How do we know what happened in the past? I mean really, how do we know? We see the past portrayed in movies, TV, we see it in video games, we read about it in books, we learn about it in class. But how do historians actually know what happened?
My name is Christian and I'm a medieval historian and professor. In this video we'll discuss the sources which tell us about the past, specifically the difference between primary and secondary sources. Think about all the ways we can learn about the past.
Books, teachers, movies, television shows, museums, video games, artifacts, old letters or journals, old photographs, old buildings, bones, paintings. There are practically unlimited numbers of sources which tell us about the past in some way. But are they all equal? In history we classify sources into two types, primary and secondary. A primary source is anything, anything at all, which was created by humans in the time period we are studying.
So, say you're interested in the time of Shakespeare. Primary sources could be any of his writings, his plays, his sonnets, or letters. But they could also be other sources from that time period as well, such as tax records, Coloury, surviving buildings and paintings and even if it existed, Bill Shakespeare's favourite hat. All of these sources were created while Shakespeare was alive.
Everyone tells us a little bit about the world he inhabited. Primary sources are our evidence, our evidence from the past. They're the remnants from long dead people and their world. They're all we have. So what about secondary sources?
A secondary source is anything which talks about or concerns the past, but was made afterwards. So textbooks about Shakespeare are secondary sources. Your English teacher is a secondary source.
Movies are secondary sources. That weird television show that claimed that Shakespeare was actually an alien from outer space? Secondary source.
Wikipedia, random internet websites, secondary sources. And even serious academic research published by PhDs and peer-reviewed journals, also secondary sources. sources.
Now, needless to say, not all secondary sources are created equal. Some can be downright misleading, or crazy, or just wrong. Some, however, could be really good, such as the work published by professional historians and other scholars in peer-reviewed academic journals.
Nevertheless, all of them, good and the bad, are still classified together as secondary sources. If primary sources are evidence about the past, then secondary sources are, by their nature, opinion. Sometimes good opinion, sometimes well-informed and expert opinion, but opinion nevertheless.
When we as historians want to investigate the past, we need to go to the evidence, to the primary sources first. This is not to say that we're not interested in opinion, particularly the opinion of other historians, but original research into the past requires primary sources. When we investigate the opinions of other historians, we are doing historiography. A worthwhile task, but a different one from primary source research. If you've liked this video, please consider subscribing to the channel for new videos about history every week.
Until next time, on the Medieval Historian.