History 154

Primary sources are first-hand accounts by participants of a particular event or materials produced at the same historical time period. 

If you were examining racism in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the article in the encyclopedia on the "Negro" would be a primary source. However, an article in the American Historical Review analyzing racism in the Britannica would be a secondary source. (Richard Marius, A Short Guide to Writing About History, pp. 14-15.)

Some examples of primary sources include:

• Memoirs, speeches, writings, correspondence
• Papers of a political party, agency, or association
• Official documents such as congressional hearings and reports
• Contemporary magazine and newspaper articles
• Contemporary art, films, literature and music
• Contemporary artifacts, such as buildings and monuments

When looking for primary sources, you need to consider:

• Who would create the documents? Who would preserve the documents?
  • Who can be individuals or groups, such as local, regional, or international organizations, associations, and governmental agencies.
• How would the documents be preserved and accessed? Would they have been
  • Formally published/produced, such as books, newspapers, magazines, films, music, court cases, etc.? You are likely to find these items in library databases.
  • Informally published/produced web documents, such as press releases, reports, policy statements, etc.? You may find recent documents through Google or the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (going back to 1996). 
  • Personal or internal documents? If these materials were preserved, they may only be available through visiting private collections, library archives, museums, historical sites, or corporate/organization archives. A national library, public library, historical society, or university/college library may have digitized some of these materials. Interviews and oral histories produced as part of a scholarly research project are often only available from the researcher.