how should sources be used to search history
Answers
You can find published primary sources by using the online catalog, or by searching in a digital collection of historical documents, such as the Gerritsen Collection of Women's History, Chronicling America, and Empire Online. The History Library maintains a list of these collections on its website.
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Answer:
Historians and other scholars classify sources as primary or secondary. This distinction is important because it will affect how you understand these sources. In this first video of a 2-part tutorial, we will discuss primary sources.
Primary sources are most often produced around the time of the events you are studying. They reflect what their creator observed or believed about the event. These sources serve as the raw material that you’ll analyze and synthesize in order to answer your research question, and they will form key pieces of evidence in your paper’s argument. Secondary sources, in contrast, provide an interpretation of the past based on primary sources.
This newspaper article is an example of a primary source. It describes a visit Nixon made to the Soviet Union in 1959. It was written the day after by a journalist who witnessed the event, and it reflects what the journalist and his editors thought their readers would care about at the time. Another example is this pamphlet, which compiles legal testimony from a witch trial. It was published in 1646, the same year as the trial it documents. But, given the nature of the topic, you would probably want to research the pamphlet’s author, John Davenport, to determine the reliability of the transcription or what might have motivated him to publish it.
However, you should be aware that there’s nothing inherent in a source that makes it primary or secondary. Instead, its category depends on how you treat it, which in turn depends on your research question. For example, Black Reconstruction in America, written in 1935 by W.E.B. Du Bois, could be used as a secondary source for research about 19th-century America, since Du Bois draws on a range of government reports, biographies, and existing historical narratives in order to make a claim about the past. However, it could also be used as a primary source for research about Du Bois’s life or black intellectual culture during the 1930s.
One of the main challenges of dealing with primary sources is locating them. Many historical documents have never been published, and they may only be available in archives. For example, here is a page from the expense book of a student enrolled in the University of Illinois in 1930. It is a unique document located in the Student Life and Culture Archive here on campus, and it is only accessible to those who can come to the archive in person. This, on the other hand, is a published primary source: a diary, written in 1912, and first published several decades later. Our copy is in the Main Stacks.
Some of these materials, like letters, were not published at the time of creation, but have been subsequently published in a book, or digitized and made available online. For some topics, historical documents might be difficult to find because they have been lost or were never created in the first place. In other cases, the primary sources might exist, but not in English. Therefore, when you begin to formulate a topic, you will want to think about what kinds of evidence will be available to you.
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