What is a Primary Source?
Historians and history teachers talk about primary sources often…what do they mean by this? Read the post below to learn more!
A primary source is any source that allows us to learn directly about a particular time in history. We can learn about this time in the past directly because this source was made by someone who was alive during that time.
When we think of primary sources, we often think of old texts. Something like the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address are indeed primary sources—they can tell us directly about life in the United States in the 1770s and the 1860s because they were written by people at the time. Today, we can examine these sources to understand what life was like in the past. For instance, the Declaration of Independence reveals how the Founding Fathers thought about the powers of government and the importance of individual rights. It is also equally revealing in the things it does not say: The Declaration of Independence, for instance, does not say what a better government would look like; it mostly explains the grievances that the colonists had with Britain.
Primary sources, however, are not limited to just texts. Anything created at a certain point in the past would be a primary source for studying that era. Paintings and photographs can provide insight not just into what things looked like in the past but also into the moments that people thought were visually important. Films and television shows can illuminate what was entertaining to wide numbers of people at a particular time, while also showing the kinds of media influences the average citizen encountered. Even something like social media posts are primary sources for telling us about what life was like at the time they were posted.
Not all primary sources can tell us everything about what it was like to live in a certain time. Diaries, for instance, can tell us a lot about the details within the lives of particular individuals, but they often do not show us much beyond the diary-writer’s life. Political treatises, for instance, can tell us how governments intended to act, although they cannot tell us about how governments acted in practice. And newspaper articles can tell us what news people living in an area read, but they cannot tell us if these articles were in fact accurate reports.
We usually contrast primary sources with secondary sources. Primary sources are written by the people living in a time. Secondary sources are written in a subsequent period of time. They are studies about the past, written on the basis of information taken from a collection of primary sources. Something like Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (the book that inspired the Hamilton musical) is an example of a secondary source. The author combined hundreds of primary sources and other secondary sources to make a compelling story about Alexander Hamilton’s life, ideas, and ultimate legacy.
It is important to remember, however, that even secondary sources can also be primary sources if you look at them the right way. If we want to learn about Alexander Hamilton, then Chernow’s book is a secondary source because it was written by someone who was not there at the time that Hamilton was alive. However, if we want to know about how historians in the 21st century thought about the US Revolutionary War, then Chernow’s book becomes a primary source because he was writing about the Revolutionary War in the 21st century.
Every source created, then, could be a primary course—it just depends on the questions that you are asking about the text.
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