2.2.3 Understanding Historical Documents
Completion requirements
2.2.3 Understanding Historical Documents
Why did imperialism occur?
Historians try to determine the events of the past. To understand the past, they look at many things including historical documents, which can take many forms. Journals, letters, reports, paintings, diagrams, maps, charts, cartoons, and photographs are all helpful.
When looking at images from the past, historians ask significant questions:
Purpose and audience: Every document has been composed for a certain purpose. If you were writing about your day at school, you would write differently in your personal diary than in a text message to a friend or in a journal entry for your teacher. In your diary, you might write your innermost thoughts and feelings; for a friend, you might want to make a funny comment or share some gossip; for your teacher, you might write more descriptively, leaving out some of your secret thoughts or amusing references. If you were taking a photo of your best friend to put in your locker, you might take a different pose than if it was for the yearbook. Drawing a caricature of the kid down the street would have a different purpose than painting a portrait of your grandma.
Perspective: Each writer and artist has his or her own culture and experience, or worldview, that colours what they see and report. This context also must be considered.
Finding out more: What if you planned to do some research about cultural contact between the first Europeans in North America and First Nations people? In an image search of the Internet, you might find the following two pictures. They depict the same event - Christopher Columbus and his crew arriving in the Caribbean in 1492. Columbus is considered to be the first European to set foot in the Americas. You do not know who drew them, when they were produced, or why they were published.
When looking at images from the past, historians ask significant questions:
- Did the artist work from real life, from another text, from the imagination, or from a combination of these?
- How convincing is the work?
- When was the document composed? Was it at the time the event occurred or was it later â and how much later?
- What details show the accuracy of the work?
- Whose perspective does the work portray?
- Does the work influence how people think about the subject today?
Purpose and audience: Every document has been composed for a certain purpose. If you were writing about your day at school, you would write differently in your personal diary than in a text message to a friend or in a journal entry for your teacher. In your diary, you might write your innermost thoughts and feelings; for a friend, you might want to make a funny comment or share some gossip; for your teacher, you might write more descriptively, leaving out some of your secret thoughts or amusing references. If you were taking a photo of your best friend to put in your locker, you might take a different pose than if it was for the yearbook. Drawing a caricature of the kid down the street would have a different purpose than painting a portrait of your grandma.
Perspective: Each writer and artist has his or her own culture and experience, or worldview, that colours what they see and report. This context also must be considered.
Finding out more: What if you planned to do some research about cultural contact between the first Europeans in North America and First Nations people? In an image search of the Internet, you might find the following two pictures. They depict the same event - Christopher Columbus and his crew arriving in the Caribbean in 1492. Columbus is considered to be the first European to set foot in the Americas. You do not know who drew them, when they were produced, or why they were published.
- What do they show you?
- Are they accurate?
- How do you know?
- What happened when the first white men met Aboriginal people?
- What do each of these images tell us about imperialism?
Image in public domain.
Image in public domain.