The Historical Record Historians use a wide variety of sources to answer their questions about the past. Usually, scholars distinguish between primary sources and secondary sources.
Primary sources are the actual records that have survived from the past.
Secondary sources are accounts about the past produced by people writing after the event, episode, or situation under study. For example, your history textbook is a secondary source. Some of the materials it contains, such as direct quotes from people living in the past or excerpts from historical documents, are primary sources. Although we cannot directly observe anything that happened in the past, people living in the past have left many clues. They include books, personal papers, government documents, letters of all kinds, oral accounts, diaries, maps, photographs, reports, novels and short stories, artifacts, coins, stamps, and many other things.