Primary Sources

What are primary sources?

Historians consider all sources, textual or otherwise, to fall into two (and sometimes three) categories:

• Primary Sources. These are considered primary because of their proximity to whatever is being studied. They may represent the viewpoint of a person who was experiencing the events you are studying. They can also be sources generated in a time period or by an organization whose perspective you are trying to understand.
  • Almost anything can be a primary source, depending on how you are using it. For example, if you are interested in studying bias in the scholarly publishing industry, then scholarly books and articles will be your primary sources, even though you are used to thinking of them as secondary sources.
• Secondary Sources. These are considered secondary because of their distance to whatever is being studied. Distance here means critical distance or perspective. In other words, these sources are being used precisely because they are not in the thick of whatever it is you are mainly studying. They have taken a step back so they can examine evidence and try to analyze the subject in an unbiased way. For example, historians who live after the events they study have the benefit of seeing how things turned out. They didn’t experience them firsthand, but they can read records of many people who did, and thereby try to overcome the limitations of a single person’s perspective.
  • Newspapers, for example, can be primary or secondary, depending on how you use them. If you are simply using them to find out concrete facts, and you trust the reliability of the factual information, then you are using them as secondary sources. But if you are using them to understand the mindset of the newspapers or their subscribers—which things were covered in the newspaper and which weren’t, what biases do the journalists reveal, what did people think about particular events at that time—then you are using them as primary sources.
• Tertiary Sources. This term is only used sometimes. It refers to sources that are specifically meant to be used by researchers, often to learn about the sources themselves. This might include research guides, bibliographies, and possibly encyclopedias.

A few notes about primary and secondary sources

• “Primary source” is not a synonym for your “main source.” To call something a primary source is simply to describe the relationship between the source and the event you are studying. It is possible for the main sources of a research project to be secondary sources.
• Primary and secondary sources work together. Primary sources are not better or worse, more or less reliable than secondary sources. They are complementary.
  • Primary sources give you direct insight into what you are studying. They are the only way we really can learn about what happened in the past. But the authors have their own biases and limitations, and not everything that happened is well documented in primary sources.
  • Secondary sources attempt to gather and analyze evidence in an unbiased fashion. You should use secondary sources for which you trust the author’s research and analysis. At the same time, you should recognize that all sources are created from a certain point of view, and even secondary sources should be read critically.
• Secondary sources will provide you with the factual background that you need to understand your research subject. Just as important, they tell you the interpretations of the past that other historians have made. Good research takes those secondary source interpretations into consideration and then uses them to try to say something new about a set of primary sources. You may agree, disagree, or build upon existing interpretations.
• Original research almost always requires primary sources. If you only read secondary sources, you will never be able to come to your own, original conclusion (unless you are studying something about the secondary sources themselves, in which case they just became primary sources when you weren’t looking). This is why it is so important to find primary sources.
  • This is also why it’s important to try to find primary sources that have not already been selected to demonstrate someone else’s interpretation. It will be difficult for you to come up with something new if the sources have been chosen to lead you to a specific conclusion. You should try to find some collection of sources, however small, that are in as much of their original state as possible—unedited, and in their original grouping so you can see how they relate to other primary sources.

How many primary sources do you have to use?

There is no simple answer. Some primary sources are a single index card or post-it note. Some are a report that is thousands of pages long. It always depends on the nature of the source and how you are planning to use it.

The only guideline is that your professor has allotted a certain amount of time for you to work on your research project, so you need to find enough sources to adequately answer your research question within that timeframe, and also enough to keep you busy for the time the professor is expecting you to be reading your sources. For an introductory research project, that might consist of around 10 hours spent reading/looking at/listening to primary sources. Some are more time-consuming, like if you have to transcribe an oral interview or read handwriting.

Research involves sifting through material and using your judgment to find what’s relevant. A field biologist does not expect to spend five minutes observing an animal and see everything they need to know. You have to read through enough material to know what’s common and what’s unusual, who are the different people who appear in the sources, what are the documents like that you are looking at, and so on.

How will you find primary sources?

There are several different avenues you can use to find primary sources. This list can help you think about what strategies you want to use, depending on your project and what is available and accessible to you.

Format

Traditionally, historians had to travel to archives to access primary sources. There is still a lot of value that comes from handling sources in their original form, and there are great primary source archives at UNE, the Maine Historical Society (Portland), and other local organizations. However, you will most likely be accessing your sources either digitally or as a published collection. There are resources for finding primary sources in archives, but this will not be addressed here.

It is important to recognize that not everything has been digitized. To give just one example, the French national library (the Bibliothèque nationale de France) has about 40 million objects, but only about 6 million are digitized. It takes time and money to digitize things, so libraries and archives are full of documents, images, and recordings for which there is no digital version. Also, copyright law in the United States affects whether something will be freely available on the web. For instance, books usually do not enter the public domain until 95 years have passed. So most books published in the 20th century are still not yet freely available, even if they have been digitized.

Source collections

Out of all the primary sources in the world, only a smaller subset is digitized. These fall into several categories.

• Random primary sources on the Web. These will be easiest to find on Google, but you should avoid them. It is uncertain whether they are accurate representations of the original sources. They will be edited, excerpted, and separated from their original context, often without any indication of what has been cut. And they will have been chosen because they are famous, striking, or support a particular point of view. These kinds of sources are great for finding a juicy quote that supports your hypothesis, but a bad way to do research. When you do research you want to look at all of the data, not just the data that someone else thought was useful.
  • Even though the webpage may have reliable information, you don’t want scattershot collections or small bits of sources, like Spartacus Educational’s page about Navajo Codetalkers or the Digital Public Library of America’s small collection of sources on the American Indian Movement. They are so highly selective and so limited that there’s not much room for you to discover anything. Collections meant for the classroom often have a lot of photographs, which are interesting but often don’t contribute much new information about what you’re studying.
  • The Library of Congress and the National Archives have informational pages that include samples of sources, often targeted at classroom use, like this page about the Great Depression and World War II. Those can be a helpful introduction, but you still want to dig your way through and find the larger collections those selections came from. If you hunt around their websites, you can find very detailed research guides like this list of many of the Library of Congress’s digital collections related to the Great Depression and the New Deal.
• Partial or full collections available online. This is a much better way to find primary sources because the sources are complete and in something close to their original context. Picture a document as it physically exists, in a folder with all of the other documents generated by the author or organization in that day, week, or year. Instead of just reading the one extract that supports someone else’s claim, you’ll see all of the evidence. You want the digital version of that, where all of the documents in that archival folder have been digitized and are available to you, in the same order they were in that folder.
  • These kinds of digital archives are often associated with universities, who often make them freely available. For example, Duke University has digitized some of its archives related to the Civil Rights Movement, like the Joseph A. Sinsheimer Papers.
  • Universities subscribe to primary source databases, such as UNE’s subscription to ProQuest Historical Newspapers or the North American Women’s Letters and Diaries databases.
• Published collections that have been digitized. Before the internet, scholars sometimes published books that contained large collections of sources. They might transcribe handwritten documents, or translate them into English. Sometimes these are available as books that you can borrow, and sometimes they are digitally available.
  • Documents held by entities of the U.S. government are usually freely available. This includes, for instance, the massive collections of papers in the Foreign Relations of the United States, or the Index to the Theodore Roosevelt Papers.
  • Books and periodicals that are not under copyright can be found in Google Books, Archive.org, and HathiTrust.org.
    • Some organizations published their records, like the Record of proceedings of the General Assembly of the Knights of Labor, which are available on Archive.org.
    • They even have some digitized microfilm, like the Records of the field offices for the state of Alabama, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865-1872.
  • Some of these collections are still only available as hard copy books, but you can still borrow and read them. For instance, several local colleges have the 6-volume Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and you can get them delivered to our library through MaineCAT.

Searching for primary sources

Now that you understand the different forms that source collections can take, how will you find them?

• Google. Now you know that when you search for “primary sources [your topic]” you are not going to stop at the first site that has a few excerpts. If you keep hunting, you may find a detailed source like NASA’s Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report, a source collection like the Rutgers University Oral History Archives (which can be limited to veterans of the Vietnam War, for instance), or even better, a research guide like this one from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
  • o It takes time and effort. For example, when you first start searching for sources for the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, it’s easy to find excerpts or small collections. But more searching eventually turns up a whole website with thousands of documents on the 1918 pandemic. Jackpot!
• Catalogs and databases. You can search key words in library catalogs and databases, and try adding words like “sources,” “records,” “papers,” etc. This may lead you to sources, or it may lead you to bibliographies and research guides for your topic.
• Figure out who would have created the sources. Notice that almost all of the examples in this document are associated with a specific person or organization. Someone needs to create the sources, and someone needs to store them. Try to figure out who might have done so for your topic. For instance, if you were interested in the early history of socialism in the U.S., you might learn that the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was associated with socialism and anarchism. The IWW still exists and has an online archive, and there are many research guides on university websites that lead to other source collections related to the IWW. It may take some research and some trial and error to identify an organization or an author that will lead to sources.
• Footnotes and bibliographies. There may be research guides and bibliographies available for some topics. In other cases, look at the footnotes and bibliographies of your secondary sources to get ideas. Be careful, though; those authors may have traveled extensively and used obscure sources that you can’t access.

How will you read primary sources?

There are many guides to reading primary sources. Here are a few, ranging from short to detailed:

• The UNE Library guide to Primary Sources
• University of Nevada, Reno, University Writing & Speaking Center, “How to Read Primary Sources”
• University of Pennsylvania, Office of Learning Resources, “Guide to Reading Primary Sources”
• Molly Todd, “Working with Primary Sources: The Heart of the Historian’s Craft,” in Undergraduate Research in History: A Guide for Students