Summary Of From Reliable Sources

The fourth chapter in Howell and Prevenier’s book From Reliable Sources discusses a multitude of different perspectives and approaches that exist in the historical field, regardless of whether or not these approaches contribute something positive to the field. While reading through this chapter, I did find a few of the approaches interesting for one reason or another, but I also realized just how many factors go into how a historian perceives a text or source. I never really understood how many smaller details a historian needs to know in order to fully comprehend the context or meaning of a text, whether it is an entire paragraph, a sentence, or even a simple word. Historians have come a long way in terms of creating useful concepts that have …show more content…
Approaches like theirs aren’t often discussed, I’ve noticed, because a historian’s goal is to remain unbiased and objective; however, a historian can never remain truly unbiased simply because historians are people who form their own opinions and who have their own beliefs and preconceived notions. Dilthey and Windelband both added a philosophical aspect to a field that was once based on facts and sources only; these men, however, proved that a source can be read to show what a person was feeling or thinking. Of course, nothing is concrete when dealing with re-creating past events based on one text, but Dilthey and Windelband gave historians the possibility to look at a text in a new light, with a new perspective. Their new way of reading a text relies heavily on the scholar’s abilities, and that’s another thing that I find absolutely fascinating. I appreciate how Dilthey and Windelband created this new way of thinking that forces the historian to have a previous understanding of how to gain specific information from a text; because their new approach is based around philosophical thinking, scholars have to know and understand how to take a text and extract what the author meant, thought, lived through, and understood. This type of thinking is incredibly difficult and I believe that’s why I find it so interesting. We don’t learn about approaches like Dilthey and Windelband’s because it’s so hard to grasp and because we aren’t ready for something at that level yet. As undergraduate students, we still have to learn the basics about how to find and interpret a text; we aren’t at the level yet where we can read a text and extract all these hidden