Chapter 9

What is historical research? It is past events that are collected accounts from facts and that happened during a specific time and place. The use of this type of research is an attempt to understand and uncover social life in historical setting. Attempting to find out the nature of a phenomenon we use systematize reconstruction of the past. We may do this through time lines using this method allows the researcher to obtain a chronological sequence of events, which can open interesting settings climatic events that have change future events. Social history has many different methods of gaining information about the past, thus it overlaps wth historical research in the attempts to systematically recapture the complex nuances, the people, meanings, events,and even the ideas of the past that have influenced and shaped the present. Often times nostalgia is considered historical research, but in a way its not, nostalgia is the retelling of comfortable past pleasantries,events or situations. Historical research involves the uncovering of accounts in a way that it combines events and information of that specific time which lets the researchers to "slip the bonds of their own time"and decent into the past. When collecting these histories we need to be careful of interpretations of the culture and time period investigating. Keep in mind that definitions and connotations for terms change over time.

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Construction of a life history,

are life histories which are more in depth than just interviews, its also the use of external corroborating pieces of evidence. We have various types of data, we classify them into primary, secondary and tertiary sources. Primary sources are those are obtained by written accounts such as journals, recordings, diaries, which are original artifacts or testimonies of that time frame. Secondary sources are those obtained by oral history, stories told by someone else's perspective, talked about through generations, such as history books, news paper stories. Tertiary sources are collections through all the secondary parties, encyclopedia, almanacs, bibliographies, more distilled information. In evaluating external sources we must determine the authenticity of document or artifact. We can do this by asking questions such as why, where, when , how, and by whom was the document created. Internal criticism is attempting validate what the author is trying to say, what is their motive, are their any references, does the language invoke other works of that time period. Internal and external sources are very important especially when find out the validity of the works. The historical methods are used to access information otherwise cut off to researchers due to time persiods. We use the information to attempt and answer questions of the time period in question.