These sites provide good overviews of primary resources for historical research.
Using Primary Sources on the Web
Your professors may be impressed if you know how to find, identify and use PRIMARY SOURCES in your class assignments. What are they?
Simply put: They are documents, letters, accounts, descriptions, photographs or drawings of events created as close to the event as possible. They tend to be less affected by retrospection and expert opinion. They are "as it happened," "what I experienced" or eyewitness, accounts that tend to be untainted by historical analysis.
Your professors will want you to use SECONDARY SOURCES to support your analysis of a topic. Secondary sources may use primary sources in their research, however secondary sources are usually more removed in time and place from the historical event. Secondary sources are written by persons who did not experience or witness the event or did not know the person(s) involved. Secondary source publications tend to base their text on scholarly analysis of other scholars.
EXAMPLES some might quibble with these examples, but the main issue is, "how close to the actual event or person is the evidence."
The topic: Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
These would be considered PRIMARY
These would be considered SECONDARY
The topic: The Crusades of the Middle Ages
These would be considered PRIMARY
These would be SECONDARY
The Topic: Jim Crow Segregation in United States
These would be considered PRIMARY
These would be SECONDARY
The Topic: The Life of James Dean, the actor
These would be considered PRIMARY
These would be considered SECONDARY