Resources: Reading Primary Sources

Understand this: all history is constructed out of primary sources-legislative documents, memoirs, novels, movies, paintings, newspapers, for example, anything that comes from the past. We say "constructed" because sources don't make for history in and of themselves. They have to be read, interrogated, and interpreted if we are to get to the past.

Jacob Burckhardt, in the introduction to his classic, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (c. 1860), noted that someone might have looked at all the same sources and came to very different conclusions. He wasn't saying that his study of the Renaissance was just a work of imagination. His point was simply that one could find many different things in his rich and varied sources.

You should read your primary sources with an open mind, ready to be surprised by what they may offer up. But you need to do more than this. You need to read your sources with questions in mind, questions that will lead you back to your overriding historical question.

To begin with, there is a set of questions that you should ask of any source.

• What does this source purport to be? Is it really that? That is, is this an authentic source?
  
• Who is the author?
  
• When was the source produced, or what period does it cover?
  
• Where was this source produced, or what location is being discussed?
  
• What do you textbooks or narrative histories say about the time, place, or author?
  
• Who was the expected audience of this source?
  
• What is the basic point being made here?

Some of these questions may turn out to be dead ends. As you read deeper in your source, some of these questions may turn out to generate more questions. But the key is this: these questions should guide your reading and notetaking. When you find a line or a page that speaks to one of your questions, it is time to take out your pen or computer and take a note.
These are the starting questions that you should ask of any primary source. They should be supplemented with a series of more precise questions, questions that follow from your the historical question you are researching and the secondary literature you have examined.
Let us look to an example.

Topic: A French peasant from the nineteenth century and the changing world around him
Central Source: Emile Guillaumin's Life of a Simple Man (c. 1900), an account of his peasant father's life in late nineteenth century.

Central Historical Question: How did Guillaumin's father experience the modernization of rural life?

Secondary Literature: Historians of France have debated the timing and the influence of the modernization of rural life. Some see the mid nineteenth century (1840s esp.) as the time of greatest change; others the late nineteenth century (1870s-1900). Some see changes in rural life as revolutionary; others see them as gradual.

Some Questions To Ask of This Source:

• What did G's father say about the world he lived in?
  
• What did he say about the changes he experienced?
  
• To what period did he date the changes in his life?
  
• What did G's father say about city folk who came back to visit him on the farm?
  
• How did he describe
  - his childhood?
  - changes in agriculture?
  - changes in technology?
  - such as, the railroad?
  - newspapers?
  - politics in his small town?
  - his awareness of national and international events?