Judge a Source by Its Author, Purpose, and Bias

Hey, historian! I'm Sage, and today we're going to do what real historians do every single day — we're going to interrogate a source. Not every document tells the whole truth. That doesn't always mean someone lied. It means every source was made by a real person, with a real reason, from a real point of view. Your job is to figure out all three. Here are the three questions I ask every time I pick up a source: 1. WHO made it? Think about the author's identity. Were they a government official, a soldier, a factory worker, a newspaper editor? Their position in society shapes what they knew and what they noticed. 2. WHY did they make it? Purpose matters enormously. A letter written to a friend is different from a poster designed to recruit soldiers. An advertisement is trying to sell you something. A court record was made to settle a legal dispute. Purpose tells you what the creator was trying to accomplish — and that shapes every word they chose. 3. WHAT perspective or bias does it carry? Bias doesn't always mean deliberate lying. It means leaning in a direction because of who you are and what you care about. A factory owner writing about a workers' strike will naturally focus on different details than a striking worker writing about the same event. Neither account is worthless — but neither gives you the complete picture alone. Here's the key insight: a source can be unreliable for one question but perfectly reliable for another. A piece of wartime propaganda is unreliable for learning the true military situation — but it's an excellent source for understanding what ideas the government wanted citizens to believe. Always ask: reliable for WHAT? Put these three questions together and you become a source detective. You're not just reading words — you're reading the person behind the words.