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208

The most useful account we have found is the article by John D. Mulligan, “The Treatment of A Historical Source,” History and Theory, Vol. 18, No. 2 (May 1979), pp. 177-196. Mulligan identifies various criteria historians employ for evaluating the authenticity, meaning, and significance of historical sources. He cites the observations on these issues made by a large number of distinguished historians and illustrates how each criterion applies to his own research, which focused on the importance of a correct evaluation of a primary source which sharply challenges accepted historical research on an aspect of the Civil War. This source was a personal letter, not a governmental document. Nonetheless, Mulligan’s article illustrates the relevance of the framework we suggest, namely asking, “who says what to whom for what purpose in what circumstances?”

Also useful is the recent article by Cameron G. Thies, “A Pragmatic Guide to Qualitative Historical Analysis in the Study of International Relations,” International Studies Perspective, Vol. 3, No. 4 (November 2002), pp. 351-372. This article includes a comprehensive list of sources that contributed to his essay. Readers may also want to consult the website “History Matters” which is designed for high school and college teachers of history. This website includes sections on “making sense of evidence” and “secrets of great history teachers.”

209

Letter from Deborah Welch Larson to Alexander L. George, April 10, 1999.

210

Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 51. Emphasis in original.

211

For a detailed analysis of this position, see Gerardo L. Munck, “Canons of Research Design in Qualitative Analysis,” Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Fall 1998). The author provides a systematic and balanced assess ment of the canons for qualitative research imbedded in King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry.

212

In a letter to Alexander L. George (January 29, 1998), Marc Trachtenberg indicated that he is currently studying methods for assessing archival and other sources in research on international politics.

213

Larson, The Origins of Containment.

214

Deborah Welch Larson, “Sources and Methods in Cold War History,” pp. 327-350.

215

Ibid. See also the project “Oral History Roundtables: The National Security Project,” established in 1998 by Ivo H. Daalder and I.M. Destler, sponsored by the Brookings Institution and the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland. This series of roundtables, published periodically, brings together former officials specializing in foreign and security affairs to discuss specific historical problems in which they were involved. Daalder and Destler plan a final summary report.

216

The Bayesian approach to theory choice is one means of weighting the confidence we should place in an existing theory versus a new competing theory. Briefly, in the Bayesian approach, we increase our prior estimate of the likely truth of a theory when we encounter evidence that is likely only if the theory is true and unlikely if alternative explanations are true. This relies, however, on subjective prior probabilities that researchers assign to the truth of competing theories. The Bayesian defense of this practice is that as evidence accumulates, differences in the prior probabilities that different researchers assign to theories will “wash out” as new evidence forces researchers’ confidence in theories to converge. For arguments on both sides of this issue, see John Earman, Bayes or Bust? A Critical Examination of Bayesian Confirmation Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).

217

David Collier and James Mahoney, “Insights and Pitfalls: Selection Bias in Qualitative Research,” World Politics, Vol. 49, No. 1 (October 1996), pp. 59-91.

218

For a study that indicates that social scientists’ explanations