Finding Primary and Secondary Sources

Generally speaking, a primary source is material written or created at the time of an event as a kind of firsthand report. Material written much later, as historical analysis, is a "secondary" source.

In the field of history, primary sources enable the researcher to get as close as possible to what actually happened during a past event or time period. A primary source reflects the individual viewpoint of a participant or observer. Primary sources may include diaries, correspondence, speeches, interviews, records of organizations, photographs, opinion polls, census data, etc. Books, magazine and journal articles, and newspaper articles written at the time of the historical event can also be considered primary sources.

Secondary sources are written by historians. These scholars gather available primary source material related to a historical event or person, analyze the material, and produce their own historical interpretation of the event/person based on the material. Historians are careful to cite, through footnotes, bibliographies, and lists of relevant archival collections, the data (primary source material) upon which their own account is based.

How to Find Primary Sources

  1. If you have already found good scholarly secondary sources (journal articles or books) on your topic, one of the fastest ways to locate relevant primary sources is to check the footnotes, bibliography and other information in the secondary source. History scholars should always list the primary sources they used to interpret/analyze a historical event or person.

    Once you have identified a primary source you are interested in, search PolyCAT to see if it is in our library. If not, check LINK+ (if it's published as a book) to see if you can order it through the LINK+ borrowing system. If the item is not available via LINK+ or is something other than a published book, use Interlibrary Services to obtain the material.

  2. If you still need additional primary sources for your research, below are suggestions on where to get started in your search; the usefulness of each item depends on the topic and the time period of the event/person/phenomenon that you are researching.

To Find Articles in Magazines, From 1800 On

Poole's Index to Periodical Literature
(1802-1902, in Reference Room, call # AP2 .P78 1938 (Per AI)) would be useful for finding out what magazine articles were written from 1802-1902.
19th Century Readers' Guide
(1890-1900, in Reference Room, call # AI3 .R47 (Per AI)) would be useful for finding out what magazine articles were written from 1890-1900.
Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature
(1900-present, in Reference Room, call # AI3 .R472 (Per AI)) would be useful for finding out what magazine articles were written from 1900 to the present.

Once you have the information (citation) about the magazine article you are interested in, search PolyCAT (conduct a journal title search) to see if the magazine is in our Library. If not, use Interlibrary Services to order the articles you need.

To Find Newspaper Articles, 1850's — 1980's

ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Provides full-text articles and images from the New York Times, 1851-2003, and the Los Angeles Times, 1881-1985. To access the text from more recent issues of these newspapers, search the ProQuest Newsstand database.
San Francisco Chronicle
(1865 — present) Copies of the SFC from 1865 are available on microfilm in the Reference Room area of the library. Unfortunately there is no index until 1976, so you may have to browse relevant issues/dates for primary source articles on your topic. To find more recent SFC articles (mid-1980's to the present) as primary sources, search California Newspapers (Newsband) for online access.