Key Terms from first year

SOURCES - anything that provides evidence

PRIMARY SOURCES ARE any evidence surviving from the past which can be examined by historians. It is directly from the past. eg ruins, letters, diaries from the time of the event, photographs.

SECONDARY SOURCES ARE information about events produced by people who did not witness the events in question. These people rely on primary sources to produce their work eg history books, documentaries, biographies/autobiographies.


Dangers of sources:

Bias: information from a person who witnessed an event or who lived at that time is not always true or accurate. The writer or photographer may have been biased. This means that they may have a strong personal opinion about an event and tried to show that their opinion was right

Basic facts can be altered to support certain views or to spread the ideas of a particular movement this is known as PROPAGANDA.

Mistakes:sometimes the author simply has the facts wrong

A good historian should try to be objective recording and examining events calmly and accurately.

ARCHAEOLOGIST - they excavate (dig up) the past. They dig up the remains left behind by people in earlier times.

The site of an excavation is a dig.