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A sense of the past is the light that illuminates the present and directs attention towards the possibilities of the future. Without an adequate knowledge of history, today’s events become disconnected occurrences. To compile history, records are needed. Historians attempt to find out about the past by looking at the evidence left behind - called Primary Sources. After investigating the past using primary sources, historians write their own interpretation (account) of what might have happened. Such an account written by a historian is called a Secondary Source. There are many different types of primary sources which you can use to find out the past. These include pictures and photographs, oral history, political cartoons, artifacts and personal memoirs. Some of the first evidence left behind by people of the past were drawings. They were made thousands of years before people were able to write. In fact, the first writing was made up of small drawings called hieroglyphics. The drawings left behind by early people provide important evidence about how they lived, what they looked like and what ideas they believed in. Later in history, people left behind paintings. They engraved pictures into stones and made figures of people from marble. Since the middle of the 1800s, after the camera was invented, photographs have also provided a lot of evidence about the past. During the twentieth century, movie film, television and video film have been used to record past events. Functional and symbolic, photographs often portray street scenes, war battles, buildings, transport, people and festivals. Many a time, in reconstructing the history of early Singapore, social historians have often examined numerous photographs which depicted the early immigrants’ lifestyles both in their homelands and Singapore.  In this way, such photographs help enhance the historian's understanding of the immigrants’ material environment, thereby constructing an argument to explain the correlation between, say, a push factor such as widespread poverty in China, and the large-scale immigration of Chinese in the late nineteenth century. As pointed out by James Warren, "the black-and-white images are priceless snatches of Singapore life itself, each telling its own history". Photographs, however, should be used with care especially in constructing history. One should not discount the bias in any photograph since the snapping of shots is left at the sole discretion of the photographer. Some of the most important sources of the recent past are people’s memories of their lives. This is what we call "Oral history". Oral history is much valued in the writing of the history of the underside world such as the rickshaw pullers, prostitutes and Samsui women. It is also useful in view of the relatively high illiteracy rate and the lack of personal written records of the underside people. As such, oral testimony not only supplements the limited written material, but also fills in the gaps in the sources, and corrects the bias in colonial records. In writing Rickshaw Coolie: A People’s History of Singapore (1880-1940), James Warren employed oral history as a means to construct the social history of the Rickshaw coolies. His informants’ narratives contained fascinating information about choices, migration, work, changing relationships and hardship. Details on dressing, diet, work schedules, living conditions and worship were also touched on in the interviews. In James Warren’s view, such oral testimonies were "often direct, sometimes impassioned, and never dull". However, the problems of selective bias, the fallibility of memory over time, and the question of the verification of oral history material are very real. Some have even argued that oral testimony is not wholly reliable because of informants' tendency to "exaggerate and idealize what they did". No doubt, oral evidence may contain errors and biasness, and does not necessarily constitute a complete historical record by itself. Nonetheless, in view of the paucity or absence of written documents, there is every reason to treat oral history seriously. It helps us gain meaningful insights into understanding how people perceive the past. Seen in this light, oral history serves as a valuable primary source in helping historians construct social history. |
