How should I analyse a primary source?

When approaching primary source questions it is worth remembering that the examiner needs to see you weigh up the source’s evidence in the light of your own knowledge. This is easy to do if you apply the ‘CCCP’ acronym to each source: Comment on source, Content of source, Context from own knowledge, Provenance of source. Your Comment should immediately indicate your opinion on the source, e.g. ‘Source A provides useful information on Saddam Hussein’s impact on the international community’ - this is what you are going to prove in the rest of the paragraph. Content is evidence from the source: a short quote or a brief description of an aspect of the picture, e.g. ‘Source B shows Saddam surrounded by electricity pylons’. Context from your own knowledge can be used to confirm (or not!) the content, e.g. ‘the electricity pylons are an example of Saddam’s widespread electrification policy, which put even small villages on the grid’. It is important to be selective with the contextual evidence from your own knowledge - it must be relevant to the content of this particular source, as you won’t get marks for irrelevant facts. Provenance points out why the source might have a certain agenda by considering where it’s from, and to do this you can use ‘NOP’: Nature - what is the source, is it a letter, a poster?; Origin - who created it and when?; Purpose - why was it created?. Provenance again requires you to use knowledge that specifically relates to the source - if a source was published on a certain date you should consider what was happening at that exact time, and if a source’s author belonged to a certain group you should consider how that influences the tone of the source. For example, instead of the generic ‘the Kurds hated Saddam Hussein’ you could point out that ‘this Kurd probably felt this way because of this specific campaign of persecution Saddam designed against the Kurds, and so was likelier to have a negative view when speaking about him’.                     This method can be applied generally to evaluate any source’s message, purpose, usefulness and reliability, although the structure of your answer will be different depending on what a question asks you to do.