historical document

A copy of the Declaration of Independence

A Gutenberg Bible on display at the US Library of Congress

Historical documents are documents that contain important information about a person, place, or event.

Most famous historical documents, consist of laws, accounts of battles (usually given by the victors), and the exploits of the powerful. Though these documents are of historical interest, these documents do not detail the daily lives of ordinary people, or the way society functioned. Anthropologists and Archeologists, generally are more interested in documents that describe the day to day lives of ordinary people, such as what they ate, what they worried about, hopes and/or dreams, and their family interaction. It is this information that allows Anthropologists and Archeologists, to understand and describe the way society was functioning at any particular time in history.

Many documents that are produced today, such as personal letters, pictures, contracts, newspapers, and medical records, would be considered valuable historical documents in the future to Anthropologists and Archeologists. However most of these documents will be lost in the future since they are either printed on ordinary paper which has a limited life span, or on digital formats that will become obsolete in a relatively short time frame.

Some companies and government entities are attempting to increase the number of documents that will survive the passage of time, by taking into account the Preservation Issues, and printing documents in a manner that increases the likelihood of them surviving the passage of time, or placing documents into time capsules or other special storage environments.

See also

• Family history
• Genealogy
• Labeling family photos
• Preservation: Library and Archival Science

External links

• Internet History Sourcebooks Project See also Internet History Sourcebooks Project. Collections of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use.
• WWW-VL: History Central Catalogue first history on the WWW, located at European University Institute
• BBC History Site
• [1] History Podcast Network
• List of American Historical documents
• Library of Congress
• historic document collection
• Some of America's historical documents from the NARA
• The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
• AmDocs: Documents for the Study of American History

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