HIST 2233 & 2243 - World Civilization I & II: Primary/Secondary Sources

• Primary Sources Research Guide
• What are primary sources? (a librarian's perspective)
• What are primary sources? (a historian's perspective)
• Primary sources in the library databases
• Primary sources from external websites
• Secondary Sources

Primary sources are basically eyewitness accounts on things that happened in history. These include, but are not limited to, diaries, photographs, video clips, newspaper articles, interviews, and other original copies of various documents.

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).

These are examples of library databases that contain primary sources.

These are examples of other places where you can find primary sources. Get creative! Use any museum with an online collection.

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