However, the majority of these resources are secondary materials. They are someone else's interpretation of what actually happened. History, after all, deals with matters that were furiously debated by the participants. Interpretations of the past are furiously debated as well, among historians, policy makers, politicians, and ordinary citizens. By working with sources, students can become involved in these debates.
Primary sources help students develop knowledge, skills, and analytical abilities.
By dealing directly with primary sources, students engage in asking questions, thinking critically, making intelligent inferences, and developing reasoned explanations and interpretations of events and issues in the past and present. Many organizations have now made a wide variety of primary sources available online, freely accessible to anyone with a Web browser. They compare this information against articles and editorials from online newspapers and magazines. They also use the Web to follow election campaigns, reading position statements, speeches and pronouncements of the candidates and proposition campaigns at Web sites run by a variety of types of organizations. History students have a similar wealth of information available.