ABOUT PRIMARY SOURCE

Primary sources are anything professional historians use to back up some idea they have about the how/what/why/when of something that appears to have happened, usually in the past.  The requirement is the primary source must be produced in the period under study.  These days the business of history, thanks to the toiling of generations of changing historians, is willing to consider just about anything a primary source.  They used to put all their trust in documents, preferably those the winners didn’t burn but instead preserved in archives.  This shows how far the business of history has come: a spoon, a song, a sweater, a sign…rule of thumb, if you can persuade another pro historian that it helps make your case stronger it’s a primary source.

This blog knows an archive when it sees one and, ever mindful of those who will follow us, it wants to offer to current readers but also readers, historians of the future, a few clues to our world now.

Primary source is sure that its current readers will have some ideas of their own.  What is the detail you see that tells a story about our time?  What is the “artefact” that could possibly help readers, historians of the future, make sense of a time that we who reside in it sometimes find senseless?

Primary Source(s):  they are all around us!