Primary sources are produced at the time of the event or phenomenon you are investigating, and they purport to document it. They reflect what someone observed or believed about an event at the time it occurred or soon afterwards. These sources provide raw material that you will analyze and interpret. Primary sources can be published or unpublished.

Learn more about primary sources:

For this course, your primary source "base" has already been identified. You will be working with the Committee on Allerton Park records in the University Archives.

The final three sections of this guide, "Find Books," "Find Articles", and "Find other sources" will help you find additional primary sources, as well as secondary sources.

In the field of history, secondary sources are the scholarly "conversation" taking place about the past. This "conversation" is sometimes referred to as "scholarly communication."

Published secondary sources can include scholarly books, articles, and essays (both analyses by contemporary scholars as well as older scholarly analyses), surveys, criticism, comparative studies, reference sources, and works on theory and methodology.

To find published secondary sources, you can use the Library Catalog to find books or use article indexes/databases to find journal articles; article databases may list books and book chapters as well. You can also consult bibliographies.

Other ways of finding relevant secondary sources include looking for review essays, in which a historian who specializes in the subject analyzes recent scholarship and looking for historiographical treatments of the topic published as chapters in collections, journal articles, or even monographs.

Learn more about scholarly communication (AKA secondary sources), including the role of less formal modes of communication such as social media: