Primary source: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:21, 10 August 2025

Revision as of 01:30, 10 August 2025

Line 60:

History as an academic discipline is based on primary sources, as evaluated by the community of scholars, who report their findings in books, articles, and papers. [[Arthur Marwick]] says "Primary sources are absolutely fundamental to history."<ref name=Marwick>Marwick, Arthur. "Primary Sources: Handle with Care". In Sources and Methods for Family and Community Historians: A Handbook edited by Michael Drake and Ruth Finnegan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. {{ISBN|0-521-46580-X}}</ref> Ideally, a historian will use all available primary sources that were created by the people involved at the time being studied. In practice, some sources have been destroyed, while others are not available for research. Perhaps the only eyewitness reports of an event may be [[memoir]]s, autobiographies, or oral interviews that were taken years later. Sometimes the only evidence relating to an event or person in the distant past was written or copied decades or centuries later. Manuscripts that are sources for classical texts can be copies of documents or fragments of copies of documents. This is a common problem in [[classical studies]], where sometimes only a summary of a book or letter has survived. Potential difficulties with primary sources have the result that history is usually taught in schools using secondary sources.

Historians studying the modern period with the intention of publishing an academic article prefer to go back to available primary sources and to seek new (in other words, forgotten or lost) ones. Primary sources, whether accurate or not, offer new input into historical questions and most modern history revolves around heavy use of [[archive]]sarchives and special collections for the purpose of finding useful primary sources. A work on history is not likely to be taken seriously as a scholarship if it only cites secondary sources, as it does not indicate that original research has been done.<ref name=Handlin/>

However, primary sources – particularly those from before the 20th century – may have hidden challenges. "Primary sources, in fact, are usually fragmentary, ambiguous, and very difficult to analyze and interpret."<ref name=Marwick/> Obsolete meanings of familiar words and social context are among the traps that await the newcomer to historical studies. For this reason, the interpretation of primary texts is typically taught as part of an advanced college or postgraduate history course, although advanced self-study or informal training is also possible.