Primary Sources — Written and Printed

Abstract

And, as G. R. Elton put it, there is ‘the unexpected, the unforeseen, the contingent, the accidental and the unknowable’.

Historians cannot too frequently remind themselves that their material is not the enormously dense networks of actual human relations in the past, but only the fragmented surviving record from which they may be able to elicit some sense of some of the intelligible patterns and structures that once were part of that network.

(J. H. Hexter, The History Primer, Allen Lane, 1972)

In addition, Robert Rhodes James clearly expressed one of the historian’s major problems when writing of the Chanak incident of 1922:

In any crisis of this nature the historian, however well equipped with information, is at a disadvantage. Any crisis generates its own momentum and its own personality. The stress of events; fragmentary information; the characters of individual ministers; physical tiredness; sheer chance: all these play their part, and contribute to the character and development of the crisis to an extent of which even the participants are often unaware. And thus it is that follies are committed and a sense of proportion lost for reasons which are impossible to specify with any exactness. Thus, however complete the documentation may be, the true causes are usually absent.

(R. R. James, Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900–1939 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970)