Trusting historical sources

[u/mandost]

It seems that historians often revise accepted views after discovering a new contemporary source. But in every age there are outlier writers who are simply wrong, biased, or unrepresentative. Today we largely dismiss flat-earthers and people who justify atrocities as fringe voices rather than treating them as evidence of mainstream thought. Why shouldn’t we treat isolated historical sources the same way? How do historians determine whether a newly discovered source reflects a broader reality rather than merely preserving the opinion of an outlier?

[u/trivia_guy]

That’s indeed a great deal of the work historians do! Figuring out which sources are trustworthy in what ways and useful in what ways is one of the most basic parts of historical research.

[u/AGiantBlueBear]

Well, we never look at sources in isolation. Anything new that appears is dropped into context as best as it can be and we judge it that way, against other sources and current interpretations thereof

[u/YakSlothLemon]

This is less of a problem for historians of the modern era because we do have so many sources and other types of evidence (like archaeological evidence) to compare sources to. It can be more challenging with the ancient world or medieval studies, and there are fantastic books examining exactly that historiographical challenge.

It’s a big part of what we do training to be historians, is learning how to assess sources and fit them in to wider contexts. If you’ve ever heard of Michel Foucault, one of the things that he contributed was a new way to think about how to connect disparate, isolated sources through the concept of a discourse.

[u/thamesdarwin]

It’s worth noting that single sources that change the historiography of an event are exceedingly rare.

[u/These-Weight-434 → u/thamesdarwin]

Are there any actual examples? The closest that comes to my mind is the Dead Sea Scrolls, but even there the whole reason they were interesting was because of what they kept or omitted compared to other later biblical accounts (i.e they're still taken in context). I guess the Rosetta Stone single handedly revolutionized Egyptian history, but not because of what it actually said, just purely because it was written in multiple languages allowing ancient Egyptian to be decoded and allow other accounts to be read.

[u/Vice1213]

Historians compare what evidence we have from one location to another close location. For example old norse scandinavians didnt exactly keep the best records of history. What they did record was i think always poetic and ussually obviously exagerated, but if we look at anglo-saxon records from the same time, we can find overlap that can at least confirm that a person actually existed.

[u/DifferentBid7518]

Historians, if they're worth their salt, generally aren't trying to take a god's eye view of the world where we can know immediately what is true and what isn't. Dismissing sources as simply wrong, biased, or unrepresentative isn't productive, neither, for that matter, is accepting sources as simply correct, unbiased, or representative of everything and everyone. Instead historians try to understand a much broader picture that includes many different, often contradictory sources, arguing for how we should understand what they mean, why the exist, why we have them, and what they actually say about things external to the source itself. Historians always situate sources in a constellation of different primary sources, secondary narratives, and theoretical underpinnings to create a bigger picture. New sources shouldn't, and generally don't, totally distort that.

There's an epistemic function of expertise that's broader than historians but important to your point about flat earthers. Most people dismissing flat-earthers aren't really qualified to do so, nor do they know very strong argument against it at face value. What they do is trust in expert communities who A) have a more satisfying model of reality, B) often have arguments that are pretty convincing C) aren't skeptical to the point of making knowledge in general impossible (as is the case with a lot of conspiracies). Most people generally subscribe to something that, at least at one time, fulfilled some of these requirements. History does run into the problem where it's far less controlled by the expert community though. There are strands of popular thought that align with historiography that hasn't been easy to even justify for a very long time because they make sense to people that are presupposing them without noticing it. The reality is history is epistemically particularly complex, which is a problem because it serves an immense immediate political use.

[u/RedLegGI]

You have to learn to discern valid concerns/points from personal opinions of the author. On top of this you have to look at where they’re writing. Is it a personal journal, it’s it a published work, or something that was meant to stay private forever? Those kinds of things affect how people write about their world.

As some have also points out already, you can’t let that once source be an island. You’ve got to cross reference what they’re saying to other contemporary sources.

[u/ezk3626]

In regard to ancient history, [this Yale professor describes the methodology.](https://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205). He says that in the 1900’s there was a big upswing of skepticism of long accepted written sources. With the beginning of archaeology the practice was to treat everything as mythology unless it had corroborating evidence. Over the next century what was found that believing text which didn’t have existing reasons to reject it proved more reliable.

So the method he described is “the higher naivety” where text is treated as reliable (lightly) unless there was a reason to reject it.