Three 1930s newspapers all report the same details about a labor strike. A historian initially thinks this strong agreement confirms the account. On closer inspection, she discovers all three papers used the same wire service dispatch as their source. What problem does this illustrate?
ANewspaper sources are inherently unreliable because they are written for popular audiences rather than scholars
BThree sources appear to corroborate each other, but they share a common origin — the agreement is false convergence, not independent confirmation
CWire service reports are secondary sources and therefore carry less evidential weight than primary accounts
DThe historian should simply gather more sources until the number agreeing is large enough to trust
False convergence is one of the most dangerous traps in archival research: when multiple sources appear to agree independently but actually derive from a single original, you have one data point, not many. Three newspapers sharing a wire service source offer no more corroboration than the wire report itself. True corroboration requires sources that arrived at their claims through genuinely independent routes — different observers, different methods, different chains of transmission. The number of agreeing sources matters far less than whether their agreements can be explained by a common source.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
A government census from 1845 shows no significant food shortage in a particular region. Oral histories collected decades later describe widespread starvation during that same period. What should a skilled historian conclude from this divergence?
AThe government census is a primary contemporary source and therefore more reliable than oral accounts collected long after the fact
BThe oral histories are distorted by memory and emotional investment; the objective census data should be trusted
CThe divergence is historically significant and reveals a gap between what official categories measured and what people experienced — worth investigating, not resolving by picking a winner
DA majority-vote approach: if more sources support one account, that account should be accepted
This is the key methodological insight: divergence reveals structure. The census counted what governments could count and chose to report — likely formal grain prices or official distributions. Oral histories capture lived experience, memory of what people felt and survived. The gap between them is not a data-quality problem to resolve but a historical phenomenon to explain: what did the state see, and what did it miss? What social reality was invisible to official categories? Treating divergence as an error to be resolved by majority vote loses exactly this information.
Question 3 True / False
Triangulating across source types (documentary, material, oral) is more valuable than gathering many sources of the same type, because different source types have different strengths and different blindspots.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
This is the logic underlying triangulation: sources of the same type tend to share the same blindspots. Multiple documents may all reflect official categories that systematically miss certain populations. Multiple oral accounts may share similar memory biases. But a government document, an archaeological layer, and a personal letter each capture different aspects of reality through different mechanisms. When all three point to the same conclusion, confidence rises substantially — because their weaknesses do not overlap. One source's blindspot is another's area of clarity.
Question 4 True / False
When a historian finds that two independent sources agree on a historical claim, this agreement is sufficient to establish the claim as historically reliable.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Agreement between sources establishes reliability only to the degree the sources are genuinely independent and have independent reasons to report accurately. Even independent sources can share biases — both could be elite perspectives that systematically misrepresent non-elite experience, both could reflect a shared cultural assumption, or both could have incentives to misreport. Corroboration raises confidence but does not 'establish' claims beyond doubt. The historian must also ask: what would each source fail to see? What might both sources systematically miss? Corroboration is a starting point for inquiry, not its conclusion.
Question 5 Short Answer
Why is source independence more important than the number of agreeing sources when evaluating historical evidence?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: If multiple sources share a common origin — a single eyewitness, a shared propaganda agenda, the same wire service dispatch — their agreement tells you only that one claim was repeated, not that it was independently confirmed. Ten sources all copying the same flawed original give no more confidence than one source. By contrast, two genuinely independent sources arriving at the same conclusion through different routes — different observers, different methods, different interests — offer real corroboration, because the chance that both are wrong in exactly the same way is much lower. Independence determines the information value of agreement; counting sources alone does not.
Establishing independence — tracing the chain of transmission, identifying shared origins, assessing whether agreement could be explained by a common source — is the essential prior step before any source comparison. The historian's instinct to 'find more sources' is correct only if those additional sources are genuinely independent.