

In other cases, the primary sources might exist, but not in English. For some topics, historical documents might be difficult to find because they have been lost or were never created in the first place. Some of these materials, like letters, were not published at the time of creation, but have been subsequently published in a book, or digitized and made available online. This, on the other hand, is a published primary source: a diary, written in 1912, and first published several decades later.
PERSONAL HISTORIAN TUTORIAL ARCHIVE
It is a unique document located in the Student Life and Culture Archive here on campus, and it is only accessible to those who can come to the archive in person. For example, here is a page from the expense book of a student enrolled in the University of Illinois in 1930. Many historical documents have never been published, and they may only be available in archives.

One of the main challenges of dealing with primary sources is locating them. However, it could also be used as a primary source for research about Du Bois’s life or black intellectual culture during the 1930s. Du Bois, could be used as a secondary source for research about 19th-century America, since Du Bois draws on a range of government reports, biographies, and existing historical narratives in order to make a claim about the past. For example, Black Reconstruction in America, written in 1935 by W.E.B. Instead, its category depends on how you treat it, which in turn depends on your research question. However, you should be aware that there’s nothing inherent in a source that makes it primary or secondary. But, given the nature of the topic, you would probably want to research the pamphlet’s author, John Davenport, to determine the reliability of the transcription or what might have motivated him to publish it.
PERSONAL HISTORIAN TUTORIAL TRIAL
It was published in 1646, the same year as the trial it documents. Another example is this pamphlet, which compiles legal testimony from a witch trial. It was written the day after by a journalist who witnessed the event, and it reflects what the journalist and his editors thought their readers would care about at the time.

It describes a visit Nixon made to the Soviet Union in 1959. This newspaper article is an example of a primary source. Secondary sources, in contrast, provide an interpretation of the past based on primary sources. These sources serve as the raw material that you’ll analyze and synthesize in order to answer your research question, and they will form key pieces of evidence in your paper’s argument. They reflect what their creator observed or believed about the event. Primary sources are most often produced around the time of the events you are studying. In this first video of a 2-part tutorial, we will discuss primary sources. This distinction is important because it will affect how you understand these sources. Historians and other scholars classify sources as primary or secondary.
