1. Historical research

2. Present traces of the past Problems:
History is a selection of a selection – historians select from available evidence which is a selection of what happened in the past.
Present traces of the past
Problems:
Too little evidence
Too much evidence
Who decides what is significant?

3. Problems:
Memory fallible
Evidence can be ambiguous
Prejudice common

4. historians cannot travel back to the past to re-observe and take better notes – can use only what was left behind
Language – means for eyewitness to give us their personal knowledge (records
Records require interpretation
Historians cannot describe everything; respond to a question they ask; they select evidence relevant to stories they want to tell
Make conjectures about the past
Should historical writing be objective, and denotative rather than connotative, given the fact that emotion is a part of human experience
Cause cannot be observed- has to be inferred

5. Problems of primary sources:
Fallible eye witness
Social bias
Deliberate manipulation
Weakness of the raw material (sources) - most people that ever lived and most events that ever happened were not recorded
Have to use sources never intended for future interpretations
History interprets – constructs plausible meanings from evidence left behind
Text can never correspond to the past as it was (because past was not a text)_.
Topic choice bias
Confirmation bias
National bias

6. Reflection:
Reflect on what the investigation revealed to you about the methods used by historians and the challenges they face when investigation topics like your own
Section worth 4 marks
Discuss challenges and limitations of studying history
Consider some of the following questions to address in your reflection section:

7. Pg. 245 – move to global war – more questions
What is history? Is it more creative and interpretative as opposed to scientific and objective?
How did the nature of your investigation present specific challenges to finding reliable evidence?
What methods did historians sue?
Is it plausible to capture the entirety of an event?
What are the challenges of causation?