Primary sources are:
Secondary sources are:
Adapted from Memorial University Libraries
A primary source is a document that was created at the time of the event or subject you've chosen to study, or by people who were observers of, or participants in that event or topic.
The medium of the primary source can be anything, including written texts, statistics, objects, buildings, films, paintings, cartoons, etc. What makes the source a primary source is when it was made, not what it is.
Books written by scholars about a topic are secondary sources. Historians' introductions to and editorial comments on collections of primary documents are also secondary sources because they're twice removed from the actual event or process you're going to be writing about. So while a historian's introduction to Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle (1906) is a secondary source, the novel itself, written in 1906, is a primary source.
Adapted from "Writing about History" by Elspeth Brown
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Adapted from Memorial University Libraries
Adapted from the Library of Congress, "Using Primary Sources"