How do we know?

If nothing else, a historian today is distinguished from others trawling the past by a specific relationship to sources, that is, to documents understood most broadly. Interest in the excitement or color of past events is admirable and, one might hope, central to the day to day business of historical research, but in itself that is chronicling, mere antiquarianism. All history writing has a certain measure of chronicling; if a historian cannot get even the basic chronology right, then the rest of the work might be properly considered suspect as well. But there's still more that the historian must get right. There is context and significance (and sometimes, even more stickily, 'cause and effect'), which are the most vigorously contested terrain. I will argue in future posts that these things can matter, sometimes a lot. (That old axiom, that academic squabble are so nasty because the stakes are so low, makes up for ignorance with an abundance of pithiness.) In almost all these instances, historians fight not about facts but about sources. Hence, the study of history is foremost the study of sources and necessitates consideration of epistemology, weight, and perspective. Sources are everything.
Wie es eigentlich gewesen, at Ranke's insistence, is rarely within reach for the historian. The most document-rich and familiar periods or subjects -- even those in which the participants and witnesses still draw their share of oxygen and can inform the researcher -- are (eigentlich) accessible only through some process of imagination. But that's quite a different topic. What matters here is that documents are the foundation of historical imagination. Pity the sub-Saharan African specialist, or the specialist in pre-Columbian civilization? Not necessarily, for every artifact created by a human is a document, and each speaks a fact of some sort -- if only it can be read.