Scribd
Upload
31 views2 pages

Using Secondary Sources

Secondary sources are produced after the event being studied and can include histories, newspaper articles, biographies and documentaries. When evaluating secondary sources, questions should be asked about the author, date, intended audience and potential biases. Secondary sources can be used as a source of facts, background information or different interpretations of events.

Uploaded by

chris
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
31 views2 pages

Using Secondary Sources

Secondary sources are produced after the event being studied and can include histories, newspaper articles, biographies and documentaries. When evaluating secondary sources, questions should be asked about the author, date, intended audience and potential biases. Secondary sources can be used as a source of facts, background information or different interpretations of events.

Uploaded by

chris
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

Secondary sources

Secondary sources are those sources produced after the period or event under
investigation. They may include histories written over one hundred years after the
event, later newspaper accounts, biographies, documentaries, political commentaries
and encyclopaedias. Secondary sources may provide an overview of an event or issue,
different opinions and/ or interpretations of events, access to statistics,
photographs, maps and other sources and provide the latest research and scholarship
on a particular historical subject.

To help interpret secondary sources the following questions can help.


• Who wrote it?
• When was it written?
• What sources were used to write it?
• Are these sources reliable?
• What has been omitted?
• Why was it written?
• Who was the intended audience?
• Have any facts been omitted?
• Have emotive phrases or words been used?
• Has the writer any reason to be one-sided?

Three ways to use a secondary source:


1. As a collection of facts
Use a secondary source if you need to find a particular piece of information
quickly. You might need to know, for example, where Gallipoli is, what year Gough
Whitlam was dismissed or the names of Indigenous tribes in your area.
2. As a source of background material
If you are studying one topic but you need to know something about what else was
happening at that time, or what happened earlier, you could use a secondary source
to find the background material that you need. For example, if you are studying the
Great Depression in Australia, you may use a secondary source to help you see which
other countries were affected, or what the 1920s were like.
3. As an interpretation
Since the facts do not speak for themselves, it is necessary for the historian to
give them some shape and to put them in an order that people can understand. This
is called an interpretation. Many secondary sources provide not only information
but also a way of making sense of that information. You should use a secondary
source if you want to understand how the writer makes sense of a particular person,
trend or event.

What do we mean by usefulness and reliability?

When you are trying to establish the reliability of a source, you’re looking for
clues like:
-author
-origin
-motive of source
-period written
-date source was created
-content (what is the source saying)
-intended audience
-bias of source
However, a source can be unreliable but still can be useful to historians. A source
is always useful for a certain purpose - your job is to find out how accurate it
is.
Let’s say you had a photo of nice, clean British trenches (content) and you were
told it was taken by a British senior officer (author/origin/bias) and was to be
sent back to the home front (intended audience/motive).
From your own study you would know that British trenches were terrible. Thus you
could infer that due to the position of the author and the audience he was creating
the text for, his intended purpose would be to glorify war back on the home front.

From this you would be able to say that the source is not a reliable depiction of
British trenches but it is useful in showing how British generals wanted people on
the home front to view the war – to glorifying it rather than revealing the awful
reality. This might have been to encourage more recruits to sign up to fight, this
might have been to encourage the hearts of family members back home, this might
have been to quash rumours of failure on the home front, to give an impression of
success and order and everything moving efficiently toward victory, to boost morale
– a whole range of motivations might exist and we need to try to consider them all.

You might also like

pFad - Phonifier reborn

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


Alternative Proxies:

Alternative Proxy

pFad Proxy

pFad v3 Proxy

pFad v4 Proxy