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What are Primary Sources?
Primary sources are the building blocks of historical research - they are the documents or artifacts closest to the topic of investigation that you will use as evidence to support your interpretation of the past. Anything can be a primary source if it can be interpreted as valid evidence to illuminate a historical question.
Often primary sources are created in the time and place which is being studied (e.g. correspondence, diaries, newspapers, government documents, art), but they can also be produced later by eyewitnesses or participants (e.g. memoirs, oral histories).
Test Yourself
If anything can be a primary source, then the main question for historians is, what is this primary source evidence of?
Take a look at the oil painting reproduced below. Consider the guiding questions below in your assessment of this source. Then ask yourself, if this painting is a primary source, what is it evidence of?
Hint: Pay close attention to the caption to learn more about this source.
Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, The First Thanksgiving, 1621, Oil on canvas, ca. 1912-1915 (private collection), https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001699850/.
Before revealing the answer below, ask yourself:
- What people and objects are depicted?
- Who created this?
- When was it created?
- Why do you think this image was created?
- Who was the intended audience?
Did you notice when this painting was created? According to the caption, painter J. L. G. Ferris created this work sometimes between 1912 and 1915. Wikipedia tells us that Ferris lived between 1863 and 1930, and that this painting is part of a series called The Pageant of a Nation. Clearly, Ferris was not an eyewitness to the events of 1621 that he represents in the painting. He may have done his own research, but that would make this painting a secondary source, at best. [Spoiler alert: it's wildly inaccurate.]
We could use this painting as evidence of Ferris's ideas about the first Thanksgiving at the time he painted it, in the early twentieth century. With additional research, we might also be able to find out how popular the painting was, and if other Americans in Ferris's time had similar ideas about the events of 1621.
For more on the history of Thanksgiving, see:
- Deloria, Philip. “The Invention of Thanksgiving.” New Yorker 95, no. 37 (November 25, 2019): 70–74.
Secondary Sources
For comparison, secondary sources are narratives, interpretations, and critical analyses of the past, written by historians or others and (hopefully) based on primary sources. They are created by writers who have the necessary distance in time to put past events and people into their broader historical context. Secondary sources build upon and interpret primary sources, and typically respond to and debate with the secondary sources created by others. Secondary sources also come in a variety of formats, including peer-reviewed books and journal articles, presentations at conferences, professional blog posts, or magazine articles.
For help finding secondary sources, return to the main History Research Guide.
Guide Authors
A version of this guide was first created for FSU Libraries by Adam Beauchamp in 2019. It was adapted and updated for the Monroe Library in 2024.
Except where otherwise noted, the content in this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
