The humanities encompass various fields: art (studio, especially art history), history, literature, music, theater & dance, and religion.
Primary sources are any material/artifacts from a period that researchers/scholars study that convey the experience from that time.
Secondary sources are scholarly treatments of a topic that utilize primary and secondary sources to explain the past or the subject.
Tertiary sources contain both primary and secondary sources (scholarly analyses).
The humanities share many types of the same primary sources. While the primary source depends on the topic or question one is researching. Here are many examples of primary sources.
| Written | Oral | Visual | Digital |
| Books Journals Letters Annals Dissertations Public records Census data Eyewitness accounts Scripture Inscriptions Newspapers Diaries Chronicles Government documents Personal or institutional papers Genealogies Manuscripts Laws Scrolls Period literature & poetry |
Speeches Anecdotes Sagas Oral histories Music Interviews (not videotaped) Ballads Legends Telephone conversations Recordings (tape & records) Myths |
Sculpture Photographs Portraits Maps Cartoons Coins Videotapes Films Posters Engravings Models & dioramas Woodcuts Architecture Etchings Relics Historical paintings Artifacts Computer generated Graphics |
Faxes Electronic mail Machine readable Databases Web pages |
From Using Internet Primary Sources to Teach Critical Thinking Skills in History, Craver, Kathleen, D 16.2 .C79 1999, p.18-19
Typical tools that we use for research can provide us with primary & secondary sources: catalogs, ONESEARCH), databases (some have only secondary sources; some only primary sources & some both), & the Internet.
