Question

When evaluating past eras, historians depend on primary documents and other resources to understand events and cultures. For instance, it would be difficult to evaluate why people once thought Earth was at the center of the solar system unless you analyzed documents from the time in which the idea was relevant.. What difficulties do you think might arise when trying to understand ideas from the past, especially when those ideas are so different from our modern thinking? Do you think primary resources show a complete picture of the period they are from? Give an example or two as your answer.. . @Kfins99

Answer 1

We have difficulty understanding the ideas of the past because today we are an evolved society with a lot of access to information, which makes our knowledge wider than the knowledge of past society. For this reason, ideas from the past may seem archaic and unreasonable when compared to our current thinking.

Primary resources do not show a complete picture of the reason people in the past had these "archaic" thoughts, it just shows what those thoughts were and at what point in history they occurred

Answer 2

One example of a difficulty is why they had wars. Primary recourses would and DO show the reason of why they had those arguments and fights. Another thing is Politically, for example, when the Senators stabbed Julius Caesar, without a primary source, we wouldn't know who stabbed him to death! We could have been falsely looking at a different person.