Practice question · Put in order
Put the links of the chain from event to evidence in order.
- An institution preserves it and you read it
- Someone present perceives part of it
- Someone records a version of it, for a purpose
- Copyists reproduce the record over generations
- The event occurs
Hints
- The chain runs from the event to what reaches your desk.
- Each link is another chance for information to be lost or shaped.
Show the answer
- The event occurs
- Someone present perceives part of it
- Someone records a version of it, for a purpose
- Copyists reproduce the record over generations
- An institution preserves it and you read it
Why
Five links, and every one is a chance for information to be lost, shaped, or invented. What lands on your desk survived all five, which is why "the document says so" is the beginning of an argument, not the end of one.
Practise Primary vs Secondary Sources
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Primary vs Secondary Sources
- A medieval charter records the grant of a mill. Sort each item: witting testimony or unwitting?
- A lost Greek history survives only as passages quoted by a later author who disagreed with it. What are you…
- What is provenance, and why does it matter so much?
- A memoir written fifty years after the event is a primary source for the memory, even if not for the event.
- Gibbon's Decline and Fall is a secondary source on Rome and a primary source on the eighteenth century. What…
- What can happen to information as a manuscript is copied by hand across centuries?