Primary Sources

This guide is designed to help you find primary sources for your research. On this guide, you will find both online collections of primary resources and strategies to find primary sources not listed here.

To look through our list of primary sources, click here.

To learn more about primary sources and how to find them and how to better learn from them, keep reading this page.

A primary source is any source of information created at the time we're studying. Primary sources can be many things, they can be a diary, a recording of a speech, the text of a law, an image, or an newspaper article. They can be found in many places, on library websites, inside museum storage, or at your grandparent's house. Finding them can be very overwhelming and confusing, but below are some tips you can use to make it a bit easier.

• Look through the sources of a history book/article on your topic. This technique is called citation chaining and you can use it for history to see what they're using, what kinds of sources they're using to support their argument, and get ideas of how to better use primary sources.
• Search the web for your topic and add "archives" to the search terms. This helps me find more unique and small online archives and other digital collections on different topics.
• Check out other libraries, universities, and museums for digital collections. Tons of public libraries, museums, and academic/research institutions have online resources these days. Try looking at places local to the area your interested in and look for the term "digital collections". For example, if you're researching something that happened in NYC, you could look at the New York Public Library.
• Ask others for help. Your librariand and professors are here to help! Not only will they provide you places to look, they can help you think about what you're looking for. It is really difficult to find something when you don't know what you need. Talking with someone else who has experience in this type of research can help you clarify your thoughts, build a strategy, and feel more focused.  

Our library search is built off a system called WorldCat, which searches libraries across the globe. You can use it to find many primary sources in different libraries using the tips listed below. We can even help you get the actual sources mailed here to Payson or scanned and sent to your email using Interlibrary Loan. To learn more about that, click here.

By using a proper search strategy, you can find Primary Source material at Pepperdine University Libraries and over 70,000 libraries worldwide.

Search by people who witnessed or participated in an event:

• Harry Truman
• Leon Trotsky
• Jackie Robinson
• Bartolome De Las Casas
• Jesse Owens
• Saint Augustine

Some useful terms to add to your search for primary sources are:

• correspondence
• diaries
• interviews
• pamphlets
• personal narratives
• sources
• biography (An autobiography is a primary source.)
• oral history
• sourcebook
• documentary history

Try limiting your search to books that were written at the time of the historical event to target primary sources.

The following has been adapted from Bowdoin University's guide for Reading, Writing, and Researching for History, https://courses.bowdoin.edu/writing-guides/.

Evaluating primary sources can be guided by the acronym PAPER.

• Purpose of the author in preparing the document
• Argument and strategy she or he uses to achieve those goals
• Presuppositions and values (in the text, and our own)
• Epistemology (evaluating truth content)
• Relate to other texts (compare and contrast)

Purpose

• Who is the author and what is her or his place in society (explain why you are justified in thinking so)? What could or might it be, based on the text, and why?
• Why did the author prepare the document? What was the occassion for its creation?
• What is at stake for the author in this text? Why do you think she or he wrote it? What evidence in the text tells you this?
• Does the author have a thesis? What — in one sentence — is that thesis?

Argument

• What is the text trying to do? How does the text make its case? What is its strategy for accomplishing its goal? How does it carry out this strategy?
• What is the intended audience of the text? How might this influence its rhetorical strategy? Cite specific examples.
• What arguments or concerns does the author respond to that are not clearly stated? Provide at least one example of a point at which the author seems to be refuting a position never clearly stated. Explain what you think this position may be in detail, and why you think it.
• Do you think the author is credible and reliable? Use at least one specific example to explain why. Make sure to explain the principle of rhetoric or logic that makes this passage credible.

Presuppositions

• How do the ideas and values in the source differ from the ideas and values of our age? Offer two specific examples.
• What presumptions and preconceptions do we as readers bring to bear on this text? For instance, what portions of the text might we find objectionable, but which contemporaries might have found acceptable. State the values we hold on that subject, and the values expressed in the text. Cite at least one specific example.
• How might the difference between our values and the values of the author influence the way we understand the text? Explain how such a difference in values might lead us to mis-interpret the text, or understand it in a way contemporaries would not have. Offer at least one specific example.

Epistemology

• How might this text support one of the arguments found in secondary sources we’ve read? Choose a paragraph anywhere in a secondary source we’ve read, state where this text might be an appropriate footnote (cite page and paragraph), and explain why.
• What kinds of information does this text reveal that it does not seemed concerned with revealing? (In other words, what does it tell us without knowing it’s telling us?)
• Offer one claim from the text which is the author’s interpretation. Now offer one example of a historical “fact” (something that is absolutely indisputable) that we can learn from this text (this need not be the author’s words).

Relate: Now choose another of the readings, and compare the two, answering these questions:

• What patterns or ideas are repeated throughout the readings?
• What major differences appear in them?
• Which do you find more reliable and credible?