On 3/17/06, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
Primary sources are *by definition* preferable to secondary sources in most cases.
No way. Aside from our lovely NOR policy, let me just say that the worst annoyance is some yahoo with a primary source who thinks that he now knows how to write history (and I am sure the specialists in other fields as well have run into this a million times over).
A small example: periodically you get people quoting passages selectively out of Darwin's _Descent of Man_ to prove that Darwin was a racist (by modern standards). They appeal to the original and say that they are as good as anyone else at interpretting such things. In reality, Darwin's take on race (so says the historian) needs to be highly contextualized (he is actually considerably less racist than most of his anthropological contemporaries, though just racist enough to not be considered an ethnologist) and is considerably more complex than just reading _Descent of Man_ (you can't really understand _Descent of Man_ unless you read the works to which Darwin is implicitly responding to). But none of that depth, context, and richness is clear from the primary source alone -- the work of a historian is to draw all of these things together, to make the primary source more than the text it is printed upon.
And so historians have done this, and so it is easy to write an article about _Descent of Man_ or Darwin's views on race, because most of that synthesis has already been done by others and can be easily found and referenced. Sure, pairing the synthetic approach *along* with the primary source is a great idea and for good effect. But in this case the primary source serves primarily to add luster and authenticity to the secondary interpretation, which is considerably harder to get than just reading the original.
Perhaps I sound a little territorial, here (of course the historian claims that being a historian is not easy), but I suspect that other people with other backgrounds will agree a bit on this. I'd rather have people write an encyclopedia based on secondary accounts than primary accounts -- the former will prove to be a collection of the current state of the knowledge (an encyclopedia), the latter will prove to be a collection of off-beat, missing-the-point, and thoroughly unaware and uninformed amateurisms.
I've run into this time and time again, when some self-styled researcher attempts to forge new ground on Wikipedia using their original sources, and refuses to acknowledge the difficulty of using primary sources, even after it being patiently explained more than a few times. I have to admit, it drives me a little batty -- as such I apologize for the lengthy reply!
FF