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Primary Sources
The study of history and the work of historians are built on two types of sources, primary and secondary. Primary sources, as we will explain below, are the bedrock layer historians and scholars use in their work. You might hear these referred to as “original sources” since they spring directly from the time in question. Formally, primary sources are defined as “items that are directly associated with their producer or user and the time period in which they were created. Examples include diaries, newspaper articles, government documents, clothing, photographs, oral interviews, and news broadcast.”[1] This can expand to anything that bore witness to the historical topic you are studying. Something as simple, yet as large as a building for example. Independence Hall still stands today and also serves as a primary source for example. Visiting these sites can enlighten your historical senses more than words can relate. Nothing can top the experience of a primary source.
As you can imagine, the list of possible primary sources is rather large, but the information they provide is limitless. Research through primary documents such as letters between two people gives the inside view of what they said and did, perhaps even thought, in the moment. Can you imagine someone reading the private text or emails between you and a significant other! These deeply personal resources help historians piece together the who, what, when, where, and why of specific subjects.
Why Primary Sources
Let us examine how primary sources can be a value to research and learning. Imagine you have been assigned to write a research paper on the Stamp Act of 1765. If you are going to write a research paper on the Stamp Act, you should probably read the Stamp Act. Then you could read a few newspapers published in the days or weeks after the Stamp Act was announced and gain an overall view of the Stamp Act just as the general public did in 1765. Next, you could review a few letters between people discussing the Stamp Act or look over their journal entries and find their personal reaction. Perhaps some citizen leaders published pamphlets or opinion letters you could review. Search for political artwork or other identifiable visual aids you can find. What did the various Colonial legislatures have to say about the Stamp Act? You can examine the journals and records of their sessions to find out. Now take that a step further and do the same for the Stamp Act Congress that convened to coordinate the opposition to the law. There existed people who favored the Stamp Act and disagreed with the opposition, perform the same exercises in research for their actions. Take it a step further and do the same for the relevant parties within the British government. All this research connects you to primary source materials.
If you completed these steps for your hypothetical paper, the goal is that you have formed a knowledge base of several critical objectives,
-The Stamp Act itself and what the British government wanted to accomplish with it.
-The basis of Colonial opposition in both the press and among the people personally.
-The actions taken by those in opposition and their correspondence with Great Britain.
-The basis and actions of those Colonists who supported the Stamp Act and Great Britain.
-The resolution of the crisis followed by the plans or desires of all parties going forward.
All this is accomplished through your review of primary sources. Notice how to this point there has been no mention of reading a book about the Stamp Act from the library or your favorite reading device. At this juncture you are simply collecting your own data by taking the names, dates, and places involved to guide you to the primary sources necessary to do your own research. This is the value of primary sources. It is the reason historians rely on them to form their conclusions and craft the interpretations we all come across in their finished form of secondary sources, which we will also examine.
Hopefully this hypothetical exercise demonstrated not only what primary sources are, but also why and how they should be used to learn about a topic.
[1] Jenny L. Presnell, The Information-Literate Historian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 93.
Secondary Sources
Authors and historians do not rely simply on primary sources. While primary sources are the bedrock of any serious scholarship, it is also important historians review the work of others. Secondary sources are the published interpretations of authors and historians reached through their use of primary and secondary resources in their research.[1] Secondary sources include books, articles in scholarly journals, essays, and other published interpretations. I think that in our modern day we must include interpretations given in the spoken form as well, such as podcast, YouTube videos, or other lecture style formats where an author or historian explains their work and conclusions. I would also add published websites, just like this one. Secondary sources serve as a guide or roadmap for research. Before you dig into the details, secondary sources can provide an overview of the main participants and events of your research, introducing you to subjects you will need to find primary resources for. To keep with our example above of a hypothetical research paper on the Stamp Act of 1765, you could read through a published book on the crisis, such as the historian Edmund Morgan’s The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue To Revolution. While much of Morgan’s work is an analysis of the crisis -something we are about to learn about- it contains a narrative of the events. Reviewing this work gives you an overview of the events from a high level to help you decide on a path forward for your own research. Today this step is often carried out on a website such as Wikipedia because its quick and convenient, but if you are taking a look at any type of serious research I would encourage you to avoid the use of such sites unless absolutely necessary or for background only.
Reviewing the work of authors and historians reveals to you their interpretations, or what the historical field refers to as historiography. Once you have reviewed the thoughts of others and identified your own primary source research path, you can begin your own work and reach your own conclusions! Now you are thinking historically and challenging what others think, even what you might have thought before you started. As your work continues you build an interpretation that you can build on and share with others.
Secondary sources come in several styles. Books are not all the same. What type of book are you using? Some books are purely narrative in form and do not challenge or add to established historical conclusions, they simply lay out the events for you in the form of a narrative. You might think of someone like David McCullough in this format. He was not a trained historian for example, with no graduate or post graduate degrees in history, but he was a master story teller with a gift for crafting a narrative. While some historians might look down upon work such as this, I find it not just entertaining, but of its own value for informing others and sparking the interest that grows into deeper research.
Books may also be analytical in nature. Analytical works focus on the deeper origins and consequences of events. They might ask how and why something happened, explore the legacy and consequences of the events, or similar. Such works can be enormously detailed with data and very lengthy. For the American Revolution, the historian Gordon Wood fits into this category of authorship. Professor Wood’s works, such as The Radicalism of the American Revolution analyze in detail the underlying facets of something like the American Revolution.
Outside of books, scholarly journals provide a place for historians to publish academic essays that make focused arguments or explore narrow details of historical topics. These range from a few pages to lengthy feature articles of perhaps 50 pages or more. Look around for scholarly articles in an academic journal such as The Journal of the American Revolution to bring depth to your research. These articles often expand on the work of books, or importantly sometimes refute it, for in the historical field as in life, not everyone always agrees! Taking in the interpretations of all sides is necessary to proper historical research.
Historians continually take a fresh look at topics. New materials are found, new ideas are floated, and the world we live in changes, which naturally adjust our perspectives. What historians thought about a topic fifty years ago likely differs from what they think today, sometimes drastically. This is called historiography, thought of as the body of work and interpretations on a historical topic over time as a whole. For more on historiography visit our page dedicated to that subject. If you are going to do any type of heightened historical research, historiography is a term you are going to come across often!
So, what type of source should you use was our original question. We have now explored the different types of sources and provided examples using a hypothetical project within the American Revolution. I hope this information helps you decide what type of sources to use as you go forward with your historical research. More importantly, I hope these exercises have taught you to think historically and critically. Always ask yourself about an author for example. Who are they? What is their background? Do they have an agenda that could skew their analysis?
As a case study we could ask, are secondary works by television host or political commentators on historical events null and void? Not necessarily, we just need to be aware of these factors when we evaluate the work of any author. Bottom line is to make yourself aware of the author, read their work with an open mind, then use the tools we covered here to take your own look. It wont take long to start learning quickly how to weed out the non-sense work from the serious scholars that devote years of their life, or longer, to their work.
Practicing what I preach, do not just take my word for it, check out some other resources on historical sources:
Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography: An Introduction(New York: Routledge, 1999).
Jenny L. Presnell, The Information-Literate Historian (New York: Oxford, 2007).
Martha Howell & Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
[1] Jenny L. Presnell, The Information-Literate Historian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6.
What type of source you should use depends on many factors. Are you an experienced scholar or just diving in to learning about history? A mixture of all sources is usually the best, but read about the different types of historical sources and choose for yourself the best way you learn.
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