History on television: The problem of sources

Abstract

Historians try to understand aspects of former times and give them meaning. It is their job to interpret what happened, to explain how people lived in the past and to account for their beliefs, passions and hopes. Their reading is necessarily subjective, biased by their personal opinions and by the attitudes of mind and by the ways of thinking characteristic of their own epoch. Their only safeguard is the trace left by previous generations. The quest for sources, critical examinations of the documents, comparison and confrontation are the first steps of historical investigation. Records are never self-evident; historians must decipher them, then make inferences and, by reasoning, draw logical conclusions. But they can neither invent what is not attested, nor distort what they have found in archives or archaeological remains.