The study of history usually includes the investigation of both primary and secondary resources. Primary resources are the basic evidence for any good research project. For example, if you were investigating how American children in 1880 learned to read, you could view a copy of a nineteenth century reader from the Nietz Textbook Collection at the University of Pittsburgh Digital Library to see how they were taught to read. Newspapers of the same time period would also constitute a primary resource. Secondary resources would include scholarly articles and books about your topic.

Consult the research guide below for more information regarding how to recognize primary sources.