HIST 125 / Black Metropolis

primary source, n.
Pronunciation: /ˈpraɪm(ə)ri  sɔəs/

A primary source is one produced by a participant in or witness of the events you are writing about. A primary source allows the historian to see the past through the eyes of direct participants. Some common primary sources are letters, diaries, memoirs, speeches, church records, newspaper articles, and government documents of all kinds. The capacious genre "government records" is probably the single richest trove for the historian and includes everything from criminal court records, to tax lists, to census data, to parliamentary debates, to international treaties—indeed, any records generated by governments. If you're writing about culture, primary sources may include works of art or literature, as well as philosophical tracts or scientific treatises—anything that comes under the broad rubric of culture. Not all primary sources are written. Buildings, monuments, clothes, home furnishings, photographs, religious relics, musical recordings, or oral reminiscences can all be primary sources if you use them as historical clues. The interests of historians are so broad that virtually anything can be a primary source.
From the Hamilton College History Department's Writing a Good History Paper

A Note on the Sources

Many of the sources included here were noted in "A Note on Primary Sources"  from James R. Ralph, Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Harvard UP, 1993).

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NewspaperArchive includes 45+ newspapers from parts of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these were published for only a year or two during that period.

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