![\"A](\"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/pexels-pixabay-163185-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/a>Primary sources are left to us from the era we\u2019re examining. They were created in (or close to) the same moment as the events we study \u2013 they\u2019re oral traditions, letters, diaries, account books, laws, judicial records, birth certificates, death records, journals, commonplace books, maps, paintings, sketches, etchings, prints, photographs, chairs, milk churns, carriages, planes, fossils, textiles, and debris (to offer an incomplete list.) Because these sources offer us tiny glimpses of the past as it happened\u2014fragments of thought, feeling, opinion, process, and effect\u2014we gather as many of them up as we can to try and piece together a holistic picture of not only what happened and to whom, but how and why it happened at all.<\/p>\n
Primary sources might once have been meant for public audiences\u2014like propaganda posters, or newspapers\u2014or they might have been things that were private\u2014love letters, confessions, stories meant only for one community, but not another. \u00a0They are a fraction of everything ever created about a place and time. \u00a0They tend to record the voices of those who had power, time, and\/or money. They favor durable goods over flimsy objects. In Western society they favor the literate over those who couldn\u2019t read and write.<\/p>\n
It’s not enough for someone to have created something. Someone else had to see value in that something and want to keep it safe because of that value. Someone had to pass it along to someone who could place it in their memory, or in a book, a library, an archive, or sometimes someone\u2019s attic. People had to file the something, or conserve it and display it, or repeat it to others so that it wouldn\u2019t be lost. Value judgements were made over and over, and some things were thrown away, torn up, sunk, forgotten, and burned.<\/p>\n
We try to write the story of the past based on what is left.<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t as simple as looking or listening to what\u2019s left to us and believing it. We have to put the thing into the context of its time, and ask questions about why it was created, and why it survived. Often, we may vehemently disagree with the politics, values, ethics, and ideas of the people who wrote or created or stamped or painted the things with which we, as historians, interact. We come to this work with our own ideas about what\u2019s valuable in life, and whose voices matter, and we have, as a profession, proved willing and able to ignore large swathes of humanity because we didn\u2019t examine our own biases when we came to do the work.<\/p>\n
We can\u2019t sit down with our forebears and ask them questions directly, but we can sift through the fragments of evidence they left behind and try and reconstruct what they meant, why they did things, who they treasured, what mattered to them, what didn\u2019t matter at all. We have to look high and low for every fragment we can find. We have to think seriously about where to look. We have to think carefully about how<\/em> to look. And it\u2019s only when we\u2019ve done that that we can begin to weave together a story about the past. That story becomes the secondary source, written or crafted or told or shared at some distance from the original event. We need both in order to do our job, but the principle is the same each time: learn from the people who went before you. Listen to as much as you can.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why the answer to \u201chow many primary sources do I need?\u201d is \u201cit depends.\u201d And at its heart that answer cannot be about a number. At its heart the answer must be about justice\u2014doing justice to the subject at hand, but also practicing justice in the world we\u2019re building now. How do we recover as many voices as we can? How do we get the stories right? By diligently searching for all the fragments; by listening to the quiet places; by thinking about who we are, and what we\u2019re doing this for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of my favorite courses to teach is my department\u2019s class on historical methods. For a final assignment in the course, students have to create a bibliography of sources that could support the writing of an upper-level seminar paper, and annotate several of the entries. My students often ask how many primary sources is enough, and they\u2019re never very satisfied by my honest answer of \u201cit depends.\u201d I started thinking about this from their perspective. Surely there\u2019s a threshold historians…<\/p>\n