An is not a record of what happened but a record of what somebody thought worth keeping.
Those are different collections, and the difference between them shapes every history written from the first.
Documents survive because an institution had a reason to file them and the resources to store them.
Institutions with those resources have been, for most of recorded history, states, churches and large estates.
The result is an of tax records and a near-absence of anything written by the people taxed.
Historians have long understood this and have developed techniques for reading against the grain.
A court record written to convict a defendant still contains her words, but present.
An compiled for describes a household nobody thought worth describing for its own sake.
Such readings are and they do not solve the underlying problem, which is not distortion but absence.
A source can be corrected; a source that was never created cannot be recovered by any method.
The temptation at that point is to fill the gap with and to forget that this is what has been done.
The better discipline is to name the silence and to say what would be needed to break it.
A historian who writes that no evidence survives has told the reader something true and useful.
A historian who writes that the population was content because no complaints survive has done something else.
The second sentence looks like a finding and is an of who could write and what was kept.
Archives have begun publishing accession policies describing what they declined to take.
A list of refusals is a peculiar document and a valuable one, because it makes the shape of the collection visible.
Nobody can read what is not there, but a reader told what is missing reads what remains differently.