Historians distrust their own materials because evidence is inherently fragmentary and unreliable

Evidence

The working historian is accustomed to evidence which is fragmentary, unreliable, inconsistent and often contradictory, thus accurately reflecting the human condition. It is for this reason that history is one of the most valuable of educational and intellectual disciplines; for this reason too that historical statements are much more tentative, much more hypothetical than is normally expected in the comparativist social sciences. The historian knows that his materials are friable and unsafe, and he can only watch with wonderment and alarm as the model-building social scientists raise great structures of the bricks which he reluctantly supplies to them. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 716

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Absence of archival evidence can mislead historians about intentions — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 415; Soviet bureaucratic record-keeping itself destroyed reliable historical evidence; Conflicting archival accounts destabilize the very boundaries of events and causal claims — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1032 (+4 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Absence of archival evidence can mislead historians about intentions — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 415; Soviet bureaucratic record-keeping itself destroyed reliable historical evidence; Conflicting archival accounts destabilize the very boundaries of events and causal claims — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1032 (+4 more)