Finding Primary Sources: Home
Primary Sources VS. Secondary Sources-- The Quick Explanation!
Primary Sources---The IFs, ANDs, and BUTs!
What Are Primary Sources?
Primary sources consist of firsthand accounts/event recordings, artistic representations of events, and original research, studies, schematics, and data. These may be created simultaneous to an event or recorded later (interviews, diaries, memoirs, art).
Visual materials, such as photos, original artwork, posters, and films, are important primary sources, not only for the factual information they may offer, but also for the insight into historial views.
Primary sources include:
- Books (such as diaries, memoirs, speeches)
- Correspondence (email, text messages, postcards, letters)
- Dissertations, original research or case studies
- Government documents (reports, census data, testimony, laws, treaties)
- Manuscripts and Archival materials (personal and family papers, organizational records)
- Maps, architectural plans, and schematics
- Moving images or films
- Newspapers, magazines or journals with firsthand accounts, data or statistics
- Artifacts (fossils, furniture, tools, clothing, etc. from the period being studied)
- Printed ephemera (leaflets, flyers, handbills, etc.)
- Broadcast media, including tv and radio
- Sound recordings and music
- Visual materials (prints, photographs, posters, artworks)
Great Book for History Researchers!
- Historians and the Research Process: Getting Started
- Reference Resources
- Finding Monographs and Using Catalogs Finding Journals, Magazines, and Newspapers: Using Indexes
- Evaluating your Sources
- The thrill of Discovery: Primary Sources
- History and the Internet
- Maps: from Simple to Geographic Information Systems
- Beyond the Written Word: Finding, Evaluating, and Using Images, Motion Pictures, and Audio
- Statistics: Quantifying History
- Presenting your Research: Traditional Research Paper, Presentation, Poster, or Website?
