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The compulsory Section A of Edexcel Paper 2 tests a single, demanding skill: the ability to analyse and evaluate two contemporary sources for a defined historical enquiry. Across the preceding lessons this skill has been practised topic by topic, with each lesson modelling the analysis of source-types drawn from its own period. This lesson stands apart from the narrative to teach the source skill itself — as a transferable discipline, systematically and in depth — so that you can bring a reliable method to any pair of sources the examiner may set, from a 1920s advertisement to a McCarthy-era hearing transcript. It is the companion to Lesson 10, which teaches the exam technique for deploying that skill under timed conditions; here the concern is the underlying craft of reading sources like a historian.
The central conviction of this lesson is that source evaluation is not a matter of "spotting bias" but of asking what a source is good evidence for. Every source — however partial, however interested — is reliable evidence of something, and the historian's task is to work out what that something is for the particular question in hand. A propaganda poster is poor evidence of general prosperity but excellent evidence of how prosperity was sold; a presidential speech is poor evidence of objective conditions but excellent evidence of how a government wished those conditions to be understood. The skill, then, is to convert the apparent weakness of a source — its partiality — into analytical strength by relating it precisely to the enquiry. This lesson builds that skill through the framework of provenance, tone, purpose, and content-in-context, and through worked examples drawn from across the whole period 1920–55.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson serves the AO2 skill that is examined in Section A of Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 2, Option 2H.1 (Route H depth study): "The USA, c1920–55: boom, bust and recovery." It is a dedicated source-skills lesson: rather than teaching new period content, it develops the transferable discipline of analysing and evaluating contemporary source material that Section A requires, using representative source-types drawn from across the whole period.
Because Paper 2 is a depth paper, the reward is for fine command of a short period and for source judgements set firmly in context. (For the precise weightings and question wording, consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than any paraphrase.)
The disciplined analysis of any contemporary source proceeds by asking four connected questions. They are not a checklist to be answered mechanically but a way of thinking that, with practice, becomes second nature. Each question feeds the next, and together they build towards a judgement of value for a defined enquiry.
| Element | The question to ask | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| Provenance | Who produced this, of what type, for whom, when, and in what circumstances? | The nature and origin of the source — the foundation of every judgement that follows |
| Tone and emphasis | What is stressed, in what language and register, and what is downplayed or omitted? | The source's angle of vision — what it wants the reader to see and to feel |
| Purpose | Why was it produced? What effect was it designed to have, on whom? | The intention behind the source — the key to reading its content critically |
| Content-in-context | How does the content stand when tested against what else is known of the period? | Whether the source corroborates, complicates, or distorts the wider record — and where its silences lie |
The four questions culminate in the two that Section A ultimately rewards: utility (of what, for this enquiry, is the source good evidence?) and limitation (what can it not tell us, and where must it be treated with caution?). A strong answer never treats these as separate paragraphs bolted on at the end; it weaves utility and limitation out of the provenance, tone, purpose, and context, so that the judgement grows organically from the analysis.
Provenance is the origin and nature of a source — its authorship, its type or genre, its intended audience, its date, and the circumstances of its production. It is the single most important element, because everything else follows from it: the tone, the purpose, the reliability, and above all the utility of a source are all functions of what it is and who made it. A common error is to note provenance and then set it aside ("this is a speech by Roosevelt") without letting it do any analytical work. The discipline is to make the provenance explain the source: because it is a presidential fireside chat, delivered at a moment of banking panic, to a frightened national audience, we should expect it to be reassuring rather than analytical, and we should value it accordingly — as evidence of leadership strategy, not of banking economics.
Provenance also establishes what a source is close to. A contemporary source produced at the moment of an event, by a participant, has the value and the limitation of immediacy — it captures the moment directly but may lack perspective. A source produced by an official body carries the authority and the interest of that body. A private source — a diary, a letter — may be more candid than a public one, but speaks for an individual. Reading provenance well means asking not only "is this reliable?" but "what is this the authoritative voice of, and what can that voice not know or not say?"
Tone and emphasis reveal the source's angle of vision — what it foregrounds, in what language, and, just as importantly, what it downplays or omits. A source that dwells insistently on the ease of buying goods "on easy terms" is telling us, through its emphasis, that credit was central to how consumption was sold; a war message that narrows a complex conflict to a single act of aggression is telling us, through its omissions, how the government chose to frame the war. Emphasis and silence are evidence.
Purpose is the intention behind the source — the effect it was designed to produce. Almost every contemporary source of the kind Section A sets was made to do something: to sell, to reassure, to mobilise, to justify, to persuade, to intimidate, to advance a cause. Identifying the purpose is the key to reading the content critically, because it explains why the source says what it says and in the way it says it. Crucially, purpose is not a reason to dismiss a source but a guide to its true value. A recruitment poster's purpose to mobilise makes it poor evidence of general conditions but excellent evidence of how the war effort was sold; a "Double V" editorial's campaigning purpose makes it not less but more valuable as evidence of the demands the war generated. The examiner's discriminator is precisely whether a candidate uses purpose analytically — to explain what the source is good for — rather than as a verdict of unreliability.
The final element is the testing of the source's content against the wider record — against what you know of the period. This is where AO1 own knowledge does its indispensable work in an AO2 task. Context allows you to do three things: to corroborate the source (the near-unanimous vote for war confirms the effect of Roosevelt's war message); to challenge or complicate it (the persistence of a segregated army qualifies any celebration of wartime racial progress); and to identify its silences (a consumer advertisement is silent on the farmers and African Americans excluded from the boom). A source read in a vacuum can only be described; a source read against context can be evaluated. The strongest answers deploy specific, relevant own knowledge — a date, an event, a figure, a countervailing fact — to test each source, and it is this contextual testing that lifts an answer from summary to genuine evaluation.
Section A may set sources from anywhere in the period 1920–55, and each broad type of source has its own characteristic value and its own characteristic limitation. Learning to recognise the type, and to anticipate what it is likely to be good and bad evidence for, gives you a running start on any question. The table below sets out the principal source-types encountered across this course, each of which has been modelled in the relevant content lesson.
| Source-type | Characteristically good evidence for | Characteristic limitation |
|---|---|---|
| Consumer advertising (1920s boom; 1950s affluence) | How prosperity was sold, and the aspirations and anxieties advertisers exploited | Silent on those excluded from the market; idealised, commercial persuasion, not a record of conditions |
| Political speech / address (Coolidge-era "new era"; Truman Doctrine; Fair Deal) | Official ideology, the framing of policy, how a government wished to be understood | Persuasion, not neutral analysis; presents the official case and omits what complicates it |
| Documentary photograph / relief report (Depression; Dust Bowl) | The human impact of events, and how that impact was communicated | Composed and selected for effect; a single image cannot convey the whole picture |
| Propaganda / recruitment material (Klan literature; "Rosie the Riveter"; "Double V") | The worldview or demands of a movement or campaign; how an effort was mobilised | One-sided advocacy; may exaggerate appeal or coherence; silent on the other side |
| Executive order / official document (New Deal agencies; EO 8802; EO 9066; loyalty programme) | The concrete exercise of federal power and the administration's priorities | Administrative in form; reveals the act, not its reception or its effects on the ground |
| Hearing transcript / testimony (HUAC; Army-McCarthy) | The methods and mentality of a process — interrogation, accusation — captured unmediated | Shows the visible surface (e.g. McCarthy) more than the quieter systemic machinery |
| Movement text / Black press (NAACP statements; reports of Brown, Till) | How a cause was pursued, experienced, and communicated within a community | Committed advocacy; presents the movement's perspective, not its opponents' |
| Judicial opinion (Plessy; Brown) | The constitutional status of an issue and the reasoning behind a legal change | States the law; cannot reveal whether or how a ruling was obeyed |
The value of this typology is that it lets you predict the analytical shape of a question before you have read a word of your own knowledge into it. Confronted with a 1920s advertisement, you already know to ask what it reveals about how the boom was sold and whom it excludes; confronted with a presidential address, you already know to distinguish how policy was presented from how conditions actually were. This is not a substitute for reading each specific source carefully — the particular provenance, tone, and content always matter — but it is the disciplined starting point that a top-band candidate brings to the paper.
Consider an enquiry into the nature of 1920s prosperity — for example, "How useful are these two sources for understanding the character of the prosperity of the 1920s?" — and suppose the paper sets two representative sources: Source A, a magazine advertisement of the mid-1920s for a motor car or household appliance, offering purchase on the instalment plan; and Source B, a Republican political address or "new era" financial commentary of the late 1920s celebrating permanent prosperity. (These are described by type and rhetorical character; no verbatim quotation is attributed to any named individual.)
The disciplined analysis works each source through the framework and then reads them together.
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