ABSTRACT
Primary sources are listed first, followed by secondary sources. As this ordering suggests, primary sources are regarded as the most important for historical research. The privileged status that the raw data in primary sources enjoys among historians has been true since the mid-nineteenth century and the Rankean injunction that to know the past one must first know the archive. Reconstructionist historians also tend to further classify primary sources into ones that are documents of record and other discursive sources. Postmodernist historians also argue that all sources involve interpretation: they are written from someone’s perspective and thus no source should be regarded as objective. The idea that stores of archival materials are somehow reflective of the past itself has an obvious appeal for some kinds of historian. Historians should never deliberately misrepresent the contents of a source in an effort to prop up a line of argument.
