Some years ago, I was writing a nonfiction book about America's Continental Divide. My research included trips to western museums and libraries (including private libraries that contained primary sources such as documents, letters, and photographs), as well as interviews with government officials, land managers, recreation managers, ranchers, and others involved with land use and historical issues on western lands. I also used secondary sources such as other writers' books about the region and newspaper accounts of various issues.
What amazed me was how many inaccuracies turned up: The same outlaw was said to have been hanged in three different towns, the same Colorado gold-rush stories were told in Creede as in Leadville, the value of various artifacts varied by a factor of 10. And Lewis and Clark, Cattle Kate, and Jesse James were seemingly in 20 places at once.
How do we know what is true? Teachers deal with these issues all the time when students turn in papers supported by unreliable sources. Catherine Stratton, a history professor at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y., has taught classes in the subspecialty of historiography, which attempts to ascertain how we know what we think we know about history. According to Professor Stratton, one of the keys is to do enough research that you find yourself constantly circling around the same sources, hearing the same facts from different angles. Another key issue is to use a good volume of primary sources, which emanate from the period in question, and reliable secondary sources, which interpret the information.
Primary Sources
Primary sources are sources that are the equivalent of eyewitness accounts or direct evidence, which were created or written during the event. Examples would include letters (or facsimiles of letters), diaries, photographs, bills of sale, physical objects such as archeological remains, works of poetry or fiction from a given era, interview transcripts or tapes, texts of speeches, news footage or tapes, court records, official documents such as birth and death certificates, government and historic documents such as the U.S. Declaration of Independence or the English Magna Carta. Facsimiles and translations are acceptable, although in higher level research, a great deal of emphasis is placed on the chain of authenticity, ie, how close is the document to its original form, and how reliably does your facsimile or copy reflect the contents and intent of the original?
A primary source could also be a participant's account of an event. An example of a primary source would be a published diary, such as The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank. Other examples of published works that are primary sources could include a book from the period of time under discussion (for example, an essay by Aristotle would be a primary source when discussing life in ancient Greece) or a journal article reporting on research that was written by the researchers.
Secondary Sources
A secondary source is an interpretation, an analysis, or a notated compilation and/or critique of primary sources. Secondary sources may contain replicas of primary sources (such as copies of photographs, or facsimiles of documents) . Secondary sources include textbooks, history books, encyclopedias, criticisms, and analyses.
Confusingly, some sources can be considered primary sources in one topic, and secondary sources about another. For example, let's take a theoretical History of the Civil War that was written by a southern historian in 1865. According to Professor Stratton, this would be considered a secondary source (albeit a close-to-the-fact one) on subjects about which the author had no direct first-hand experience. (Examples might include the number of guns present at Fort Sumter, the number of casualties at the battle of Bull Run, or what which general said to whom at what time.) But the same book would be considered a primary source if you were writing a thesis on the attitudes of contemporaneous southern historians toward the Civil War.
It is a misconception that primary sources are always more reliable than secondary sources. Primary sources can have mistakes in them, such as a typographical mistake in a birth certificate, a lie in a diary, a deceptively Photoshopped photograph, or an error in an eyewitness account caused by ignorance or prejudice. Similarly, a secondary source may be well-researched and well documented, but the historian may choose to show only those sources and documents that support his point of view.
Encyclopedias
Encyclopedias are generally considered secondary sources, but they fall into their own subcategory as they are yet one step further removed. It doesn't matter whether the encyclopedia in question is Britannica (whose entries are written and reviewed by bonafide experts) or Wikipedia (whose entries are often written by experts, but can also be written and amended by the general public), encyclopedias are not generally considered acceptable sources for academic papers. They are great places to start a research trail, because they provide links to other sources, but they are not sources in and of themselves.
The issue of sourcing is further complicated by the use of the Internet for research, although the same distinction between primary sources and secondary sources applies on the Internet. Both primary and secondary sources are needed to evaluate information and put it into context. The primary source gives an insight into place and time; the secondary source (counter to its name) may indeed include precisely the peer-reviewed research needed to establish the truth about an issue.
Karen Berger - Karen Berger is the author of 15 books. Please click on her name to read her full bio.
