GSTR 210 - Sirianni (Spring 2025)

Primary sources are documents, artifacts, or data created during the specific time period being studied. Oftentimes, documents from the first publication cycle – newspaper articles, letters, or research notes – are considered primary sources. Different academic disciplines have different definitions of what constitutes a primary source, which can make locating and identifying these sources a bit challenging.

• Diaries or journals (published or unpublished)
• Letters, correspondence or other personal communications
• Public documents such as deeds, marriages license or certificates
• Newspapers and weekly newsmagazines (offering contemporaneous reporting of events)
• Radio and television transcripts and wire reports
• Speeches in print or audio formats
• Court cases
• Legislative reports, bills and laws
• Census data
• Government Documents
• Maps
• Art works such as paintings, prints or photographs
• Artifacts or specimens
• Interviews or oral histories
• Works of literature such as fiction, poetry or drama
• Statistics including opinion polls
• Sacred Scriptures

While primary sources offer a firsthand account, secondary sources are written after the fact. Secondary sources analyze, interpret, explain, or analyze a primary source, event or individual. These resources represent a second publication cycle, tasked with presenting an argument or to persuade the reader. In a sense, they’re telling you what to think. Typically, journal articles are a good example. Criticism and interpretation are key functions of Arts and Humanities secondary sources. Social Sciences secondary sources interpret raw statistical data or provide commentary on social policies. Secondary sources in the Sciences are publications that review research or abstract it.

Primary sources provide a window into the past—unfiltered access to the record of artistic, social, scientific and political thought and achievement during the specific period under study, produced by people who lived during that period.

Bringing scholars into close contact with these unique, often profoundly personal, documents and objects can give them a very real sense of what it was like to be alive during a long-past era.

1. Get engaged

• Primary sources help students relate in a personal way to events of the past and promote a deeper understanding of history as a series of human events.
• Because primary sources are snippets of history, they encourage students to seek additional evidence through research.
• First-person accounts of events helps make them more real, fostering active reading and response.

2. Develop critical thinking skills

• Primary sources are often incomplete and have little context. Students must use prior knowledge and work with multiple primary sources to find patterns.
• In analyzing primary sources, students move from concrete observations and facts to questioning and making inferences about the materials.
• Questions of creator bias, purpose, and point of view may challenge students’ assumptions.

3. Construct knowledge

• Inquiry into primary sources encourages students to wrestle with contradictions and compare multiple sources that represent differing points of view, confronting the complexity of the past.
• Students construct knowledge as they form reasoned conclusions, base their conclusions on evidence, and connect primary sources to the context in which they were created, synthesizing information from multiple sources.
• Integrating what they glean from comparing primary sources with what they already know, and what they learn from research, allows students to construct content knowledge and deepen understanding.

In addition to primary source material found in books within the library, we also have access to an amazing variety of primary source material through the following online sources: