NCEA Level 3 History

What counts as evidence

Evidence in history comes from sources, and a source is anything a person made or left behind that tells us about the past. In a New Zealand history course the sources are usually documents such as letters, diaries, petitions, official reports and newspaper articles, but they also include speeches, cartoons, photographs, posters, maps, graphs, statistics and passages from textbooks. A source is not evidence by itself. It becomes evidence once a historian asks it a question and works out what it can and cannot answer.

The skills a historian uses on a source are close reading, comprehension and extracting meaning. Close reading means reading every part of the source, including its caption, its date, its title and any small print, because the details are often where the argument sits. Comprehension means being sure of what the source literally says, in your own words, before you say anything about what it means. Extracting meaning means working from what is written or drawn to what it shows about the people who made it and the time they lived in.

Primary and secondary sources

A primary source was made at the time of the event, or close to it, by someone who lived through it or took part. A letter written by a soldier in a trench, a petition signed in 1893 and a photograph taken during a protest are primary sources. A secondary source was made later by someone who was not there and who usually drew on other sources, such as a textbook, a documentary or a historian's article.

The distinction is about how close the source is to the event, and it is relative. A newspaper editorial written the week after a strike is primary evidence for the strike, but a newspaper article written fifty years later about the same strike is secondary evidence for the strike and primary evidence for how people in that later decade remembered it. The same document can therefore be used in two ways, depending on the question being asked.

Neither kind is better in general. A primary source brings you close to the events and the attitudes of the time, but its author saw only part of the picture and may have had reasons to shape what they wrote. A secondary source can be balanced and can use evidence the people at the time did not have, but its author looks back with later knowledge and later values.

Provenance

Provenance is the origin of a source: who made it, when, where and why. It is the first thing to establish, and most of the later judgements about a source depend on it.

• Who made it, and what position did they hold? A government minister, a newspaper owner, a soldier, a child and a missionary all had different access to events and different interests.
• When was it made? A diary entry written that evening and a memoir written forty years later may describe the same day very differently.
• Where was it made? The place shows who the author could have known and heard, and which local attitudes were pressing on them.
• Why was it made, and for whom? A private letter to a sister, a speech to a crowd and a report to a government department are written with different readers in mind.

The same questions apply to images. A cartoon in a newspaper tells you about its cartoonist's view and the newspaper's readers, and a poster issued by a government department tells you what that department wanted the public to think and which people it hoped to attract.

Fact and opinion

A statement of fact can be checked against other evidence: a date, a number of people present, a place, a law that was passed. An opinion is a view held by its author, and it cannot be proved or disproved in the same way. Sources mix the two, often in one sentence. "Some three hundred men marched to the hall, a wild and ungrateful mob" contains a figure that can be tested and a judgement that tells you about the writer.

Opinions are not useless to a historian. A writer's opinion is evidence of what that person, and perhaps the group they belonged to, believed at the time. What a historian must not do is treat an opinion as though it were a fact about the event.

Describing and analysing

Describing a source says what it contains. Analysing a source explains what it shows and how far it can be trusted. A description of a poster might say that it shows a man in uniform pointing at the viewer beside the words "Your country needs you". An analysis says that the poster was made to recruit men, that it appeals to duty and guilt, that it assumes its viewers are men who see themselves as belonging to the nation, and that it therefore shows what the government wanted people to feel about the war and not how many men were actually willing to go.

The test is whether each sentence has done some work beyond repeating the source. A sentence that begins "The source says" usually needs a second half that explains why that matters for the question, using the evidence of the source and your own knowledge of the context.

An invented example

Imagine a letter from 1886 written by a farmer in a small settlement to a newspaper, complaining that a new road was built through a neighbour's land and not his own. A careful reading goes in stages.

1. Comprehension: the farmer says the road was routed to benefit a wealthy neighbour, that he lost two days' work, and that the council did not reply to him.
2. Provenance: the author is a farmer writing publicly, which means he wants the council embarrassed and other readers to agree with him.
3. Fact and opinion: the road's route and the lost work are checkable; "to benefit a wealthy neighbour" is his explanation, not a proven fact.
4. What the source shows: that ordinary settlers expected a say in local spending, that a newspaper letter was a normal way to apply pressure, and that some people believed the wealthy influenced decisions. It does not show that the council was in fact corrupt.

The conclusions that come out are bounded by the evidence. Each depends on what the letter is, who wrote it and why, which is why the work begins with provenance and not with the content alone.