Do you panic if your professor tells you to find a primary source? When does a news article stop being primary and start being secondary? This guide will clarify what's what in the humanities and give you some examples to look at.
Primary sources are first hand accounts of real events. They may describe a national crisis or the ordinary routines of daily life.
Some primary sources are created at the time an event occurs. News accounts of daily events, journal entries, ships' logs and passenger manifests, laws, treaties, birth or death certificates, letters, telegrams, even e-mails: all of these are records of events as the events are unfolding. Other primary sources are created well after an event has passed. A first hand witness to an event may tell his or her story years later. Memoirs, oral histories, and interviews are all primary sources.
Not all primary sources are written. History has been captured on film and all manner of video and audio recordings, in photographs, drawings, and in ancient art works and archeological artifacts. Primary sources give us a glimpse into history as witnessed by the people who were there. With each new generation of technology, humans create new ways to record their experiences. Future generations may look at today's blogs to see how 21st century people described their lives.
Secondary sources then are one step removed from a primary source. They may quote a primary source, but they are more inclined to focus on analyzing or explaining or rebuking the content of a primary source. Secondary sources are incredibly useful for deepening understanding and exploring what other experts have said about a topic, but it is important to know how they are different from primary sources.
Tertiary sources are even further removed from a primary source. A tertiary source is an accumulation or consolidation of primary and secondary sources that does not add commentary to either, but instead tries to summarize, index, or give an overview on a particular topic, such as an encyclopedia or a digest or even the website Wikipedia. While these are not usually material that should be used as citations, they can be a powerful tool for finding appropriate primary and secondary sources on a given topic.
