Practice question · Multiple choice
Why is incidental detail, a bill of lading listing the price of pepper, such strong evidence?
Hints
- What was the document actually arguing about?
- You can only distort what you are paying attention to.
Show the answer
C. It had no motive to lie about what it was not telling you
Why
What a document says in passing, while arguing about something else, escapes the distortion aimed at its real subject. Much of social history lives in exactly those margins, the prices, the names, the quantities nobody thought worth faking.
Practise The Epistemology of History
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More questions on The Epistemology of History
- A manuscript claiming to be a fifth-century charter mentions a fortress built in the ninth. What kind of…
- Sort each practice: does it belong to objectivity as procedure or to the impossible mirror?
- Because every historian selects and interprets, all historical accounts are equally valid.
- Why does the archive tilt toward the wealthy, literate, and metropolitan?
- Complete the account of historical evidence.
- Put the three filters in the order they act on the past.