What type of sources historians depend on to work?

Answer 1

Although historians disagree with each other about many things, they do know what they trust and respect in each other’s work. All historians believe in honoring the integrity of the historical record. They do not fabricate evidence. Forgery and fraud violate the most basic foundations on which historians construct their interpretations of the past. An undetected counterfeit undermines not just the historical arguments of the forger, but all subsequent scholarship that relies on the forger’s work. Those who invent, alter, remove, or destroy evidence make it difficult for any serious historian ever wholly to trust their work again.

We honor the historical record, but understand that its interpretation constantly evolves as historians analyze primary documents in light of the ever-expanding body of secondary literature that places those documents in a larger context. By “documents,” historians typically mean all forms of evidence—not just written texts, but artifacts, images, statistics, oral recollections, the built and natural environment, and many other things—that have survived as records of former times. By “secondary literature,” we typically mean all subsequent interpretations of those former times based on the evidence contained in primary documents. This distinction between primary and secondary sources is among the most fundamental that historians make. Drawing the boundary between them is a good deal more complicated than it might seem, since determining whether a document is primary or secondary largely depends on the questions one asks of it. At the most basic level, though, the professional practice of history means respecting the integrity of primary and secondary sources while subjecting them to critical scrutiny and contributing in a fair-minded way to ongoing scholarly and public debates over what those sources tell us about the past.

Honoring the historical record also means leaving a clear trail for subsequent historians to follow. This is why scholarly apparatus in the form of bibliographies and annotations (and associated institutional repositories like libraries, archives, and museums) is so essential to the professional practice of history. Such apparatus is valuable for many reasons. It enables other historians to retrace the steps in an argument to make sure those steps are justified by the sources. Apparatus often evaluates evidence to indicate gaps in the historical record that might cast doubt on a given interpretation. Knowing that trust is ultimately more important than winning a debate for the wrong reasons, professional historians are as interested in defining the limits and uncertainties of their own arguments as they are in persuading others that those arguments are correct. Finally, the trail of evidence left by any single work of history becomes a key starting point for subsequent investigations of the same subject, and thus makes a critical contribution to our collective capacity to ask and answer new questions about the past. For all these reasons, historians pride themselves on the accuracy with which they use and document sources. The sloppier their apparatus, the harder it is for other historians to trust their work.

The trail of evidence in bibliographies, notes, museum catalogs, databases, and other forms of scholarly apparatus is crucial not just for documenting the primary sources on which a work of history depends, but the secondary sources as well. Practicing history with integrity means acknowledging one’s debts to the work of other historians. To copy the work of another and claim it for one’s own is plagiarism—an act historians abhor. Plagiarism violates the historical record by failing to reveal the secondary sources that have contributed to a given line of argument. It is a form of fraud, and betrays the trust on which the historical profession depends..

Answer 2

Reading. Historians make their own interpretation of the past by reading written sources from the past and the interpretations of other historians. This is different from archaeologists who study mankind through the material culture they've left behind (although documentary sources can be involved in their initial desk based assessment of a question) Palaentologists are the dinosaur people, from what when there ain't no folk about.

Answer 3

They depend on their own opinion on things like the "different aspects of others" they then gather all the infomation and find the most beliving one and make it history.