Primary Sources, a la Shmoop.
You can’t create historical drama or historical fiction without historical research.
And you can’t do historical research without digging up some… primary sources.
Captain Philips, Saving Private Ryan, 12 Years a Slave, Zero Dark Thirty…yeah…people
actually had to do research when they were writing those scripts.
Primary sources are original materials that were created during the time being studied…
or by someone with firsthand knowledge of the event.
Let’s break it down…
“Original” means the source was created by someone actually living in the period we’re
studying.
So, if we’re studying WWII, an original material could be… the diary of a soldier.
He wrote it himself and he was actually in the war.
It originated in that time period.
“Materials” means that primary sources take…
different forms.
It could be a letter, a painting…even a toy.
Then there’s the “Created during the time being studied” part.
A newspaper article about WWII that was written yesterday would not be a primary source because
it was written 70 years after the event.
Little “hindsight” there.
But just to make it confusing, primary sources can be written after the event as long as
it was created by “somebody with firsthand knowledge.”
Which means…
primary sources could include memoirs, letters, or interviews that were made after the event
if the person making them was actually there at the time… like our WWII vet.
Ok, so… what isn’t a primary source?
Anything written about the past that wasn’t written at the time, or wasn’t written by
someone with firsthand knowledge of the event.
Secondary sources are usually texts that use a bunch of primary sources to make an argument
or interpret the past.
So, let’s say you’re writing a paper and need to use primary and secondary sources.
You collect interviews from WWII vets, documents from government officials describing their
decisions and actions, film footage from the front, and a book published by a history professor
in 2013 about WWII.
The interviews, documents and film footage would all be primary sources.
The book published in 2013 would be a secondary source.
Okay…we’re gonna hit you with some types of primary sources…
Texts.
Not the OMG, LOL kind.
Anything that’s written down… like diaries, personal letters or published works like books
and newspapers.
Images.
Anything visual.
Paintings, doodles, photographs, posters, tapestries…
Recordings.
Although recordings only go back 150 years, we’ve got recordings of music, oral histories,
interviews, TV shows, radio programs and films that literally speak to us about the past.
Objects.
This pretty much covers … everything else – clothes, toys, coins, tools, pottery,
and… anything else you can think of that was made in the past.
So… according to this definition, couldn’t anything that ever existed…be a primary
source?
Well…sorta.
But keep in mind, the further back in history you go, the less likely you are to find primary
sources that have survived.
Texts deteriorate… and writing didn’t always exist.
We’re more likely to have old images or objects, but they also deteriorate.
So while we might have a ton of stuff from the recent past, our primary sources get more
and more rare as we move further back in history… and our ability to construct a picture of
the past gets a little fuzzy.
Okay, but…where in the world are all these things kept?
Is there some sort of secret warehouse on an Area-51 type base?
Does the NSA have a massive database of every sound ever made in the past 150 years?
Uh, no…
Objects can be found in archives, museums or personal collections.
But fortunately, you don’t have to travel the world, visiting all these places or breaking
into private residences.
There’s a very convenient way of finding primary sources: the interwebs.
There are millions of primary sources that have been digitized and put on the internet.
Primary sources are the key to uncovering an accurate picture of the past.
Without them you could make up any story you wanted about history.
Who knows?
Maybe Lincoln would have looked better as
a blond…