Primary Sources: A Historian's Perspective

Primary sources are things created in the time period being research. 

Examples:

• Dragon Pine - A Ming Dynasty (China) painting created in the late 14th to early 15th centuries.
• Woman Riding Two Brahman Bulls - An Indus Civilization (ancient India) statue created sometime between 2000-1750 BCE.
• Coffin of Senbi - A piece of funeral equipment from ancient Egypt dating between 1918-1859 BCE.
• Crudely executed cross of lead, placed on a corpse of a Black Plague victim around 1348-1349 CE.
• Drawings from the Theresienstadt Ghetto by Bedřich Fritta - A collection of graphic art depicting life in this Nazi ghetto between 1942-1944 CE from a Jewish artist's perspective (located in present-day Czech Republic).

Secondary sources are books, articles, and more written by scholars and other subject matter experts about a time period or event. They used primary sources as the basis for their research.

Examples:

• Eliza Hamilton: the extraordinary life and times of the wife of Alexander Hamilton by Tilar J. Mazzeo
• Magna Carta: the birth of liberty by Dan Jones
• Recovering 9/11 in New York by Robert Fanuzzi and Michael Wolfe (Editors)