HIST 101, Introduction to Historiography, Lecture 1 — What Is History?

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Built from selected materials, chosen and arranged for a purpose — the way a house is built from selected lumber and brick, not from every material that exists.

Constructed does not mean invented. A history is built from surviving traces, the way a house is built from selected materials. The builder chooses and arranges; the builder does not fabricate the materials themselves. Evidence still governs what a constructed account is allowed to say.

Historical knowledge is not observed directly — nobody today watched Preston's men on King Street. It is built by reasoning from surviving traces: depositions, artifacts, records, images.

This is not a weakness unique to history. Much of what you know with confidence — that the sun will rise, that a doctor's diagnosis is sound — is also inference from evidence, not direct observation of the conclusion itself.

A historical claim is held with the confidence the current evidence supports — open to revision if new evidence or a better argument appears.

Provisional does not mean weak or temporary in a dismissive sense. A well-supported claim can stand for a century. It only means the claim was never declared immune to being overturned.

Capable of being shown to be wrong. A corrigible claim is one that makes a real commitment — specific enough that evidence could, in principle, prove it false.

This is what separates a historical claim from a claim that simply cannot lose. If nothing could ever count as evidence against a position, that position is not disciplined historical thinking — it is closer to the “nobody can really know anything” escape hatch this slide already refused.

A trace is anything the past left behind that survives into the present: a document, an object, a building, a landscape, a photograph, a set of numbers.

Provenance is the trace's own history — who made it, when, why, and how it reached the place you found it. Provenance is the first thing a historian establishes, because a source that cannot be located in time and purpose cannot be used with confidence.

Three habits that make up the evaluation move:

Sourcing — who produced this, under what conditions, for whom?
Contextualizing — what world did it come out of?
Corroborating — what independent evidence agrees or disagrees?

Sam Wineburg's research found that these are not intuitive. Untrained readers go straight to what a document says before asking who wrote it or why — which is exactly backward.

A sworn written statement, taken outside a courtroom, that can be used as testimony in a legal proceeding.

Depositions are among the richest sources for early American history, because ordinary people who left no letters or diaries still ended up in court. But the genre shapes the content: a deposition is produced under legal pressure, often in answer to questions someone else chose, by a person who knows the stakes.

Preston's was written in the week after the shooting, before his trial for murder.

A source created within the period or process being studied — a letter, a deposition, a ledger, a newspaper, a tool, a photograph.

It matters here because primary sources are what give a historical claim traction. But proximity is not neutrality: the people who made these sources were inside the events, with interests, limited sightlines, and reasons to be believed.

A later work that interprets primary evidence and earlier scholarship — a monograph, a journal article, a textbook chapter, a documentary.

Secondary does not mean “just somebody's opinion.” A good secondary work organizes evidence, tests inherited claims, and shows its reasoning so you can check it.

And a secondary source becomes a primary source the moment your question shifts to the time when it was written.