Analysis of Primary Resources

According to Webster, history is a chronological record of significant events often including an explanation of their causes. (Webster s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster Inc., 1984) Where do historians get the information that they use to write history? Often historian s use primary resources. Primary resources are first-hand testimony of evidence coming directly from a source who has knowledge of a topic or an artifact of a event or time in history.

Any time you collect oral history, you are taking information about events of the past. Any time you read history, you are seeing a historians perception, based on oral history and artifacts of the time, of events of the past. Some primary sources are more reliable than others. How do historians determine what information to use in the account he/she is writing?

Historians use two basic rules. The first is the Time and Place Rule and the second is the Bias Rule.

Time and Place Rule

"To judge the quality of a primary source, historians use the time and place rule. This rule says that the closer in time and place a source and its creator were to an event in the past, the better the sources will be. Based on the time and place rule, better primary sources (starting with the most reliable) might include:

Direct traces of the event;
Accounts of the event, created at the time it occurred, by firsthand observers and participants;
Accounts of the event, created after the event occurred, by firsthand observers and participants;
Accounts of the event, created after the event occurred, by people who did not participant or witness the event, but who used interviews or evidence from the time of the event.

Bias Rule

The historians second rule is the bias rule. It says that every source is biased in some way. Documents tell us only what the creator of the document thought happened, or perhaps only what the creator wants us to think happened. As a result, historians follow these bias rule guidelines when they review evidence from the past:

Every piece of evidence and every source must be read or viewed skeptically and critically.
No piece of evidence should be taken at face value. The creator s point of view must be considered.
Each piece of evidence and source must be cross-checked and compared with related sources and pieces of evidence.

An additional area of bias is what the reader brings to the source. The preconceived ideas of the
event can alter the intent of the author of a document.

Source is Library of Congress Learning Page: The Historians Sources: Analysis of Primary Sources. Date of access: 4/17/01. http://memory.loc.gov/learn/lessons/psources/pshome.html

To find a series of questions for analyzing primary sources, go to Section 2A: Questions for Analyzing Primary Sources http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/lessons/psources/studqsts.html

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