1History is not simply a list of facts about the past; it is an argument built from fragile and incomplete evidence.
2Historians begin with sources, which include letters, laws, buildings, bones, and even the garbage that ordinary people threw away.
3Every source was created by someone with a purpose, so the first question is always who wrote it and why.
4A king's official chronicle may glorify his victories while quietly erasing the humiliating defeats that ordinary people remembered for generations.
5By carefully comparing several independent accounts of the same event, skilled historians can detect hidden bias and reconstruct what most probably happened.
6Archaeology frequently corrects the official written record, revealing the ordinary daily lives of people who never learned how to write.
7Numbers matter as well, because dusty tax records and old census lists can quietly expose truths that official speeches deliberately tried to conceal.
8New questions transform old evidence, so each generation rewrites history to answer the concerns of its own time.
9This does not mean that history is mere fiction, but rather that our understanding of the distant past remains permanently open to revision.
10The honest historian states clearly and separately what is firmly known, what is reasonably guessed, and what still remains completely unknown.
11In the end, the study of history teaches a kind of humility, because the dead can no longer defend themselves against our modern interpretations.