LET’S TRY ONE
Five surviving letters all come from one wealthy household. What limits a claim about every resident's daily life?
The sources represent one household rather than all residents.
The collection's social coverage is narrow even if its details are valuable.
Learning steps & teaching tips
Match the scope of a historical conclusion to the surviving evidence and its context.
- Separate a document's statement from a historian's interpretation.
- Check date, audience, purpose and missing perspectives.
- Use qualified conclusions when surviving evidence is incomplete.
Try it together
Write an interpretation from two invented sources, then add a third source from a different role. Revise one claim to reflect the expanded evidence.
Ask whose experience survives in the record and what the source can actually establish.