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Secondary Source: created through analyzing primary sources

· Types: textbook, other books, modern journals or newspapers, some websites

Primary Source

A primary source is something that is created by a witness to history. Examples of this could be journals, correspondence, a contemporary newspaper article (what we mean by contemporary is a newspaper article that was written at the time of the event). So a newspaper from the Civil War is a primary source. More examples of primary sources are photographs or contemporary artwork.

Material culture is also a primary source, like a house, a teacup, any object that you can physically touch falls underneath material culture.

Primary sources can also be audio, like a contemporary song or an oral history, or interview, of person who witnessed history.

Secondary Sources

Now a secondary source is something that is created through analyzing different primary sources.

A great example, of course is your textbook any other book that's published that's nonfiction. Other secondary sources could be modern journal or a newspaper. So if the New York Times wrote something about Photographs of the Civil War that would be a secondary source, right? They're using the primary source of the photographs to write an article analyzing it.

Websites

Most of the websites that you come across are also going to be secondary sources.

Now, I say most because there's a huge caveat that a lot of primary sources now are digitized and are online. For example, if you go to the Library of Congress website 

Almost all of the material on the Library of Congress's website is going to be a primary source. But they have secondary sources that tell you about a time in American history using the primary sources in their collections.

The rule of thumb is a primary source is created by a person who experienced an event in history. 

A Secondary source pulls together all different types of primary sources and then comes up with an argument about it.