1. E.H. Carr, What is history?
“The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of host of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which is hard to eradicate (p. 10).”
“In the first place, the facts of history never come to us ‘pure,’ since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder…
The second point is…the historian’s need of imaginative understanding for the minds of the people with whom [s/he] is dealing, for the thought behind their acts…
The third point is that we can view the past, and achieve our understanding of the past, only through the eyes of the present
“…reading and writing go on simultaneously. The writing is added to, subtracted from, re-shaped, cancelled, as I go on reading. The reading is guided and directed and made more fruitful by the writing: the more I write, th emore I know what I am looking for, the better I understand the significance and relevance of what I find.

2. Marc Bloch, The historian’s craft
“[History], at last, it struggles to penetrate beneath the mere surface of actions, rejecting not only the temptations of legend and rhetoric, but the still more dangerous modern poisons of routine learning and empiricism parading as common sense.” (from Introduction to The historian’s craft)
“Human actions are essentially very delicate phenomena, many aspects of which elude mathematical measurement. Properly to translate them into words and, hence, to fathom them rightly (for can one perfectly understand what he does not know how to express?), great delicacy of language and precise shadings of verbal tone are necessary (pp )”
“…a historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time. This is true of every evolutionary state, our own and all others. As the old Arab proverb has it: ‘Men resemble their times more than they do their fathers.’”
Past
Present

3. The Criteria for “Good History”
Topic definition
Bibliographic soundness
Research Compile “complete” record Evaluating those sources Understanding explicit and implicit meanings Explicating the essence of sources in the history you are producing

4. Sources
PRIMARY SOURCES: Artifacts contemporaneous to the event –The Raw Materials Of History
SECONDARY SOURCES: Writings based on primary sources (and sometimes writings based on secondary sources that are based on primary sources…)
Types of sources
Original Written Records Secondary Written Sources Oral Sources Pictorial/Aural Sources ?

5. The Criteria for “Good History”
Topic definition
Bibliographic soundness
Research Compile “complete” record Evaluating those sources Understanding explicit and implicit meanings Explicating the essence of sources in the history you are producing
Accuracy
Explanation
Historical understanding
Writing