Primary Sources 

Primary sources are any artifacts created in the time period that you are studying. These sources tell you a story. The story may directly tell the tale through writing, as in a novel, sermon or diary, or the story may be told indirectly through painting or photography or song. And sometimes the primary source's creator does not intend to tell a story at all, but nevertheless leaves one behind. A grocery list tells us how people eat. A landscape tells you where they lived or how they made their living from the land. Even everyday appliances -- like toasters -- show by their design and use the patterns of everyday life. Anything around us can be a primary source. Why? These objects, be they books or sod, help make up the world that we are studying. They help scholars grasp how people understood life or how they lived. Whatever the form of the primary source, your job is the same: to extract the tale that the source tells and to figure out how the source tells its story. Below we will consider ways of doing that. 

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Examples of Primary Sources 

Sayatasha's Night Chant, oral poetry by Zuni tribe. (A Native American ritual poem that calls the Gods back to New Mexico to renew life for the new year.). 

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards. (A minister's sermon in 1741 uses the threat of divine vengeance to rouse his flock.) 

Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and its furniture. (The writer of the Declaration of Independence uses Enlightenment ideals in everyday objects.) 

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (The story of a slave's path to freedom that also pushed the abolitionist cause.) 

Social Worker's Journals at Hull House (The case notes kept by social workers at the famous home for the needy in Chicago.) 

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (A 1906 novel about factory life.) 

Life Magazine (A magazine of stories and photographs that chronicles American society.) 

Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick's 1963 satire about nuclear proliferation and Cold War America.) 

McKinney Falls State Park (The Texas park in Austin where settlers have left numerous stories about their lives on the landscape.) 

The Daily Texan (UT's student newspaper.) 

 
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Or, Follow the Fish 
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