A primary source is a document or physical object which was written or created during the time under study.

These sources were present during an experience or time period and offer an inside view of a particular event. Some types of primary sources include:

Greece What is a secondary source? A secondary source interprets and analyzes primary sources. These sources are one or more steps removed from the event. Secondary sources may have pictures, quotes or graphics of primary sources in them. Some types of seconday sources include:

manuscripts oratory pamphlets personal narratives sources speeches letters documents

ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS (excerpts or translations acceptable): Diaries, speeches, manuscripts, letters, interviews, news film footage, autobiographies, official records CREATIVE WORKS: Poetry, drama, novels, music, art RELICS OR ARTIFACTS: Pottery, furniture, clothing, buildings

PUBLICATIONS: Textbooks, magazine articles, histories, criticisms, commentaries, encyclopedias

Examples of secondary sources include:

A journal/magazine article which interprets or reviews previous findings A history textbook A book about the effects of WWI

Examples of primary sources include:

Diary of Anne Frank Experiences of a Jewish family during WWII The Constitution of Canada - Canadian History A journal article reporting NEW research or findings Weavings and pottery - Native American history Plato's Republic Women in Ancient

Search by keyword for Primary Sources in the Main Catalog You can search the Main Catalog to find direct references to primary source material. Perform a keyword search for your topic and add one of the words below: (these are several examples of words that would identify a source as primary)

Imagine you are a detective investigating a crime. What would you need to help you find out what happened? What would you be looking for when you visited the scene of the crime? That's right - clues or evidence. Historians are no different. When they want to find out what happened in the past they need to look at the evidence. We call evidence that was created at the time of the event, primary evidence. Lots of sources can be counted as primary sources or evidence - letters, newspapers, maps, photographs, pictures, objects and film (just to name a few). Primary evidence can be broken down into four main categories: written sources, images, artefa cts and oral testimony.

charters correspondence diaries early works interviews

Work through each section to find out what these types of sources are and how they can be used.

The first lesson of history is the good of evil. (Ralph Waldo Emerson) History does not repeat itself except in the minds of those who do not know history. (Kahlil Gibran) Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (Santayana) History is the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past. (Johann Huizinga) A nation which does not know what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. (Woodrow Wilson) To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, ... and possibly a tragic one. (Hermann Hesse) History is a people's memory, and without memory man is demoted to the lower animals. (Malcolm X) Peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducible from it. (G.W.F. Hegel) History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted

all other alternatives. (Abba Eban) Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this. (Gustave Flaubert) Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the Great Men who have worked here. (Thomas Carlyle) If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written. (Samuel Johnson) History is indeed the witness of the times, the light of truth. (Cicero) History is the "know thyself" of humanity -- the self-consciousness of mankind. (Droysen) The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. (Karl Marx) History is a science, no less and no more. (J.B. Bury) History is past politics and politics present history. (E.A. Freeman) We teach history only when it can be made into an entertaining anecdote, a procedure which is about as sound as leaving the teaching of sexual hygiene

History is the lie commonly agreed upon. (Voltaire) Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. (George Orwell) History is more or less bunk. (Henry Ford) History: An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools. (Ambrose Bierce) History could be divided into events which do not matter and events which probably never occurred. (W.R. Inge) History is only a confused heap of facts. (G.K. Chesterton) History is Philosophy teaching by examples. (Thucydides) Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child. (Cicero)

to a commercial traveller. (Aubrey Maran) Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. (Joseph Conrad) History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. . . .The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all. (Jane Austen) The historian can learn much from the novelist. (Samuel Eliot Morison) History is an argument without end. (Peter Geyl) Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it. (Oscar Wilde) History is simply a piece of paper covered with print; the main thing is still to make history, not to write it. (Otto von Bismarck) No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing. (Boris Pasternak) Historical knowledge is not a variety of knowledge, but it is knowledge itself; it is the form which completely fills and exhausts the field of knowing. (Benedetto Croce) Genuine historical knowledge requires nobility

of character, a profound understanding of human existence -- not detachment and objectivity. (Friedrich Nietzsche) It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can. It is perhaps because they can be useful to him in this respect that he tolerates their existence. (Samuel Butler) It is not the literal past, the "facts" of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language. (Brian Friel) History and myth are two aspects of a kind of grand pattern in human destiny: history is the mass of observable or recorded fact, but myth is the abstract or essence of it. (Robertson Davies) All statements about the past can be considered as very crude ways of expressing possible, hypothetical judgments about future experiences. (Pardon Tillinghast) Historical knowledge is the knowledge of what mind has done in the past, and at the same time it is the redoing of this, the perpetuation of past acts in the present. (R.G. Collingwood) Nothing capable of being memorized is history. (R.G. Collingwood)

History... is a tool we use each generation or each year to help get along in the world, discarding the old tool for a new one whenever necessary. (Paul K. Conkin) History is a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss. (W.S. Holt)

The word history is derived from the Greek noun historia meaning inquiry or research. Aristotlerega rded it as a "systematic account of a set of natural phenomena, whether or not chronological ordering was a factor in the account." The term "history" has now come to be applied to accounts of events that are narrated in a chronological order, and deal with the past of mankind.

KATH MO