How to Read Old Letters and Diaries
Learn how to read old letters and diaries, decipher historical handwriting, transcribe documents, understand context, and use personal writings as evidence.
Sources
Types of primary material used for historical reconstruction.
How to Use Historical Newspapers as Primary Sources
Learn how to use historical newspapers as primary sources, evaluate bias, search old newspapers, verify reports, and interpret news as historical evidence.
How Reliable Are Eyewitness Accounts of Historical Events?
Learn how reliable eyewitness accounts are, why memory can change, and how historians test firsthand testimony using context and corroboration.
How Eyewitness Accounts Help Us Understand History
Discover how eyewitness accounts help historians reconstruct the past, what firsthand testimony can reveal, its limitations, and how historians test it.
Primary Sources vs Secondary Sources: What Is the Difference?
Learn the difference between primary and secondary sources, see clear historical examples, and discover how historians use both types of evidence.
How to Read Primary Sources Like a Historian
Learn how historians read primary sources using sourcing, context, close reading, corroboration, perspective, and evidence-based interpretation.
What Is a Primary Source? A Guide to Historical Evidence
Learn what a primary source is, how historians analyze primary evidence, common source types, reliability limits, and how to use sources responsibly.
The Black Press in the 1940s: Reporting the Struggle for Civil Rights
Drawing on contemporary newspapers, eyewitness accounts, and archival records, this article reconstructs how African American newspapers in the 1940s reported the struggle for civil rights — from the Double V campaign to the fight for military integration — and how their own success eventually led to their decline.
The Fall of Saigon Through Vietnamese Refugee Diaries
Drawing on the personal diaries and memoirs of Vietnamese refugees, this article reconstructs the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the chaotic exodus that followed, revealing the fear, hope, and trauma of those who lived through it.
The WPA Writers’ Project: Capturing American Lives During the Depression
During the Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project put unemployed writers like Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston to work collecting the life stories of ordinary Americans. Drawing on Library of Congress archives and period accounts, this article reconstructs how the project captured a nation in crisis.