AQA 7042 · C3.11 - Judging a source's value for a specific question
Learn why a source's value depends on the question being asked and how to turn content, provenance and context into a supported judgement. A public-domain source and fictional practice enquiries let you challenge shortcuts such as “biased means useless”, while keeping the evaluation of live assessed work your own.
Value belongs to a question
A primary source supplies original evidence connected with the past being studied; a contemporary source was produced during that period. The descriptions often overlap, but a participant's later memoir can be primary evidence without being contemporary to the events it recalls. A source's value is not a permanent score attached to the document. Value means what it can help an historian establish, explain or judge for a particular question.
Three related ideas must therefore remain distinct:
| Idea | The question it answers | Why it does not settle value by itself |
|---|---|---|
| Accuracy | Does a particular claim agree with other well-supported evidence? | An inaccurate claim may still reveal fear, propaganda, priorities or intended persuasion. |
| Reliability | How far can this source be depended on for the specific inference being made? | Reliability varies with the inference: an official speech may be poor evidence of private motives but direct evidence of official rhetoric. |
| Value | What does this source enable an historian to do in answering this exact question? | The answer depends on relevance, content, provenance, context, evidential reach and limitation together. |
This makes the enquiry the starting point. Before evaluating, identify its subject, command, period and place. Then ask what the source shows, why its creator, form, audience and purpose matter, how contextual knowledge tests the possible inference, and what part of the answer the source can and cannot advance.
A source is not simply “valuable”; it is valuable for helping to answer a stated question in a stated way.
One source, two enquiries
The source below is authentic and public domain. The two questions are NovaLearn-authored fictional practice enquiries, not proposed NEA titles and not material to reuse in submitted work.
Authentic public-domain practice source
- Creator/document: Abraham Lincoln, the “Nicolay Copy” of the Gettysburg Address, an 1863 working draft of the speech he delivered at Gettysburg
- Date and occasion: 19 November 1863, at the dedication of a military cemetery for Union dead
- Repository: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, digital IDs al0186p1 and al0186p2
- Stable transcript: Library of Congress Nicolay Copy transcription
- Rights and treatment: Lincoln's text is public domain; a Library of Congress record for a digitised edition states that the collection is public domain and free to use and reuse. The extract uses an ellipsis to signal omitted words and otherwise follows the transcript.
“a new birth of freedom ... government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Practice enquiry A: How did President Lincoln intend to present the purpose of the Civil War in the Gettysburg Address?
Practice enquiry B: Why did individual Union soldiers continue fighting in November 1863?
For enquiry A, Lincoln's connection between freedom and the survival of government based on the people is directly relevant. Because this was a working draft prepared for a public presidential speech at the dedication of a cemetery, those ideas help reveal the larger purpose he intended national audiences to attach to sacrifice in the war. His political purpose does not make the draft useless: that purpose is part of what enquiry A investigates.
For enquiry B, the same provenance creates a serious limitation. Lincoln spoke as president and framed the war's national meaning; he did not report interviews with rank-and-file soldiers or separate their varied personal motives. The speech remains valuable for the official appeal soldiers could encounter, but it cannot establish why individual soldiers kept fighting without evidence such as letters, diaries or testimony from soldiers themselves.
Turn features into evaluation
Listing content, provenance and context in separate sentences is not yet evaluation. Each feature must do analytical work for the enquiry.
| Move | Applied to the practice source | Why it advances an answer |
|---|---|---|
| Identify relevant content or emphasis | Lincoln links freedom to the survival of government based on the people. | This supports an inference about the public purpose he intended to assign to the war. |
| Use provenance selectively | The president prepared the draft for an address at the dedication of a cemetery for Union dead. | His office and the commemorative occasion make intended national purpose and sacrifice especially relevant. |
| Test the inference with context | The working draft is closely tied to an address delivered during the Civil War in November 1863, but it remains one presidential intervention. | This makes it evidence of intended official wartime rhetoric, not proof of every Union soldier's motive or every listener's response. |
| State evidential reach | It can show what Lincoln planned to communicate about the war and sacrifice. | It cannot by itself establish every word spoken, how far audiences accepted the message or why individual soldiers continued fighting. |
| Judge overall value | It has strong, direct value for enquiry A and narrow value for enquiry B. | The judgement weighs contribution and limitation against each question rather than awarding a generic label. |
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