What is a Primary Source?

Primary sources are sources that give us a first-hand look at the past. They can come in many forms and include diaries and letters, newspapers and magazines, oral history interviews, photographs, maps. Any record that survives from the time you're studying can be considered a primary source.

Historians have special ways of reading primary sources. They ask questions about each type of source and methods they use to answer them. The way we read a source from the past is different from the way we would read a similar source in the present.

For example, you might read a magazine published last week to find out about new music from your favorite band, but you might read a magazine published in 1835 to find out about what life was like in the antebellum South. You don't think about things like culture and historical context when you read a present-day magazine, because they're assumed by the authors, publishers, and readers. But you don't share the same assumptions with the people who wrote and read a magazine published in 1835. So when you read it, you have to think about those things consciously.

Similarly, reading letters from the past isn't like reading letters (or emails or text messages) your friends sent you this morning, even though they might look very similar. The diary of a teenager in 1870 is much like the diary (or blog) of a teenager today, but the differences, and the fact that you don't share her time, place, or culture, can trick you. Even something as seemingly objective as a map may have been produced by people whose assumptions about a map's purpose was were very different from yours!

Using Critical Thinking with Primary Sources

When you read historical primary sources, you have to think about the assumptions, background, and context of the people who created them, and about how they differed from yours. You have to read and think about them, but you also have to think carefully about how you're reading and thinking about them!

Reading primary sources requires preparation. The next module on ANCHOR can help to plan your reading, to ask good questions of different kinds of sources, and to question your assumptions. 

As you ask and answer these questions, you'll learn to think like a historian. As you read more primary sources, asking and answering these kinds of questions will become second nature. And many of these skills, like questioning the motives of an author and understanding someone's cultural background, will help you in reading present-day materials. This skill is an important part of critical thinking known as media literacy.