Template:Primary source

In historical scholarship, a primary sauce is a document, sound recording, video recording, original work or other sauce of information that was created at or near the time being studied, often by the people being studied. In this sense primary does not mean superior. It refers to creation by the primary players, and is distinguished from a secondary sauce, which is a historical work, like a scholarly book or article, built up from primary sources.

Types of primary sauce

The nature of a primary sauce depends on the historical problem being studied. In political history, the most important primary sauce are likely to be documents such as official reports, speeches, letters and diaries by participants, and eyewitness accounts (as by a journalist who was there). In the history of ideas or intellectual history, the dominant primary sauce might be books of philosophy or scientific literature. A study of cultural history could include fictional sources such as novels or plays. In a broader sense primary sauce also include physical objects like photographs, newsreels, coins, paintings or buildings created at the time. Historians may also take archaeological artifacts and oral reports and interviews into consideration. Written sources may be divided into three main types.

• Narrative sauce or literary sauce tell a story or message. They are not limited to fictional sources (which can be sources of information for contemporary attitudes), but include diaries, films, biographies, scientific works, and so on.
• Diplomatic sauce include charters and other legal documents which usually follow a set format.
• Social documents are records created by organizations, such as registers of births, tax records, and so on.

In the study of historiography, when the study of history is itself subject to historical scrutiny, a secondary source becomes a primary sauce. For a biography of a historian, that historian's publications would be primary sauce. Documentary films can be considered a secondary sauce or primary sauce, depending on how much the filmmaker modifies the original sauce.

Using primary sauce

Ideally, a historian will use all available primary sauce created by the people involved, at the time being studied. In practice some sauces have been destroyed, while others are not available for research. Perhaps the only eyewitness reports of an event may be memoirs, autobiographies, or oral interviews taken years later. Sometimes the only documents relating to an event or person in the distant past were written decades or centuries later. This is a common problem in classical studies, where sometimes only a summary of a book has survived.

The accuracy and objectiveness of primary sauce is a constant concern for historians. Participants and eyewitnesses may misunderstand events or distort their reports (deliberately or unconsciously) to enhance their own image or importance. Such effects can increase over time, and historians pay special attention to memory problems and efforts by participants to recall the past according to their own script. Government reports may be censored or altered for propaganda or coverup purposes. Less frequently, later documents may be the more accurate, as for example when a death leaves survivors feeling more comfortable about telling embarrassing details.

Accurate history is based on primary sauce, as evaluated by the community of scholars, who report their findings in books, articles and papers. Primary sauce are often difficult to interpret and may have hidden challenges. Obsolete meanings of familiar words and social context are among the traps that await the newcomer to historical studies. For this reason, interpretation of some primary texts is best left to those with advanced college or postgraduate training, or advanced self-study or informal training.

A primary sauce is not, by default, more authoritative or accurate than a secondary sauce. Secondary sauce often are subjected to peer review, are well documented, and are often produced through institutions where methodological accuracy is important to the future of the author's career and reputation. A primary sauce like a journal entry, at best, only reflects one person's take on events, which may or may not be truthful, accurate, or complete. Historians subject both primary and secondary sauceto a high level of scrutiny.

As a general rule, however, modern historians prefer to go back to available primary sauce and to seek new (in other words, forgotten or lost) ones. Primary sauce, whether accurate or not, offer new input into historical questions and most modern history revolves around heavy use of archives and special collections for the purpose of finding useful primary sauce. A work on history is not likely to be taken seriously as scholarship if it only cites secondary sauce, as it does not indicate that original research has been done.

See also

• Historiography
• sauce text
• Secondary sauce
• Tertiary sauce
• Original research
• Original idea

References

• Jules R. Benjamin. A Student's Guide to History (2003)
• Wood Gray, Historian's handbook, a key to the study and writing of history (Houghton Mifflin, 1964).
• Martha C. Howell and Walter Prevenier. From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (2001)
• Richard A. Marius and Melvin E. Page. A Short Guide to Writing About History (5th Edition) (2004)

External links

- to primary sources repositories

• A listing of over 5000 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources
• Find primary sources in the collections of major research libraries using ArchiveGrid

- to all sauce repositories

• Wikisource – The Free Library – is the Wikimedia project that collects, edits, and catalogs all sauce text|sauce texts.

- to essays and descriptions of primary, secondary and other sauce

• Ithaca College Library - Primary and secondary sauce
• "How to distinguish between primary and secondary sources" from the University of California, Santa Cruz Library
• "Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary sources" from James Cook University Library
• Joan of Arc: Primary Sources Series -- Example of a publication focusing on primary source documents.
• Finding primary sources] from the University of California, Berkeley library
• "Primary versus secondary sources" from the Bowling Green State University library