The Treatment of an Historical Source

Abstract

Every historian knows the special excitement that is derived form perusing the documents, the primary sources that are the basic, if incomplete and imperfect, evidence from which he seeks to re-create the past. Yet, immersion in the sources can sometimes present the scholar with a dilemma. On the one hand, manuscripts evidently written by persons long dead exude a sacrosanctity which may make the historian reluctant to question the veracity of their contents, let alone the authenticity of the manuscripts themselves. Yet things can inhibit the historian's giving credence to the substance of the documents, notwithstanding their apparent venerability. If other scholars have already plumbed aspects of the historical subject to which the particular documents refer and have arrived at conclusions seemingly at odds with the testimony presented in those documents, the researcher may hesitate to accept the new evidence at face value. Some time past, in the course of my research, I came across a manuscript letter which posed rather precisely the problem of the hallowed document versus the accepted historical conclusion. The letter contained charges against several of its writer's contemporaries, men whom historians have elevated to considerable prominence in the chronicles of American military and naval affairs. Indeed, the charges were so sensational, so directly contradictory to established historical opinion, that my first impulse was to dismiss them out of hand. Perhaps it was a reverence for manuscripts which gave me pause; or perhaps it was a caution I had once read in a classic work by Marc Bloch. The student of the past, Bloch wrote, must forever be on the lookout for evidence which, though it may not correspond to expectation, may still be valid in some respects. Otherwise, historians would never uncover new and surprising facts. One could make a long list of facts which scholarly routine first denied because they were surprising.'

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