Primary and Secondary Sources

Primary sources are documents, images, books, and other artifacts from the events or time period that we are studying. We analyze these sources, in order to understand what happened in the past and why it happened. We analyze them, in order to understand how people in earlier times thought, felt, and lived.

Secondary sources are narratives and analysis by historians and other authors who have written about the past not from their own experience, but drawing on a combination of primary sources and other secondary sources.

One way to access the reliability of a history book is to examine its citations and bibliography, in order to see what primary and secondary sources its author used.

Primary Source Listings

• General Source Collections
• Online Books
• Historical Topics