Western Civilization PRIMARY DOCUMENT ANALYSIS

PRIMARY DOCUMENT
ANALYSIS ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS:
There are
two major types of sources used in the scholarship in the field of History;
“Secondary Sources” and “Primary Sources.”
Secondary
sources are like our textbook and other history books. They contain information from the past that
has already been interpreted by the authors.
The authors may have drawn on first-hand accounts and documents as well
as other books, interpreted them, and put them in a form for an audience to
read. When we read secondary sources we
are reading the author’s take on what happened.
Different authors may present the same facts but reach entirely
different conclusions.
Primary
sources are first-hand accounts from a time period in history that is being
studied. Examples include letters,
diaries, newspapers, treaties, and speeches to name a few. They have not been interpreted but are raw
information from the time period which can be positive but also negative. They can be positive because they take you
closer to the actual historical event and you can see what people who were
really there were thinking.
Unfortunately, they can have drawbacks because people involved in the
events usually have biases about the event stronger than a historian writing
hundreds of years later, Further,
someone involved in an actual event is probably only seeing the event from one
small perspective and may have no idea of the overall circumstances. One of the historian’s jobs is to sort
through these obstacles in search of the truth – or at least what they
interpret to be the truth.
For the Primary Document Analysis, choose one
document from:
https://eudocs.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Main_Page that is from the time period we are
studying (1600 – Present).
Read the
document carefully and respond to the following questions:
1. Summarize
your document.
2. What is
the purpose of the document you chose?
In other words, why was it created?
3. How may
your source be important to historians today in reconstructing what happened?
4. What
insight can we gain about the people of the time from this source including
their attitudes?
5. List 2
different ways in which your source could be interpreted.
6. What
biases, flaws in perspective, or inaccuracies, if any, should historians take
into account when they use this source?
Assignments should be approximately
550 words in length. Be sure to list the
title of your primary document at the top of your paper. Please double space.

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