Things to remember when choosing your topic:
- Primary source material is being digitized and made available online; however, most of these resources from the past are still only available in print in Archives.
- Primary documents on non-American topics may be more difficult to find and may not have been translated into English.
- You may want to do a topic involving the common people, but you will probably be able to find more documents written by the “famous” of your time period.
- It is very difficult to do an entire paper using only primary sources, since those sources tend to be very narrow and specific in scope.
- Using primary sources is more time-consuming.
- You may find that primary sources on your first choice of topic are not available locally.
