LibGuides: POL 217: Pursuing Justice- The Fight to Kill Jim Crow: Primary Sources

Primary VS. Secondary Sources

Which is which?

You may be familiar with the distinction between primary and secondary sources in the humanities. There, a primary source is an account from someone who experienced the event - a first-person account. A secondary source is written by someone who was not there.

Likewise, a science primary source is written by someone who experienced the event first hand. Just, in this case, the event was the experiment or the gathering of data. A secondary source is written by someone who has read about the research, usually from the primary source.

So how can you tell if an article is primary or secondary?

Primary Sources:

Report new data, research, or theories
Include a methodology section that details how the data was gathered
Present new data and results

Secondary Sources:

Compile and/or evaluate existing research
May not include a methodology section. If it does, it will detail how studies were selected for review.
Evaluate or discuss data from many sources

Other things to look for include:

the title "Review" or "Review Article", which are only on secondary sources
extensive reference lists on secondary sources

Which should you use?

There are good reasons to use either primary or secondary sources. Secondary sources can catch you up on most of the important research in a specific field, as well as providing over-arching themes and trends in the research. Primary sources give you much more detail on the research, including raw data. A single source may illuminate differences or problems with trends in the larger research body.

In the end you will need to consider both your level of knowledge and background in a field, as well as the specific requirements of your assignment. You may find yourself reading both types of sources to get a deep, comprehensive understanding of your topic.

General Primary Sources

History Vault
ProQuest History Vault consists of manuscript and archival collections digitized in partnership and from a wide variety of archival institutions. Major collection areas in History Vault focus on the Black Freedom Movement of the 20th Century, Southern Life and Slavery, Women's Rights, International Relations, American Politics and Society with a strong focus on the 20th Century, and labor unions, workers and radical politics in the 20th Century. On the topic of civil rights and Black Freedom, History Vault contains records of four of the most important civil rights organizations of the 1950s and 1960s: NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE. History Vault's collections on Slavery and Southern plantations candidly document the realities of slavery at the most immediate grassroots level in Southern society and provide revealing documentation on the functioning of the slave system.
Independent Voices
Independent Voices is a digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
African American Communities
From communal struggle to creative outpourings: uncover the everyday lives of African Americans spanning two turbulent centuries.
Archives Unbound
Presents topically-focused digital collections of historical documents. Collections cover a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages forward-from Witchcraft to World War II to twentieth-century political history.
NAACP Papers: Board of Directors, Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and National Staff Files
This collection includes documents relating to:
Meetings of the Board of Directors, Records of Annual Conferences, Major Speeches and Special Reports, 1909–1970
Personal Correspondence of Selected NAACP Officials, 1919–1939
Race Relations in the International Arena, 1940–1955
Board of Directors Correspondence and Committee Materials, 1919-1955
National Staff Files, 1940–1965
NAACP Papers: The NAACP’s Major Campaigns—Scottsboro, Anti-Lynching, Criminal Justice, Peonage, Labor, and Segregation and Discrimination Complaints and Responses
The focus of this module is on the NAACP's efforts to combat lynching, mob violence, discrimination in the criminal justice system, and white resistance to civil rights efforts. These files are supplemented by materials on segregation and discrimination complaints regarding public accommodations and recreational facilities sent to and investigated by the NAACP, and records on discrimination in employment.
Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice
This resource is designed as an important portal for slavery and abolition studies, bringing together documents and collections covering an extensive time period, between 1490 and 2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Close attention is given to the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social-justice perspective and the continued existence of slavery today.

Legal Documents

HeinOnline
HeinOnline is a fully searchable, image-based government document and legal research database. It contains comprehensive coverage from inception of both U.S. statutory materials and more than 2,300 scholarly journals, all of the world's constitutions, all U.S. treaties, collections of classic treatises and presidential documents, and access to the full text of state and federal case law.
FBI Confidential Files and Radical Politics in the U.S., 1945-1972
This module consists of records of the FBI and the Subversive Activities Control Board from 1945-1972. Highlights of this module include J. Edgar Hoover's office files; documentation on the FBI's so-called "black bag jobs," as they were called before being renamed "surreptitious entries"; and the "Do Not File" File. The "Do Not File" file consists of records that were originally supposed to be destroyed on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's order, however, through both intended and inadvertent exceptions to this order, large portions of these files survived.
LexisNexis
Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an intuitive interface that offers quick...