¶ … participants in that history, in order to understand what is valued by these participants. Also, what resources will be most helpful to you as a student of history?
One of the most common bits of advice given is the need to 'walk a mile in someone else's shoes.' This is no less true of the study of history. It is very easy to look at persons from another time with the judgmental gaze of someone living today. How could someone have owned slaves a hundred years ago? How could women have been denied the right to vote? If we look at historical subjects with this type of dismissive eye, we are less able to understand our own limited historical vision. We will similarly be viewed as strange by persons of the future. Appreciating how ideas have been socially constructed enables us to see how our own assumptions and worldviews are not necessarily universal.
Some of the most valuable resources for any historian are first-person accounts of historical events as they were happening 'in the moment.' It is almost impossible for us to look back on history without the benefit of hindsight. We know who is going to win the American Revolution so we automatically look for the 'reasons' for the British defeat. However, for the actual colonists themselves (and the royalists) there was no assumption that the Patriot cause would be victorious. Reading the journals and letters of participants on both sides of the conflicts; newspaper accounts from the period; and documents of the era helps paint a more complete portrait of the times. It also illustrates events from different perspectives, versus the linear history that is often 'passed down' by the winners.
By reading accounts of the losing side; of participants with often-unheard voices such as African-Americans, Native Americans, women; and even residents European nations not directly involved in the conflict, historians may develop an alternative vision of historical truth that differs from the conventional 'party line' that is accepted. For example, although the Patriot cause is often portrayed as the sole voice of liberty during the Revolutionary War, "the Governor of Virginia…sought to disrupt the American cause by promising freedom to any slaves owned by Patriot masters who would join the Loyalist forces "and many more African-American slaves chose to fight for the British, because this meant securing their freedom (Narrative: Part 2, 1998, Africans in America). Even reading fictional accounts written by persons living through a historical event can convey the emotions and subjective perceptions of inhabitants of the era.
Not all primary source data is verbally-oriented. Sometimes a historian must 'dig deep' to find the truth, and that includes digging deep into statistical information as well as diaries and letters. Sometimes this historical information may conflict with reality. For example, although during the 1950s in America the cultural ideal was of a non-working, highly domesticated wife in film, television, magazines and in the self-perceptions of many women, a much higher percentage of women were working at the time than might be assumed. Even at the height of the Baby Boom in 1950, when women had been forced out of the jobs they had held during World War II, 34% of the labor force was still made up of females (Toossi 2002: 15).
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