaire:

• Explain more about the historical method and principles.