Theatre Fundamentals: Primary Documents

What is a Primary Document

Primary sources are original materials. They are from the time period involved and have not been filtered through interpretation.

• Diaries
• Interviews (legal proceedings, personal, telephone, e-mail)
• Letters
• Original Documents (i.e. birth certificate or a trial transcript)
• Patents
• Photographs
• Proceedings of Meetings, Conferences and Symposia.
• Survey Research (such as market surveys and public opinion polls)
• Works of Literature
• Performance Review

Primary sources are usually defined as accounts or artifacts generated by an eyewitness or participant in past events. Interpretation and evaluation of these sources becomes the basis for historical narrative. Evaluating whether something can be used as a primary source depends on two things:

Proximity to the source. Ideally the best type of source material comes from a person or process that is closest in time or proximity to the event, person or place under study. Usually the creator of this type of primary source is an eyewitness who left a record for personal or procedural purposes. Reliability of sources declines as one get farther in time and proximity.

Questions asked. Determining whether a source is a primary source often depends on the questions asked of it by the researcher.

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1. Use the The Catalog and the Library of Congress subdivisions for primary sources.
The following words are subdivisions:

• correspondence
• diaries
• manuscripts
• personal narratives
• interviews
• history-sources
• notebooks
• sketchbooks

Author: Tydeman, William, ed.
Title: The Medieval European Stage, 500- 1550.

Author: Nagler, A.M.
Title: A Source Book in Theatrical History (Sources of Theatrical History).

Title: Drama on the world stage [microform]: prompt books and performance records. Series one, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

If you are unsure what [microform] is and how to use it, see the Theatre Fundamentals Guide, Deciphering the Catalog
Notice the other listed for this title: prompbooks, remember to follow the other subjects listed for additional titles on your topic

2. Use the sources listed in the footnotes/bibliographies/references within the books and journals you are using.
For help in locating the sources once you have identified them, see the Theatre Fundamentals guide, Known Citations

  3. Use the following databases, depending on the time period and geographic location:

• African American Newspapers
  This collection of African-American newspapers contains information about the cultural life and history during the 1800s, and contains first-hand reports of the major events and issues of the day pertaining to African Americans.

• American Periodicals Series, 1740-1900.
  Full text images of over 1,100 colonial and early American magazines and periodicals spanning from colonial times to the mid 20th century. Titles range from America's first scientific journal, Medical Repository, to popular magazines like Vanity Fair and Ladies' Home Journal.

• Early American Imprints
  Based on the renowned American Bibliography by Charles Evans. The definitive resource for every aspect of life in 17th- and 18th-century America. Includes books, diaries, plays, playbills...

• Early English Books Online
  Database of most imprints (books, pamphlets, and broadsides) published in English anywhere or published in any language in English-speaking countries, appearing from 1473 to 1700. One can search the full ASCII text of *selected* documents and view both the text and the corresponding original page images

• Eighteenth Century Collections Online: History and Geography
  One of seven subsets of the Eighteenth Century Collections Online, a digital archive, which when completed will comprise more than 150,000 multi-disciplinary works published in the United Kingdom and the Americas between 1701 and 1800. The History & Geography subset includes a vast amount of primary source materials including biographies, memoirs, genealogical collections, gazetteers, chronologies, military information, maps, church documents and more. The database allows for full-text searching of these publications.

• Making of America
  Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.

• Nineteenth Century, 1801-1900
  Online catalogue of over 25,000 nineteenth-century works available on microfiche. McKeldin owns microfiche in the General Collection and the Women Writers Specialist Collection.

• Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1800
  Published in Philadelphia 1728-1800, the Gazette provides a first hand-view of colonial America, the American Revolution, and the New Republic. Articles cover events worldwide.

• Periodicals Contents Index Online
  Periodicals Index Online currently indexes over 15 million articles going as far back as 1665 and every article in each journal is indexed, from volume 1 issue 1 to recent times. Access to 4,500 arts/humanities & social science journals published since the 19th-century in 40 languages, on 37 key subjects, e.g., architecture, archaeology, area studies, business, law, & linguistics, containing a full-text archive to over 300 periodical titles and direct linking to JSTOR.

• New York Times Historical (1851-2001)
  Provides the full page and article images with searchable full text back to the first issue. Includes digital reproductions providing access to every page from every available issue.

• Washington Post Historical
  The Washington Post (1877-1988) offers full page and article images with searchable full text back to the first issue. The collection includes digital reproductions providing access to every page from every available issue.

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