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For three decades Eric Foner—author of books like Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished RevolutionThe Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, and Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad—has taught a three-class unit on the Civil War for Columbia University. In his final year teaching the class, he partnered with edX to make them available online for free.

One helpful feature of these classes is that they provide undergraduate students—and others—a primer on how to question, interpret, and discuss the backbone of historical research: primary sources.

I’ve taken the material and broken it up into a Q&A below. At the end, you’ll see an example of a primary source, some answers to some questions, and some links for you to try it yourself.

1401400002rWhat is a primary source?

A primary source is a document, image, or artifact that provides first-hand or eyewitness information about a particular historical person, event, or idea.

What are some typical examples of primary sources?

Typical examples include

  • letters
  • diaries
  • newspapers
  • photographs
  • paintings
  • maps
  • oral histories

How can primary sources help historians?

Primary sources can help historians [1] answer research questions and [2] gather evidence to support their arguments.

For scholars, these materials—and the questions they raise—constitute the foundational elements of historical work. Interrogating primary sources is one of the fundamental tasks every historian must perform in order to craft a nuanced, contingent, and evidence-based argument.

How do different types of texts offer varying potential questions and answers?

Wills, financial records, and military accounts document the day-to-day functioning of a society.

Photographic albums, engravings, and printed ephemera provide glimpses into the iconography of a culture.

Personal belongings and correspondence beckon toward the intimate details of private lives, while mass-produced keepsakes blur the lines between historical evidence and pop-cultural kitsch.

What starting questions should one ask of a document?

When working with primary sources it is important to begin with a few observational and interpretive questions, which can often suggest future research directions.

  1. When was this source created? If the source is not dated, can you use any contextual clues to make an educated guess?
  2. Who created it? If no individual’s name is apparent, can you guess their position within society?
  3. What was the original purpose of this source? Why was it created and what was its intent?
  4. Who is the intended audience of the source? How does this influence the way information is presented?
  5. Is there anyone, besides the author, who is represented in the source? What can you learn about them?
  6. How has the meaning of the source changed over time?
  7. How might a historian use this source as a piece of evidence? What research questions might it help to answer? What story might you tell using this source?

Can you give an example?

The following (Cyrus Gordon – Abraham Lincoln Collection, 1846-1980, Columbia University, Rare Book & Manuscript Library) is a Bill of Sale from the State of Louisiana. You can click the image to enlarge it:

1401400039

Using the questions above, the answers would be along the following lines:

  1. October 4, 1859
  2. Anthony Wiesemann of St. Louis, Missouri.
  3. This document is a bill of sale for a slave woman. This was a legal document meant to transfer property rights to this woman from Wiesemann to her new owner, Denis C. Daniel of St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, for the sum of $1,450. [FYI: this is about $38,000 in today’s money.]
  4. The primary audience for this document was the purchaser, Denis C. Daniel, and his heirs.
  5. This document also represents the subject of the sale, “a certain negress, slave for life, named Sarah Jane, aged 17.”
  6. While this source originally served as a legal document guaranteeing property rights, today it shows us how people were held and valued as property.
  7. A historian might use this document to show how the demand for slaves continued to grow in the years immediately before the Civil War.

These questions and answers are really just the beginning. If you go here, and scroll down to Week 3, you can see another document and some initial observations and questions from a historian of women and gender, an environmental historian, and a labor historian. Different questions, angles, and comparisons can lead to new discoveries and lines of inquiry.

How can I try this for myself?

To use the rubric above to look at primary sources from the Civil War era, go here, here, and here.

What are some further resources for learning more about the use of primary sources in historical research?

Bad Evangelical Example

David Barton, whom my Evangelical History partner Thomas Kidd has sought to hold publicly accountable for his bad historical methodology, has some misguided views of primary sources, as expressed in this conversation with his brother:

We will be very specific not to bring something up or expound on something that we do not have original sources. . . There has been such an indoctrination for so long of the wrong stories, of the wrong ideologies and so the question we always ask is “what is the source of the information, what is the original document you can link that to . . . ?” Most professors, they don’t have original sources, they have ideas, they have their stories but it’s not rooted in truth. So we always want to go back and say “here’s the original document, here’s what George Washington actually said, here’s what Thomas Jefferson actually said.” And so our stories are based on the actual document . . . and if we can’t find an original source then we usually don’t use it . . . because we want to make sure whatever we’re saying we can bring it back to truth with original sources.

John Fea appropriately responds, calling this “absurd”:

First, all historians work with original sources and try to draw conclusions based on those sources.

Second, one does not have to physically own a copy of the document in order to read and interpret what it is saying. This is why historians visit archives, publish edited collections of primary sources, and place primary sources online at respectable sites.

Good Evangelical Example

Jesse Curtis, a PhD candidate in history at Temple University in Philadelphia, is doing his doctoral work on the emergence of colorblind racial ideologies among white evangelicals in the 20th century. In the course of his research, he came across an interesting letter from Pastor Tim Lahaye (of later Left Behind fame) expressing alarm that Wheaton College would host a memorial service to honor Martin Luther King. You can read the short letter at his site, and then read the sort of questions that Curtis has of this document.

He concludes:

Studying history often involves asking one question after another. At times the questions radiate outward in dizzying complexity, and often the evidence is far more fragmentary than we would like. Primary sources like this one don’t speak for themselves. If I ask you, “What does this document mean?” you might come up with dozens of plausible answers. But perhaps the best answer would be, “I don’t know yet. I need to ask more questions.” And that’s part of what makes history so compelling.

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