Chapter Two
2. Primary Versus Secondary Sources
It is important for students to understand the distinction between primary and secondary sources, a distinction some students may not have been taught in their earlier education.
The difference between a primary source and a secondary source is a matter of how far removed the author of a piece is from the actual event being described.
If an author is producing an original work—such as a book or essay—or describing something first hand, that is typically considered a primary source. If an author is communicating the experiences, opinions, and stories told by others, that is a second hand, or secondary source.
Primary sources are contemporary accounts of an event, written by someone who experienced or witnessed the event in person, first hand. Primary sources often include original documents and original source materials, such as diaries, letters, memoirs, journals, speeches, manuscripts, essays, and longer book-length publications.
Newspaper and magazine articles and reports (as long as they were written soon after the fact and not as historical accounts), photographs, audio or video recordings, research reports in the natural or social sciences, and original literary or theatrical works, can be primary sources. Constitutions, laws, public policies, and public pronouncements can serve as primary sources.
Secondary sources are sources of information coming from people who were at least one step removed from the event or phenomenon under review, who did not witness or observe the event being described, who did not write or produce the original source being described.
When Plato writes a book and titles it The Republic, that is a primary source. When later scholars write essays and books commenting about Plato’s Republic, those later essays and books are secondary sources.
In some unusual instances, a piece of writing can be both primary and secondary. Thomas Aquinas, for example, wrote a series of extended commentaries on several of Aristotle’s treatises, including Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is a primary source. Aquinas’s commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics is a secondary source because it is commenting on a prior, earlier primary source. At the same time, many scholars would consider Aquinas’s commentary itself to be a primary source because it includes original insights and arguments that are not merely the same as what Aristotle argued. Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, therefore, can be considered both primary and secondary, simultaneously.
Another example would be Livy’s History of Rome and Machiavelli’s commentary on it. Between 27 and 9 BC, the Roman historian Titus Livius wrote what was at that time an unmatched and comprehensive account of Rome, which came to be known as Livy’s History of Rome and is a good example of a primary source.
Many centuries later, the Italian writer and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli wrote an extended commentary that he titled Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy’s History of Rome, now popularly referred to simply as Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy.
Machiavelli’s book, The Discourses, is both a secondary source—it presents a commentary on Livy’s earlier original work—and it is also widely regarded as a primary source in itself because Machiavelli uses his commentaries on Livy as an opportunity to present his own original political philosophy.
In sum, secondary source materials provide additional context, interpret, assign value to, conjecture upon, and draw conclusions about primary sources. These are usually in the form of essays and books, but may include radio or television documentaries. Some unusually important works can be both primary and secondary, but these rare outliers, not the norm.
EXAMPLES
Primary Source: The Declaration of Independence
Secondary Source: Carl Becker’s book, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas
Primary Source: Personal letters written by soldiers during the American Revolution
Secondary Source: Gordon Wood’s book, The American Revolution: A History
Primary Source: The Emancipation Proclamation
Secondary Source: Allen Guelzo’s book, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America
Primary Sources: Letters from Union and Confederate soldiers; speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis; general orders issued by Union and Confederate army commanders
Secondary Source: Ken Burns’ nine-part documentary movie, “The Civil War”