Assessing reliability in primary sources

Author / Creator

Zabin, Serena R., author

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Summary

On a March night in 1770, a detachment of soldiers from Britain's Twenty-Ninth Regiment of Foot stationed in Boston fired into a crowd of civilians gathered on King Street in the center of town. Th...

On a March night in 1770, a detachment of soldiers from Britain's Twenty-Ninth Regiment of Foot stationed in Boston fired into a crowd of civilians gathered on King Street in the center of town. Three colonists died immediately; two more, including a mixed-race African-Wampanoag sailor named Crispus Attucks, died of their wounds within a few days. Despite copious eyewitness testimony, few people agreed on what happened that night. Within hours, both the soldiers' commanding officers and the political leaders of Boston began to blame each other for the bloodshed. Had the soldiers deliberately shot into the crowd, perhaps on the orders of Captain Thomas Preston, their commanding officer? Or had they fired in self-defense at a hostile and threatening crowd of Bostonians? The problem of determining the facts of the matter became further complicated by the question of culpability. For historians, assessing the conflicting stories that eyewitnesses told is even more complicated. How can a historian sort out the most and least reliable of the sources? Are some kinds of sources more reliable than others? What is the best process for figuring out a timeline of events for such a confusing moment? Are sources that are obviously biased still useable for historians? Given the unusually extensive yet simultaneously contradictory sources that describe the events of the Boston Massacre, this event is a particularly useful case study for examining the challenges and rewards of primary source analysis.

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