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A non-historian friend once quipped that historians make fairly reasonable claims, and then provide 37 examples of supporting evidence. I laughed at the time, but thinking about it over the years I have come to believe it's an important observation about historical authority.
Historians often ask things that aren't directly answered by documents in archives. If we're interested in how marginalized or even the vast mass of people understood their experiences, we have to be creative and resourceful and read documents against the grain.
Any evidence we identify is bound to be partial, and open to interpretation, never definitive. We have to accumulate a lot of little stories from various places, and tell them honestly, without papering over the work of interpretation we've put in.
This can make history journal articles a bit relentless, especially if you find the initial premise pretty convincing on its own. Assigning journal articles to students to read is often a good remind that 37 examples can be a lot.
The fact that we are making claims that can't be substantiated by one document, one files, one collection, one archive, is good, because it means we are trying to tell stories that were not heard and were not kept.
But we need to be aware of the fact that students, not to mention lay readers and scholars in other disciplines, potentially need to be told why historians employ a method and an ethic that results in this kind of textual excess.
