What do historians do when using the historical thinking skill of analyzing historical sources?

1. Analyzing Evidence: Content and Sourcing2. Interpretation3. Comparison4. Contextualization

5. Synthesis

6. Causation7. Patterns of Continuity and Change8. Periodization

9. Argumentation

Every one of these skills should be explored and understood. Writing about one or all of them can take place during essays and papers. If you haven't touched on any then you've written circular paper or statements. Remember to use these while answering the prompt or question. These skills are explained below in further depth.

1. Analyzing Evidence: Content and Sourcing:
Historical thinking involves the ability to describe, select, and evaluate relevant evidence about the past from diverse sources (including written documents, works of art, archaeological artifacts, oral traditions, and other primary sources) and draw conclusions about their relevance to different historical issues.
A historical analysis of sources focuses on the interplay between the content of a source and the authorship, point of view, purpose, audience, and format or medium of that source, assessing the usefulness, reliability, and limitations of the source as a historical evidence.

2. Interpretation
Historical thinking involves the ability to describe, select, and evaluate the different ways historians interpret the past. This includes understanding the various types of questions historians ask, as well as considering how the particular circumstances and contexts in which individual historians work and write shape their interpretations of past events and historical evidence.

3. Comparison
Historical thinking involves the ability to identify, compare, and evaluate multiple perspectives on a given historical event in order to draw conclusions about that event.
It also involves the ability to describe, compare, and evaluate multiple historical developments within one society, one or more developments across or between societies, and in various chronological and geographical texts.

4. Contextualization
Historical thinking involves the ability to connect historical events and processes to specific circumstances of time and place as well as broader regional, national, and global processes.

5. Synthesis
Historical thinking involves the ability to develop understanding of the past by making meaningful and persuasive historical and/or cross-disciplinary connections between a given historical issue and other historical contexts, periods, themes, or disciplines.

6. Causation
Historical thinking involves the ability to identify, analyze, and evaluate the relationships among historical causes and effects, distinguishing between those are long term and proximate. Historical thinking also involves the ability to distinguish between causation and correlation, and an awareness of contingency, the way that historical events result from a complex variety of factors that come together in unpredictable ways and often have unanticipated consequences.

7. Patterns of Continuity and Change
Historical thinking involves the ability to recognize, analyze, and evaluate the dynamics of historical continuity and change over periods of time of varying length, as well as the ability to relate these patterns to larger historical processes or themes.

8. Periodization
Historical thinking involves the ability to describe, analyze, and evaluate different ways that historians divide history into discrete and definable periods. Historians construct and debate different, sometimes competing methods of periodization; the choice specific turning points or starting and ending dates might accord higher value to one narrative , region, or group than another.

9. Argumentation

Historical thinking involves the ability to create an argument and support it using relevant historical evidence. Creating a historical argument includes defining and framing a question about the past and then formulating a claim or argument about that questions, often in the form of a thesis. A persuasive historical argument requires a precise and defensible thesis or claim, supported by rigorous analysis of relevant and diverse historical evidence. The argument and evidence used should be framed around the application of a specific historical thinking skill (e.g., comparison, causation, patterns of continuity and change over time, or periodization).

Furthermore, historical thinking involves the ability to examine multiple pieces of evidence in concert with each other, noting contradictions, corroborations, and other relationships among sources to develop and support an argument.

The Historical Thinking Project works with six distinct but closely interrelated historical thinking concepts. To think historically, students need to be able to:

Establish historical significance
Use primary source evidence
Identify continuity and change
Analyze cause and consequence
Take historical perspectives, and
Understand the ethical dimension of historical interpretations.

Taken together, these concepts tie “historical thinking” to competencies in “historical literacy.” In this case, “historical literacy” means gaining a deep understanding of historical events and processes through active engagement with historical texts.

Historically literate citizens can assess the legitimacy of claims that there was no Holocaust, that slavery wasn't so bad for African-Americans, that aboriginal rights have a historical basis, and that the Russian experience in Afghanistan serves as a warning to the Canadian mission there. They have thoughtful ways to tackle these debates. They can interrogate historical sources. They know that a historical film can look "realistic" without being accurate. They understand the value of a footnote.

In short, they can detect the differences, as Margaret MacMillan's book title reads, between the uses and abuses of history. “Historical thinking” only becomes possible in relation to substantive content. These concepts are not abstract “skills.” Rather, they provide the structure that shapes the practice of history.

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