Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 410, A Man of His Times.

When I teach history classes, I find one of the things I tend to have to spend the most time on

is how to approach working with primary sources, a historical source drawn directly from the time

and place it describes, and containing a firsthand account of events.

There is a tendency among many students to treat primary sources as somehow inherently authoritative,

as possessed of a special level of insight into the past. And to be both fair and clear here,

primary sources are incredibly useful for historians. There is a reason

that when academic historians do research projects, a key component to said project, is finding

a set of primary sources to draw from. If you want to do original work on a topic, you need

primary sources. You need something directly from the time and place you're

talking about that allows you a direct look back, so to speak, free of interference from the

interpretations and biases of other historians. But it's also important to remember that this

doesn't just translate into primary sources being better, whatever that means,

than secondary ones, secondary sources being the fancy name for academic work done by scholars

of a specific time period. Because primary sources can come with a lot of pitfalls.

There's the obvious issue in terms of bias. If you've listened to my other podcast, Criminal Records, you've heard me go on a rant or two

about the dangers of just blindly accepting, say, primary source accounts from slaveholders about slavery,

or from inquisitors and interrogators regarding the actions of medieval Jews.

Simply put, people in the past, just like people today, had

views of the world colored by what was convenient for them personally, and we have to be aware

of that when we read primary sources. The two examples I gave are, of course, particularly egregious,

but bias can filter into accounts in a variety of ways, big and small.

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