Uploaded February 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
In this lesson, we’ll be looking at the first of history’s problems, the sources that the past has left behind that form the very basis of historical knowledge.
‘The Memory of the world is not a bright, shining crystal, but a heap of broken fragments, a few fine flashes of light that break through the darkness.’ Herbert Butterfield
The first epistemological weakness of history lies with the sources that the historian is forced to use. Because they cannot travel in time historians are forced to rely on evidence over which they have no control. Most events in the past provide no evidence at all for what happened and is simply unknowable. What we can know is often the result of chance or privilege. And those sources that do shine light on the 'broken fragments of the past', do so through the interpretive lens of people in the past themselves who write from their own limited perspective. How can we know what people in the past thought if we cannot be certain that people in the past knew themselves what they were thinking?
In this lesson, we’ll be looking at the first of history’s problems, the sources that the past has left behind that form the very basis of historical knowledge.
‘The Memory of the world is not a bright, shining crystal, but a heap of broken fragments, a few fine flashes of light that break through the darkness.’ Herbert Butterfield
The first epistemological weakness of history lies with the sources that the historian is forced to use. Because they cannot travel in time historians are forced to rely on evidence over which they have no control. Most events in the past provide no evidence at all for what happened and is simply unknowable. What we can know is often the result of chance or privilege. And those sources that do shine light on the 'broken fragments of the past', do so through the interpretive lens of people in the past themselves who write from their own limited perspective. How can we know what people in the past thought if we cannot be certain that people in the past knew themselves what they were thinking?
