So you have to write a research paper, part I: intro to primary and secondary sources

This post is for the benefit of students taking History 102 or 102W with Liam O’Flaherty at SFU or FIC

In this course, one or more of your assignments will be research-based. See your syllabus and specific assignment instructions for details (as I change the assignments every semester).

The purpose of this post is to explain what kinds of sources you will encounter, how historians classify them, and also which ones are more credible than others.

In university level History, sources come in two forms: primary sources and secondary sources.

A fair but overly simplistic definition
An overly simple (and not always precise) way to think about the difference between primary sources and secondary sources is that primary sources come from the time period, or are records by the historical actor who witnessed an event more or less at the time of its occurrence. Secondary sources, on the other hand, are by someone else, written after the event occurred, and who maybe did not witness the event in question.

Good examples
Primary sources can include documentary evidence such as photographs, correspondence, diaries, and maps; oral historical evidence such as interviews, songs, or other orally-transmitted individual or community historical memories; or material culture, such as artefacts, statues, and architecture. Secondary sources usually come in the form of books or articles written long after the historical event in question, usually by experts or scholars.

It’s a bit more complicated
However, even here, we must be careful. For instance, newspaper articles are technically seen by some as “secondary,” since they are usually written by observers of historical phenomena (eg. journalists and editors) rather than participants as such. However a historian studying, say, the Korean War of 1950-1953, using a newspaper editorial written in Canada in 1953, would very likely treat such a source as a primary source, even though it was written by someone that may have been removed from (i.e. secondary to) the event in question. It comes from the time period, and reveals attitudes and ideas from that time. Consequently, old newspaper records – and many other records written by someone removed from the event in question – can still be a primary source.

Likewise, a textbook is a classic example of a secondary source. They are written by scholars (usually), and in the case of History textbooks, by historians who teach History rather than the witnesses of history. But, a textbook can be treated as a primary source, depending on the context. If our research is about, for instance, racism in Canadian high school curriculum prior to World War Two, a Canadian civics textbook from 1936– despite being written by experts in its day–may no longer be a fount of scholarly wisdom in the 21st century. If the point is to look at such a source for what it reveals about the historical moment being studied, then it becomes a primary source.

There are, therefore, many different types of primary and secondary sources, and the difference between the two often has as much to do with how they are being used as it does with what types of documents or sources they happen to be.

Check your specific assignment instructions for what sorts of sources you can expect to find in the course of your research!

Other relevant pages on the blog for SFU students in Summer 2019 (see below for FIC students):

 

Other relevant pages on the blog for FIC students in Summer 2019:

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