Six Historical Thinking Skills

There are multiple ways of approaching historical research, but Peter Seixas' Six historical thinking skills model is useful to think through any research assignment in history. While doing research, bear in mind these six intertwined aspects:

• Historical significance: Historians' work does not pretend to represent all aspects of the human past, nor does it pretend to objectivity. We choose what to emphasise and research by thinking about how significant an event, person, or process was according to a variety of benchmarks and criteria. Significance is determined by such factors as how events, people, or movements of the past have had long-term influence over subsequent events, how much of a change they provoked, or what they reveal about the past. What is considered historically significant changes over time. For example, in the 1950s, few historians would have been interested in the history of anyone but white, powerful men because they looked at history mostly as a collection of political and military events; such an approach would be viewed as incomplete nowadays.

• Evidence: Historical research uses evidence from primary sources to come to valid conclusions that become historical interpretation. Even though historians bring their own perspectives, ideological sympathies, and interests to their research, they don't just express their personal opinion in their publications. Research is based on a variety of primary and secondary sources from which one can draw conclusions using inference or deduction. The use of evidence is a complex process that involves starting with good quality sources, but also asking good questions of the sources. Almost any source can be used for historical research, provided it is properly contextualised and approached with an awareness of its authorship, purpose, and intended audience. Also, historians use a diversity of sources to avoid being overly influenced by only one point of view.

• Continuity and change: Historical work is often defined as the study of change over time. While this is true, historians explore both how and why things changed and how they remained relatively similar over extended periods of time. It is important to clearly situate events along a timeline, while bearing in mind that not every dynamic in history necessarily unfolds in a linear manner. One also must bear in mind what events constitute turning points, where significant change happens. Awareness of the different meanings of time in diverse cultures is also important to historical research, as not all peoples see time in a linear fashion.

• Cause and consequence: History is the study of humans in the past; therefore, it is complex. Not everything can be seen as having a simple cause; historical events often unfold because of multiple factors coming together. Conversely, the effects of an event can be diverse, more diverse than was intended by those who brought the event about. Therefore, while not all of history is as simple of cause-and-effect, it is important to bear that dynamic in mind. This means paying attention to historical actors (agents of change), to various factors that have influenced the course of a historical process, and to its intended and unintended consequences. Also, while historical researchers have the relative benefit of hindsight in looking at events for which records exist, they must remember that history is not the result of inevitable dynamics, but rather that it changed in ways that could not always be predicted by those who brought events about.

• Historical perspectives: Not only were humans of the past very different from us, but historians are quite diverse in their own interpretive preferences. So when doing historical work, it is important to bear in mind the differences between current worldviews and those of the past society being examined in order to avoid presentism (judging the past using values of the present) and to properly situate events in their context. It is also important to remember that in the past as today people were diverse and had a variety of ideas about how their world should operate (and how to bring that about). Finally, it is important -- especially in examining secondary sources -- to understand and situate the various perspectives brought to the study of the past by current historians; this is called historiography.

• Ethical dimension: Thinking ethically about the past is challenging, as there are inevitable differences in values between past and present societies, and researching how people of the past thought confronts historians with their own values. This means that, especially when dealing with controversial topics, it is necessary to be very aware of one's own value system and to be able to distance oneself from it in confronting the historical record. At the same time, historians should not simply accept that the past was the past and refuse to confront different value systems for their long-term consequences. Historians do have a duty to confront the past and highlight the consequences of past actions on later events. This should, however, be done with proper attention to historical context.

The information in this section is summarised from Peter Seixas and Tom Morton, The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts. Toronto: Nelson, 2013. More information on these concepts and on the overall idea of "historical thinking" is available through the Historical Thinking Project.

Primary and secondary sources in history

Primary sources:

Historians generally call primary sources documents that were produced either at the time an event happened or by people who were direct witnesses or participants in the events (regardless of whether the source was written at the same time or later as a memoir). The term "primary" refers to the fact that there is a direct connection between the source document and the events or people involved. It does not mean that they have an intrinsically better value for research than secondary source.

Some examples of primary sources include (but are not limited to):

• Letters or diaries written by people involved in the events

• Newspaper, journal, or magazine articles from the period

• Diplomatic documents produced around the events

• Books, monographs, pamphlets written at the time of the events (including fiction where relevant to the project)

• Legal documentation, such as court transcripts, parliamentary debates, or police records

• Memoirs or autobiographies written by people involved in the events

• Oral testimonies (which generally need to be transcribed)

• Photographs, audio, and video recordings of the events or of people directly involved in events (for more recent history)

• Blogs and other personal websites produced by people who have lived through the events being studied

The purpose of primary sources, generally, is to provide a first-hand point of view of the events. Often, using diverse primary sources helps provide a diversity of contemporary points of view on the events. That being said, primary sources, like all sources generated by humans, have limitations. Also, they often are written in a language that is not transparent (words change meaning over time) or may have been translated. In order to properly understand primary sources in their context, more information is required, and this is where secondary sources are essential to historical research.

Secondary sources:

Secondary sources are documents created by researchers who are normally not directly connected to the events being studied. Historians prefer using secondary sources written by other university-trained researchers in the humanities and social sciences, as the peer-evaluation process involved in creating these sources guarantees a certain level of methodological rigour. These secondary sources generally come in these forms:

• Monographs (books about one topic)

• Scholarly articles (articles published in academic journals)

• Collections of articles published in book form

• Some documentary films

"Tertiary" sources:

Some material that is produced by scholars is not considered a "secondary source" because it presents information in a very general form and results from summarising information available in secondary sources. These generally provide very good starting points for research, but usually do not find themselves listed in the bibliographies of research papers. They include:

• Textbooks

• Encyclopaedia articles (whether in print or online)

• Most work that is produced for a general, not a scholarly public, such as museum exhibits, magazine articles, and most documentaries

These "tertiary" sources are excellent sources to start one's research. Then, usually, one goes to somewhat more specific secondary sources (such as books), and then more specific secondary sources (such as scholarly articles), before launching into primary sources.