Hello everyone,
I am a history graduate student.
In the dissertation chapter I am currently writing, I have stumbled upon a problem I am not quite sure how to deal with. I am writing about the founding and early history of a particular political party. Now, as there are no internal documents that survive from said party for that history, I am mainly relying on third-party sources for this bit of the chapter, e.g. newspaper articles and memoirs. In total, I use around a dozen or so sources for the beginning of the chapter that narrates this early period of the party. However, the problem is that while the gist of these sources are is not contradictory, they still do contradict each other from time to time. For example, some sources say said party was established in 1893 and others say in 1895.
My question is how historians deal with such situations. Am I free to judge and decide myself what sources to trust for a particular factual/interpretative statement I make? Or would I need to go into detail in the footnotes along the lines of "Other sources differ on this. Source X says the party was founded in 1894, source y says it was founded in 1895 and source z says it was founded in 1896.," or is that not necessary unless this is a major point in my argument?
Also, if I have chosen to use a particular source to make one factual statement (say that the party was founded in 1893), but find that said source is wrong about another fact (e.g. that the party was renamed in 1901) and choose to use another primary source as a source for this fact, do I need to explain this in every instance in a footnote? Basically, I am wondering whether it is acceptable that I use a particular source to make a particular claim, but then not refer to it after that, even though it does comment on other events that I describe. This might be because I find other sources more convincing or because the discrepancies between the source and my narrative are minor and unimportant.
My guess is that unless we are talking about major point in my argument/the overall chapter, I do not need to explain such things. There are bound to be some inconsistencies if I use a dozen or so different primary sources for describing the party's early history, so explaining them all would lead to very long footnotes, which I have rarely seen in other historical scholarship. But I am still unsure and would be grateful for your advice!
Thanks!
I'm not sure if I can completely give a satisfying answer but I can give a suggestion.
First of all, remember that history is a "science", understood in the way that we are dealing with FACTS. this mean we cannot make stuff up. In other words, when we don't know something, we say that we don't know it, and move on to stating what we DO know.
If you have no way of discerning which of your two sources is most reliable when it comes to the year of founding, then it means you do not know which year it was founded. Therefore, since you are producing something related to factual knowledge, the last thing you should do is state it as if it is a fact. Because then you are saying things you don't know.
In your position, I would spend one or two lines explaining the situation. "It seems to be unclear when party X was founded. Source 1 says 1893, Source 2 says 1895. It is not clear which is right."
When using Source 1 and Source 2 later, keep this in the back of your mind. I don't advocate throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Simple mistakes happen, and it does not mean either source is generally unreliable. But when you use them later, do it with the apprehension that they have made mistakes before, and could make mistakes again.
I would also say, that when you have 12 different sources with the start of the party, I would expect it ispossible to glean the correct year of founding from them using some source criticism. Try to contextualize what you know about the founding of the party - where were the founders at the time? What were they doing? What historical context led to the founding of the party? How did the country's politics change from year to year? If you look into these things from the different sources, I expect one of the different years will make more sense. You can then include why in your footnotes, if your reasoning takes up too much space in your paper.
Just as a brief example, I am writing a book about Sino-Russian border conflicts in the 17th century. I ran into the problem that the decisive battle in the conflict was reported with three different years from the three different soucres. The Russian source placed in 1657, the Korean source in 1658, the Chinese source in 1659. That was too big a variance for me to be acceptable, so I did some analysis. First of all the Korean report of the battle was made in 1658, so the battle could not have taken place in 1659, it must ahve been misdated.
Second of all, the Koreans were summoned to participate in the battle by the Chinese. The request for help arrived in April 1658, meaning it could not have happened in 1657. Thus I concluded that the Korean dating of the battle in June 1658 was most likely, and I explained why in my footnotes.
It might be an example a bit out of the left field, but I hope its helpful, and I wish you good luck with your thesis. :)