Somewhat late in finding this, but I completely agree, particularly with the first part. Although I will add that often primary sources are just flat-out terrible. To take an example near and dear to my heart, I have had many people who saw battleship guns fired swear up and down that they saw the ship move sideways. They did not. Some b…
Somewhat late in finding this, but I completely agree, particularly with the first part. Although I will add that often primary sources are just flat-out terrible. To take an example near and dear to my heart, I have had many people who saw battleship guns fired swear up and down that they saw the ship move sideways. They did not. Some basic math using conservation laws shows that this is clearly nonsense, and I am an engineer, so this is not a hard call. But my math is by most definitions a secondary source.
More broadly, primary sources tend to be rather narrow in their view, and while they can be great for getting the feel of a time period, they are almost always worse for figuring out what happened than a good secondary source, which can look at a lot of primary sources and get some idea of balance out of it. I'm not saying you should never read primary sources, but you should definitely never read them first if you want to get an understanding of the landscape of history.
Somewhat late in finding this, but I completely agree, particularly with the first part. Although I will add that often primary sources are just flat-out terrible. To take an example near and dear to my heart, I have had many people who saw battleship guns fired swear up and down that they saw the ship move sideways. They did not. Some basic math using conservation laws shows that this is clearly nonsense, and I am an engineer, so this is not a hard call. But my math is by most definitions a secondary source.
More broadly, primary sources tend to be rather narrow in their view, and while they can be great for getting the feel of a time period, they are almost always worse for figuring out what happened than a good secondary source, which can look at a lot of primary sources and get some idea of balance out of it. I'm not saying you should never read primary sources, but you should definitely never read them first if you want to get an understanding of the landscape of history.
Oh yeah, optical illusions are a great example I hadn't considered when writing this but should have. Thanks!