Primary Sources: Primary Sources

"Primary documents" are defined by the American Historical Association’s Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct as “all forms of evidence - not just written texts, but artifacts, images, statistics, oral recollections, the built and natural environment, and many other things - that have survived as records of former times. By 'secondary literature,' we [the AHA] typically mean all subsequent interpretations of those former times based on the evidence contained in primary documents."