Sidebar VIII What is a Primary History Source?

Sidebar VIII

What is a Primary History Source?

Last Friday we tackled A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. The book was one of, if not the oldest works that has been reviewed in this series. The questions of what is the value of a work that was written over 160 years and how should you approach it are valid questions. Additionally, I did want to talk about primary and secondary sources but the review was already running very long and I felt it best to address it separately.

A primary source is something from the time in question. A first-hand account of places or events, or an artifact from those times. It doesn't have to be a written book or account to qualify either. For example, a piece of pottery from ancient Greece would be considered a primary source, because archaeologists can get first-hand information from that pot. Art, pictures, and photos can and do certainly count. Hell, for that matter youtube videos from historical events are easily considered primary sources. Assuming that many, many videos and pictures that are generated in the 21^st century are preserved, historians specializing in our era will have an easier time of it then someone studying Mesoamerica before European contact would in a lot of ways. Now secondary sources are works that are created after the fact, often using primary sources to reflect or educate on history. Medieval or later art showing the Fall of Rome for example, historical dramas or plays. These are all secondary and because of that, they can often fall prey to inaccuracies. Additionally, the beliefs of the time can color a secondary source leading to a reinterpretation of a historical event that the people who experienced it would find incredibly foreign. History books are almost uniformly secondary sources. In fact parts of Journey qualify as a secondary source since Mr. Olmsted goes into detail discussing the history of each state and he certainly wasn't around to observe the founding of the North American colonies in the 1600s.

Journey also qualifies as a primary source on the South before the Civil War by virtue of being a first-hand account written by an eye witness. Most of the book is about Mr. Olmsted's direct experiences in the south, as told by him. Primary sources are important not just for what's written (or drawn) in them, however. Mr. Olmsted's book doesn't just give us an account of what the South was like but reveals a major cultural battle taking place in his society and tells us a lot about the how the debate was being conducted, who was conducting it and what the end goals of both sides were. This is incredibly invaluable, because if you're studying history knowing the thoughts and feelings of the people who were actually experiencing events. This also leads us to the fact that primary sources are rarely if ever objective and you should always be aware of that. Mr. Olmsted wrote this book with his own bias and beliefs of the world coloring how he presented events and people. His biases also colored who got representation in his book in the first place. It's important to keep your eyes open and remember that a primary source isn't free of political agendas or biases. That's not necessarily a bad thing and you might even agree with the source's agenda (hell, the agenda of the source might even be right) but you should still keep it in mind. That doesn't mean that the primary source will lie to you but it will influence what facts are presented and how they are presented. You should always be looking at this with an eye to puzzling out what you're not being told and if you're being lead to a conclusion. This runs true for secondary sources as well. Another issue is that it's entirely possible to read into things in the primary source that wasn't meant because of your own modern experiences and biases as well.

That's why you have to approach each source keeping in mind the context in which it was created. What do I mean by the context you might be asking? Context is the environment that the source was created in. By that I mean, the political environment, which is what is the kind of government that the writer/artist lives under, what are the big political questions dividing people, what kind of factions are active in this time and place? There's also the social environment, which is different from politics because it covers things like what is the class set up? What kind of behavior is expected from the writer/artist, what is considered moral/immoral? What's the economic environment? Is crushing poverty the norm? How comfortable are people? How easy is it to get food and clothing? How do people go about making their living? You want to consider this stuff when grappling with a primary source and secondary sources are the easiest way to find that stuff out. On top of that there are language issues. For example, if I were to ever review Xenophon or The Conquest of Gaul, I wouldn't be able to read the original versions because they were written in ancient Greek and Latin. So I would be dependent on translators, which means that some words might not be quite what the original writer meant. To go back to Journey the English language has changed in the last 160 years since it was written so some of the word choices and sentences structure don't come easily to the modern reader. So generally I encourage people to start out with modern secondary sources and work their way back. A secondary source can tell you about the context and the surrounding events in which the primary source was created. Once you have that understanding, you can approach a primary source on its own ground and learn a lot from it. Because to put it simply, primary sources are simply the best way to get the first-hand feelings and thoughts of the people who were experiencing events as they occurred. If you really want to know what the people at the time were thinking and feeling, you need to get in their own words.