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Primary sources are materials that provide first-hand information that is factual, without analysis or interpretation. The accounts may be from the time they occurred or created at a later date by someone with first-hand knowledge. Primary sources include:
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Primary sources encourage you to develop your critical thinking skills. These sources can provide important insights into history, but they are often incomplete and out of context - simply snippets of raw history. They are also sometimes contradictory, with different sources offering different points of view. Primary sources are like puzzle pieces that you, as a student of history, must piece together in a persuasive and thoughtful way, in order to understand and explain the past.
Primary sources give you a deeper knowledge of the past and make history more engaging. The eye-witness nature of primary sources can help you to relate in a more personal way to events in the past.