What are the advantages and disadvantages of primary and secondary sources?
With primary sources you get the advantage of the importance of the events or objects at the time, to the people of the time, without any hindsight. You also have the advantage of not having History written with today’s morals or political correctness. Unfortunately, if you watch almost any of the Hollywood historical films you will be subjected to an unhealthy dose of historically inaccurate storytelling that many assume to be real History. With secondary sources, your information may be relevant, and may include the same advantages from the primary source. Unfortunately many newspaper accounts throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries contain either too much bias or misinformation and need further research with additional sources that have been careful to sift through the historically inaccurate figures given in the reports. I am not talking about coins, I am talking about written reports such as books or newspapers.
