Analyzing Sources

Analyzing Primary and Secondary Sources

This guide is to help you understand how to think about and examine historical sources. This can be a helpful tool in looking at documents to support your argument for a research project or in daily life when we examine old newspapers or documents like laws. Below you will find some suggestions on how to think about and use both primary and secondary sources.

Analyzing Primary Sources

There are several things to consider when we look at primary documents:

• Who wrote it?

• To whom (individual or audience) was it written? Letters and speeches have a specific audience in mind, although journals may or may not be intended for others to read.

• Why, or for what purpose did they write it? Was it intended to persuade others or simply to record events?

• What is the context of the document? For example, in which historical event or time period is it written? Does it represent only one perspective on that event or era, and how might that impact what is said or not said, either intentionally or unintentionally?

• What do they say/describe specifically?

• Are other details or information missing from this account? Might those details exist in another source that survived and could shed additional light on my research, or verify how reliable this source is?

We can usually answer the “who” and the “what they are saying” questions right away. Still, you want to gather as much information as possible about the author, and the context or circumstances that brought them to write this document. This may require reading a history textbook or doing a Google search to find out more information.

Understanding “why” it was written is usually going to be explained either by the author or by the context for the document itself—for example, the broader context for Columbus writing to King Ferdinand about Native American behavior would be the Spanish colonization efforts in New Spain, so Columbus is probably trying to convince the King to send more troops or more missionaries for the colonization efforts.

We can confirm this context by looking at other sources and by examining what the document itself tells us about context. But how do we know what other perspectives or information might exist? How can we tell if source is reliable?

We all understand the world around us through the filters of our previous knowledge and experience. While this is normal, the goal of learning to think critically is to understand our conscious and unconscious frames of reference so that we can better approach a topic or problem with an open mind. Many situations in life require you to be able to navigate multiple systems of thought and to be able to assess assumptions and implications before taking a specific path or interpretation. There may be another way to interpret information if we stop and assess the assumptions and strength of the argument in front of us.

Thus, when looking at a document we should look out for:

• statements that are based on inaccurate or incomplete information;

• may be based only on one point of view in a complex discussion that has many different perspectives (and the source does not acknowledge the other points of view);

• is based on imprecise, irrelevant, or superficial factual knowledge;

• may be actively pushing for one particular way to interpret information without adequately explaining its argument, facts, and sources.

When you encounter these types of situations, you should investigate further by looking for additional perspectives or ways to think about the topic (i.e. via other sources) to avoid accepting this one particular interpretation as authoritative. You may find it is a valid argument once you dig further into the facts of the topic and determine the author is an expert in that area. Or, you may find better information and deem the original source to be unreliable.

Understanding in what ways something may be narrowly focused on one perspective, or not considering all the information on a topic, is important to understanding how reliable the document is. The key is context, which we can assess by looking at a number of sources from a variety of perspectives for that topic.

Writing an Analysis of a Primary Source

When you are analyzing a primary source, you should focus on doing these things in your analysis:

• provide a concise summary of the main points;

• discuss the potential biases or assumptions that may be limiting the author’s perspective and description of events, and how we might verify or correct for the bias of their worldview;

• recognize the complexity of the problem, idea, or event, including raising questions or describing factors that may be contributing to the outcome that even the author may not have recognized;

• discuss the historical context for the source, including things like social, economic, political, cultural, and other trends that are affecting people at that time;

• discuss the historical significance of the document—how did this impact the course of U.S. history?

Make sure you are answering the specific question prompt as well, if it is for an assignment, but these questions and ideas will help you begin thinking about a historical document. As you begin to use primary sources to support your points for an argumentative essay or research assignment, make sure the examples you use based on primary sources are examples of what you are trying to prove and be sure to both summarize and explain the source after introducing it as an example or using a quotation from the source in your work.

Analyzing Secondary Sources

Just like primary documents need to be used carefully, interpretations that we find in secondary sources can also be influenced by various elements that we should bear in mind when using them:

• the author’s limited access to data (for example classified documents), or limited data that survived through history;

• an author’s particular perceptions on problems and questions, including thinking and writing through only their own specific lenses, experiences, or points of reference;

• the author’s training and experience in searching for and using documents.

While professional scholars like historians are trained to try to locate and analyze all sorts of sources and consider multiple perspectives when writing about a historical time or event, the book or article may still show some of the issue listed here. For example, even when authors pay attention to including various perspectives on the events, they are still part of larger paradigms and assumptions that pervade the world we live in at a given moment.

A simple example of this can be seen in books about World War I. Following World War II, in the atmosphere of the Cold War that pitted the United States against the Soviet Union, many analyses of World War I focused on nation-states and the inevitable march to war that was created by the entangling alliances of Germany and France created during the latter half of the nineteenth century. If we stop and think about it, those interpretations may have some valid arguments about World War I, but they are also written in the context of a world shaped by those same forces--two super-power nations focused on building alliances. In some ways, authors consciously or sub-consciously saw patterns in history that they were also experiencing in their own historical era.

Whereas interpretations of World War written since the 1990s have examined other aspects of the origins of the conflict by non-state actors (i.e. individuals who were not heads of state and diplomats) like Serbian resistance to Austrian-Hungarian rule and the Black Hand group that led the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Writing in the 1990s, historians were witnessing the conflicts in the Balkans and the role of individuals or small groups who were able to influence or create global conflicts while fighting to establish their own territories or nation-states.

Ultimately we have a broader picture of the origins of World War I today because we have gradually incorporated more perspectives, experiences, and interpretations about the events into our historical narrative. At the same time, when we pick up specific books about a topic, we need to think about when they were written and how that specific context may have directly or indirectly influenced the author. The study and discussion of changing interpretations in the field of history across time is called historiography.

Peer Review and Publishing

It is important to remember that not all secondary sources are written by trained scholars. One way to look for this is to also investigate the expertise or credentials of the author. Are they a trained scholar or professional in the specific field the book or article is focused on? Another way to consider the reliability and expertise of a source is to determine if it is peer-reviewed. Peer review is a process where other professionals in the field review a work before it is published to consider whether the argument and evidence fits the research standards and ethics of that discipline. This is usually noted in the description about a journal when you are looking at an article (either in the journal itself or is the library catalog description of the journal). For books, many books published by academic presses (for example, Louisiana State University Press) and some published by major book distributors are peer reviewed. Self-published books are usually not peer-reviewed.

Writing About and Using Secondary Sources

In your analysis of a secondary source, you should:

• provide a concise summary of the main points;

• discuss the potential biases or assumptions that may be limiting the author’s perspective and description of events, or other interpretations that may not be included here;

• ask yourself does the author recognize the complexity of the problem, idea, or event?

• Does the author discuss the historical context for the source, including things like social, economic, political, cultural, and other trends that are affecting people at that time?

• Does the author provide citations for the sources he or she used to arrive at these conclusions?

• Does the author provide examples and explain the examples as he or she moves through their argument in a logical manner?

When you just want to use a secondary source for information to support your own research, you should still ask yourself the questions mentioned above to ensure you are using a reliable source and that you consider all aspects or perspectives for that topic even if the secondary source you are using may not do that.

Paraphrasing, Summarizing, and Quoting

This website created by Indiana University is an excellent resource for explaining the differences between paraphrasing, summarizing in your own words, and quoting a source in your work.

This is important to understand so that you are not plagiarizing someone else's work or using sources contrary to the research and ethics of the discipline you are learning. Your professor will likely provide additional resources for citing materials and what they expect you do to in a specific course, but all students are responsible for avoiding plagiarism by properly citing other materials you used for your work.

• If you cite statistics or information that you did not know before in your paper, in general that source is now something you need to cite in your assignment.

• If you paraphrase information, you should not simply copy and paste it or change a few words from the original text. You should make an effort to summarize it in your own words and provide a citation for that source in your assignment.

• Whenever you directly quote a source, you must provide a citation for that quotation in your assignment.

• You can learn more about proper citations at the Perdue Owl website for Chicago, APA, or MLA Styles.