Introduction: Primary Sources

Primary sources are the evidence of history – the firsthand material created during the period being studied. Primary sources are the "stuff that's left behind," that survived and was saved in archives, libraries, and attics.  Laurel Thatcher Ulrich goes on to say,

"It's about documents, it's about sources, it's about clues, it's about the leavings, the shards, the remnants of people who once lived and don't live anymore."

A historian takes these incomplete remnants, gathers more shards (some contradictory, others corroborating), compares them with others, analyzes them, and finally re-assembles them into a quilt of primary sources used to buttress a historical argument or to tell a historical narrative.

Whenever we work with primary sources, we are working with fragmentary evidence, oftentimes skewed to those who wielded political and economic power, the privileged. So the voices that dominate the primary source landscape in the past have been generals not foot soldiers, slave owners not enslaved people, colonizers not the colonized, men not women. As Gerder Lerner wrote in The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy Links to an external site.:

"For nearly 3800 of the 4000 years of recorded History of Western civilization the record mainly concerns the activities, experiences and achievements of men. Not of all men, either, but a narrow group of powerful elites. Women have participated in civilization-building equally with men, in a world dominated and defined by men. In the period when written History was being created, women already lived under conditions of patriarchy, their roles, their public behavior and their sexual and reproductive lives defined by men or male-dominated institutions. Women were already educationally disadvantaged and did not significantly participate in the creation of the symbol system by which the world was explained and ordered."

When researching, it is essential to recognize these voids or silences in the evidence. The absence of evidence reveals its own story and forces historians to seek the hidden voices buried in the existing sources and to seek out new ones. Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us that these silences recur in his book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History Links to an external site.:

"Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)."

It is also important to understand that primary sources were created not for the purpose of a historian (one reason that can make historical research sometimes frustrating) but for the creator. Therefore, it is important to take into account and understand the context of sources (in other words, the importance of evaluation). Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, note in their article, "Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory Links to an external site.":

"the individual document is not just a bearer of historical content, but also a reflection of the needs and desires of its creator, the purpose(s) for its creation, the audience(s) viewing the record, the broader legal, technical, organizational, social, and cultural-intellectual contexts in which the creator and audience operated and in which the document is made meaningful..."

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