Explore beautiful and ugly buildings. Mathematics helps us create beautiful d...
Primary & secondary sources with lecture
1. Primary and Secondary Sources
DR. MELISSA JORDINE
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FRESNO
2. Outline of Presentation
Methods and Skills of History: A Practical Guide that
can be adapted for students at different grade levels
Classifying sources
Challenges for students
Providing context and thinking about other aspects
of primary sources
History Day Topic for this year and specific
suggestions for sources students can use and how to
classify them
For audio, click on icon
3. Third Edition is the most recent: you can use
or adapt exercises
No audio
4. Methods & Skills: Chapter 9
I can e-mail you a pdf file consisting of the first half
of Chapter 9, if you or a teacher who could not attend
today are interested.
This chapter begins with an interesting story about
how identity was established in the 16th century and
uses this story to point out that “evidence” can be
problematic. The chapter focuses on the issues of
identifying and analyzing sources and stresses the
importance of corroborating evidence in History.
For audio, click on icon
5. Methods & Skills: Chapter 9
Introduces the following concepts: 1)Bias
2) Specialized information that might be needed or
changes in the meaning of words over time 3)
Informed Common Sense
#3 is problematic: If I were to say that Otto von
Bismarck could not leave the house because the door
was closed, your common sense would reject this
statement although it is absolutely true.
(The Otto in this specific case is a Dachshund and not
the German Chancellor responsible for Unification)
For audio, click on icon
7. Primary source: (Methods and Skills)
-- An artifact or source created during the time
period under study.
-- A first-hand or eyewitness account by a person
who observed or participated in the event being
studied; implies that all individuals living during the
time period in which an event occurs are primary
sources
For audio, click on icon
9. Secondary Source (Methods & Skills)
An account written after the events have taken place,
by someone who did not observe or participate in the
event. Most secondary sources do not just describe
but also analyze and/or interpret the event. The best
secondary sources use primary sources as a basis for
their inquiry, and as evidence for their key points or
argument, but also consult all relevant secondary
sources.
For audio, click on icon
10. Definitions are relatively good . . .
However, the idea that anyone living during a
particular period is a primary source for events that
occur during that period has produced considerable
debate among historians who are not in complete
agreement about this issue.
Is George Washington a primary source in regard to
the British treatment of American prisoners of war?
Is someone who watched, on live television, the
Berlin Wall being torn down a primary source?
For audio, click on icon
11. Keep in Mind: Historians never classify or analyze
Not Historians sources in a vacuum
Source (s)
Source (s) Source (s)
Herodotus
and other
Historians
Historical Inquiry about
Question the past
Black Hole
For audio, click on icon
12. Key points about sources that students need to be
actively taught:
Format: letter, book, article etc. does not determine
whether a source is primary or secondary
Historical inquiry or specific focus/question
determines whether a source is primary, secondary,
or both
For audio, click on icon
13. Key points & Students
Primary Sources are not inherently more accurate or
unbiased than secondary sources
Sources can lie or omit key points; individuals can be
biased and thus write “facts” that they believe are
true such as that women are incapable of
understanding concepts in math and science.
For audio, click on icon
14. Key points and students
No one source can tell us about an event; historians
use multiple sources preferably from different
perspectives
Historians go back and forth between secondary and
primary sources and review dozens of sources before
reaching any, even tentative, conclusions
For audio, click on icon
15. Using sources in class:
A) explain to students what they are doing and what
they are not doing (how what they are doing differs
from an in-depth historical inquiry)
B) provide necessary background or context in some
form (lecture, reading assigned as homework, brief
excerpt reviewed in class)
C) use secondary and primary sources and choose
carefully (some sources are more “exciting” but less
relevant to the topic
For audio, click on icon
16. Sources that are difficult for students to classify:
Works with a narrative and primary sources located
in the back of the book
Sources that include statistics, quotes, and extensive
information from primary sources
Sources that provide an introduction or context
before letters, interviews, or excerpts from memoirs
For audio, click on icon
17. Other Issues
Archival Sources:
Often in classroom exercises only one or two sources
from a much larger number of relevant works are
used and this is problematic.
Also, truly understanding the context of such sources
requires in-depth research to use them effectively.
For audio, click on icon
18. Other Issues:
Stephen Ambrose is a prominent U.S. historian who
claimed to have interviewed Eisenhower for hundreds of
hours and whose many works influenced scholarship on
Eisenhower and key issues. Recently archivists and
historians have uncovered evidence that seem to indicate
he falsified information and only interviewed Eisenhower
for about five hours total.
“Ambrose on Eisenhower: The Impact of a Single Faulty
Quotation” by Ira Chernus. Link to this article:
http://www.hnn.us/articles/126636.html
For audio, click on icon
19. History Day Theme:
Debate and Diplomacy in History
Incredible opportunity for students to do research using
foreign diplomatic papers.
Students can use Documents on British foreign policy or on
U.S. foreign policy
However, students can also use volumes (translated into
English) containing documents on German Foreign Policy,
Austrian Foreign policy, Soviet Foreign Policy; all available at
Henry Madden Library on the Fresno State campus.
Students will have access to a far broader range of primary
sources for a vast number of topics for History Day this year.
For audio, click on icon
20. History Day Projects & Classifying Sources
In addition to the usual rules distinguishing primary
and secondary, there are two additional points:
Volumes of documents on Foreign Policy should be listed as
primary sources, even if there is some background information
or commentary.
If a student is using only the background information or
commentary in a volume that has primary sources, than the
source would be classified as secondary for the purposes of
their paper.
For audio, click on icon
21. Volumes of Primary Source Documents
If a student is using both commentary and/or
background information and using primary sources
contained in one book or volume than they should
indicate this in the first footnote (after citing the
source in correct Turabian format) and state that all
subsequent footnotes will indicate whether the
information being cited is primary or secondary in
parentheses at the end of the citation.
For audio, click on icon
Notes de l'éditeur
First example is secondary and primary obviously, unless you are only using one primary source in the appendices because you cannot get access to that source in any other way and then it is only primary and the Turabian citation would list the author of the document and the title of the document in quotes first and then indicate that it was in another source. An example of this kind of citation would be as follows: Franz Joseph, “Austrian Manifesto of War”, in John Breuilly, Austria, Prussia and Germany 1806-1871 (Pearson Education: New York, 2002) 164. The second is secondary but students often get confused if there are a lot of quotes or statistics and want to identify the source as primary even though the author is writing the account much later and as a narrative of events using primary sources to support his thesis. The third example is a bit more confusing as not all historians agree but the following general rule would be accepted by most historians and academics and is good to give to students as a guide as long as you emphasize that for these kind of sources one must decide on a case by case basis there is no absolute rule that covers all instances. The general rule is as follows: If there is only an introduction and background information consisting of one paragraph or less before each document than the source is considered primary; if there is commentary or extensive background and other information or if it is interviews with eyewitnesses written as a narrative with no indication of what questions were asked and no way to tell what was stated by the person being interviewed and what is being paraphrased or added by the interviewer than it is considered secondary. If you are only using an excerpt from a source included in this kind of work and ignore the commentary or background than it would also be primary and the citation would follow the example I gave for the first example on this slide.
In regard to using only one or two documents, imagine the daily reports written and sent to headquarters by the 15 th Panzer Division (German) deployed in North Africa during WWII. You could select a few daily reports that described British attacks and heavy fighting and students reading these sources might conclude there was constant fighting in N. Africa but in fact there were long periods in which very little happened. It would be necessary to stress that these reports are not typical and do not demonstrate a pattern but are being used because they contain information on specific attacks or battles that the instructor wants the students to know more about. Although most archive sources can be traced to their origin and we often know the author, no other context is provided and so extensive research and reading are necessary to be able to really work effectively with these documents. For individuals who cannot do such research the alternative is to read academic works that provide context and sometimes discuss specific documents in footnotes or in the text of the work. It is not just a matter of the meaning of words or the intent of the author; it is a matter of identifying every factor and influence that might have effected the content.
