Secondary source

A scholar working from primary records and arguing about what they add up to. Teehankee on Philippine elections, Scott on sixteenth-century society, Anderson on the shape of the elite. Secondary sources are not a weaker form of evidence. They are a different thing: the argument rather than the record.

The rule the course runs on is that the two never get swapped. The document is how you know the thing happened. The scholar is who you are quoting when you say what it meant. Confusing them is how an argument ends up on screen in the voice of a fact, and it is the most common way a well-researched film loses an audience member who happens to know the field.

Source: Standard historical-method distinction, in general scholarly use. The course’s handling rule, that a secondary source is always attributed by name when its interpretation is used, is carried from the citation discipline in the course direction memo.

First used in: 0.2 · How we will know what is true