"The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals" E.H. Carr 'What is history?'
Metaphorically sources can be described as windows on the past. Here in the present we are inside a building and the past is outside. We look at the past outside through a window. The window shapes our reality and perecption. Perhaps the window is small so that we can only see a small part of the past through it. Perhaps the window is very wide so we have a much larger view of the past, though we still can't see all of the outside world. Perhaps it’s a skylight window we are looking through and so we can only see the powerful and the leaders of a society. Perhaps the window is coloured and made of shaped glass so that it distorts our view of the past. We can never see the whole of the outside (the past) through one window (one source) and even a collection of source windows leaves gaps. As we look through the window we might miss things too, or interpret differently from someone else what we are looking at. It is important not to stretch a metaphor too far, but the key point is that history is not the past. We cannot get to the past. We have remains of the past we can look at and through to try to work out what happened. That is the work of a historian.
https://cor.stanford.edu/ - the Stanford History Group has produced this resource about evaluating online information. They have also provided this set of resources called Reading Like a Historian: sheg.stanford.edu/history-lessons
www.york.ac.uk/borthwick/resources/ - here are some digitised sources from the University of York Borthwick Institute
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/online-exhibitions/ - the National Archives in Kew have curated source collections
https://historiana.eu/#/historical-content - curated collections of sources on key topics from many countries
https://www.europeana.eu/en/collections - a very wide range of sources from museums, archives and collections across Europe
https://www.docsteach.org/documents - online sources from the National Archives of the USA
https://artsandculture.google.com/category/event?tab=time - Google Arts and Culture has a vast amount of online source collections
The Centre for Digital Heritage works on projects that explore the potential of technologies for the heritage sector and its sources.
"The whole past is the procession of the present." Thomas Carlyle
What do we actually mean by history? Is it the events of the past or the telling of the stories of those events? Can history possibly be all fact or is there always an element of fiction? The Big Question: What is History?
The great-granddaughter of E.H. Carr looks back at his work and how it is still relevant today. The historian was prescient in warning that the value of facts depends on who wields them. You are recommeded to read both the original book by E.H. Carr and the new book 'What is History, Now?' by Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb.
A course designed to introduce students to "historiography". These resources have been created to help students aspiring to study History at Oxbridge and other Russell Group universities. It offers an online course on historiography and will also be useful for A Level students about to embark on their Independent Investigation.
In this article Professor Richard Evans argues that toppling monuments will not help us properly understand our past or resolve our present troubles.
In this interactive video and Twitter series, we are inviting history educators from around the world to share their visions of what school history is for, and how it might contribute to helping students better understand the past, face the complexity of the present, and build a better future.
In this section you will find help and ideas about how to prepare for application to study history at university.
This is a useful page from the Historical Association that gives a brief explanation of some of the differences between school level and university level History.
This is a very helpful blogpost from Dr Alastair Dunn all about how to prepares and write an excellent UCAS personal statement when applying to university to study history.
The University of York is an exciting place to study history and history related degrees: History, Archaeology , History of Art
An extract from Cambridge University's mail to schools about the application process: "At interview, the strongest applicants demonstrated that they had chosen their degree programme at Cambridge carefully, and understood the demands of the course. They showed that they could organise their thinking well, arguing logically, responding positively to challenge, and were able to rethink or refine their initial thoughts on a question when presented with new information, or a different way of approaching it. They were also able to back up their responses with appropriate evidence, drawn from academic sources as well as personal experience. They displayed real academic curiosity about the topics discussed, and could show that they had explored their subject outside of the school curriculum (which might have been through a taster day, a self-guided project, or through on-line exploration or deeper reading into particular interests). Most importantly, they didn’t give up when presented with something not immediately familiar, but persevered, using their existing knowledge and understanding, to approach an answer."
You could have a go a part of the Oxford University entrance process for their BA in History here.