Thoroughly support and revise your claims about the past using critical approaches to the best and most relevant available evidence.
Emerging practice: As a novice historian, you may assume that the number of claims about the past still needing specific, empirical substantiation is relatively small. You will often make claims without giving specific evidence to support them, or you may give evidence that is over-general, under-examined, or not sourced. At this stage, you may use only a small portion of the evidence available to you from course readings and classes. Evidence is often accepted uncritically by beginners, who show little awareness of source problems or the differences between primary and secondary accounts. Sources are treated as straightforward bearers of information that give unfettered access to their creators' thinking.
As you begin to develop competence in dealing with evidence, you will make sure that claims needing substantiation with evidence always receive it, though you may still struggle to see when and why already substantiated claims need to be revised or qualified by new evidence. Claims are carefully calibrated and limited by available evidence, though some generalizations may still reach beyond what the evidence allows. It's easy for others to tell where you are getting specific evidence from, and that you have engaged with a variety of primary and secondary sources, though you may still rely disproportionately on a few sources. You are also beginning to think critically about evidence and know to look for information about where evidence came from. While beginners tend to approach sources like "jurors, patiently listening to testimony and questioning themselves," you are beginning to approach sources like "prosecuting attorneys."1 You notice discrepancies between accounts and pose questions about the intentions, perspectives, and potential blindspots of their creators, though skepticism about a source may sometimes be misplaced or over-zealous. You may begin to demonstrate signs of mastery, but only after specific feedback or coaching.
You'll approach mastery in your use of evidence when, as a matter of course, you provide well-sourced, specific evidence to support, revise, and qualify your claims, whether large or small. You think creatively about what evidence is available to you when considering a problem, and you effectively use earlier evidence that may, at first glance, seem unrelated to the topic at hand. You use historical sources not just to substantiate a single claim about that source or its creator, but to reconstruct broader historical and social contexts in which all the available evidence makes more sense. You also, as a matter of course, ask questions about where the evidence came from and "nurse doubt" about its reliability or limits, but you are also able to use a source's problems not just to discount its reliability, but to reason from those problems to new claims or insights. You are alternately the "prosecutor" and the "defense attorney" for sources, and ultimately reach wise judgements; balancing skepticism with belief, you come to persuasive conclusions about the most probable explanation for a given body of evidence.2
Footnotes
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The juror versus attorney metaphor comes from Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 77. ↩
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The phrase "nurse doubt" comes from the final episode of the popular Serial podcast, which was also, according to historian Eric Rauchway, a "pretty good dramatization of the historical process." See http://bit.ly/1xZRvXK. ↩