Introduction
This week, we are taking a break from our examination of early American history to take a look at research. Some of you have asked me about how to find the primary sources I often cite and include with posts, and others have expressed interest in having a list. Unfortunately, it is impossible to compile an exhaustive list of the sources, and some of them are print copies that I cannot link to since I did not find them as ebooks or online resources. This post is for those who have asked those questions. My hope is that, through sharing some of my own experience and the tips and tricks I have found useful for research, you will be enabled to uncover the answers to your own questions regarding history.
Why Primary Sources?
Before we dig into the details of researching primary sources, we should start with the question that may be on some beginners’ minds. Why primary sources? If I could more easily go to the library and find a few reliable secondary sources to read about my topic, why would I use the primary sources? What’s the point?
Those are good questions. When I first began my own journey in researching, I admit, to my chagrin, that I did not ask these questions. I simply relied on secondary sources that I had heard or found to be reputable. The problem was that they were only quoting portions of the primary sources or, worse yet, quoting some other secondary source’s discussion of some portion of the primary source. This meant that context was often missing, either intentionally or through the sheer challenge of trying to condense massive amounts of information from primary sources into a compact format for the secondary source. Additionally, I discovered that it was difficult to know if a secondary source was reliable when you hadn’t read the primary sources for yourself. While it would be nice to believe historians are all an honest lot, the unfortunate reality is that, in a world where politics has so thoroughly suffused the academic field and research—particularly in American history—much of the popular narrative simply does not match the narrative in the primary sources.
These struggles eventually drove me to the primary sources for answers. I have never regretted the shift in focus. The primary sources are often more vibrant, more personal, and truer to the reality of history and mankind’s nature than the history textbooks or secondary sources I was reading before. I began to realize there was much more to the story than I ever could have realized from just reading secondary source after secondary source, even when the source was reliable. Someone had to decide what material went into those secondary sources, and in deciding that, things would be left out. Some of those things might be little known facts and stories that I found thoroughly intriguing, telling, and entertaining. This is why every earnest student of history should be looking to the primary sources first and then using the secondary sources as supplementary material to aid in understanding where a primary source might be difficult to understand on its own or further knowledge beyond what you have is necessary to grasp its full intent.
Knowing What to Research in the Primary Source Record
The first practical step in beginning research is figuring out what to research. A topic like American history is far too broad to be managed as is. How do you know what you need to find? What is it you are trying to learn to begin with? Even narrowing it down to early American history or, further, to a specific historical figure still leaves the researcher with far too much information to sift through all at once.
My own experience has been that the best place to start is by defining your question. Begin by figuring out what it is you want to know, and then let that inform what you need to research. Let us take, for example, the research question I presented earlier: how did Communism influence America? Now that question is still a bit broad, as I was to discover, since it led to many other smaller questions such as how did it influence our schools? Or when did it get into the schools and why focus on that? These smaller questions give me starting points to begin my research. If I wanted to focus on how it influenced our schools, I would start by figuring out which well-known, influential Communists within the US targeted the schools. Then, once I had that, I could look for their writings and from there begin to uncover how they did it, why they did it, and what the far-reaching impacts were. I might then come across pieces like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History, and then I might examine not only that piece but what Zinn said about why he wrote it, what his agenda was, and how he hoped it would be used. I could also look at the methods and vehicles by which pieces like Zinn’s entered mainstream education.
Finding Primary Sources
Once you have figured out what to research, your next step is finding sources. While it is easy enough to take a trip to your local library for secondary sources, primary sources—particularly more obscure ones—are not always so easy to find. Sometimes you may find copies of them at the library or, if you are in school, at your school or university library. From there, broaden your search out to the internet. Many of the primary sources I have found came from small foundations that work to preserve digital formats of the source material for researchers like us who will want to access them. I have found many, many things simply by doing a Google search for the sources.
Searching the web takes a lot of time and ingenuity. Anyone, with enough time, effort, and practice, can do it, but it does require diligence and thought. In Elizabeth Yakel’s essay “Searching and Seeking in the Deep Web,” she says that “searching is both an art and a science. It requires planning, patience, and persistence to achieve the desired results and to ensure that a comprehensive search has been done to locate primary sources or to fully discount their existence” (Working in the Archives, p. 113). Be prepared to spend at least a few hours on a narrow topic searching for and skimming through primary sources on the web. When I write my articles on various individuals or events from American history, it usually takes me at least an hour or two of searching through both the web and my own personal collection to make sure I have gleaned everything I need to read. Much of the time researchers spend on an internet search for primary sources is spent trying synonyms, stringing together search terms, and using surface level secondary sources with well-documented primary source references to look for specific sources that may be of interest. You will also need more than a simple search on Google’s search engine to find everything in many cases. Static or fixed pages may not be as easy to find, though I have found that more for internet archives are showing up these days, even within a Google search. Nevertheless, visiting some of the better-known archive sites like the OCLC WorldCat database may help you to identify what to look for or find sites that wouldn’t otherwise show in a Google search.
Credibility and Appropriateness of Primary Sources
In most cases, when using primary sources, you will want to focus first on the ones that you already know are credible. But when you are doing research into a more obscure area of history, how do you know what is credible or appropriate? That depends largely on the source. Obviously, if the individual who wrote it is mentioned to be a reprobate liar by other more reputable sources, it is not one that would likely be considered credible, though it could be appropriate depending on the project. In some cases, a source may be credible and appropriate in one case and terribly inappropriate and not credible in another. Take the example we used earlier. If I want to know why Howard Zinn wrote A People’s History, then Howard Zinn’s own words on the topic are both credible and appropriate. He was the one who wrote it, and he knew why he wrote it, so it is to his words we would want to look. However, if I wanted an accurate understanding of why Christopher Columbus set out on his journey from Spain, I would not look to Zinn for a few reasons. First, he is not, in this case, a primary source. This does not necessarily make him not credible or appropriate, but as mentioned earlier, it does mean I need to evaluate the primary source myself to make sure that Zinn is in fact using the primary source reliably, accurately, and honestly. Columbus’s own diaries would be a much better place to begin. And in the case of Zinn, it turns out that he does not quote Columbus’s journals honestly, often leaving out a majority of the context necessary to really understand Columbus and his motivations. This makes Zinn neither a credible nor an appropriate source for such a project. So you can see from this example that in one scenario, Zinn is credible and appropriate while in the other he is most certainly not. Much of figuring out if the source is credible and appropriate begins by considering the context of the project, the credibility of the individual who has written the source, and the material in the source itself.
Incorporating Primary Sources
Finally, we come to incorporating your sources. With primary sources, you may not always have all of the information normally required by citation and referencing standards. In some cases, when I have had to cite sources, I have had citations that only had a bare minimum of information such as the author, the title of the work, and when and where I located it. For historical research, you can and should refer to either Turabian or Chicago Style field manuals for advice on citations and references in general.
The key thing to remember when incorporating sources is honesty and context. Your goal in handling the primary sources should be to ensure that when you quote them, you do so with as much accuracy, context, and completeness as you can. Read sources carefully to ensure that you are not warping their meaning to fit preconceived notions of the text. Be willing to allow the sources to reinform your view, even if that means you come away with a more negative outlook on the topic than you may have begun with. Idealism and removal of nuance from history helps no one. Much of the reason we study the past is to learn what mistakes were made and why. We can’t learn that if we gloss over troubling or difficult parts and ignore pieces that do not fit into whatever narrative we would like history to tell, good or bad. Come at this portion of your project with a mind to share whatever it is you have found, to answer the question you started with for other people in a meaningful and honest way, and to provide others with the necessary tools to use the same sources you did as a launching point for their own research, if they would like.
Resources
In closing, I want to provide you with some resources you can use to further enhance your understanding of primary source research. First and foremost, I highly recommend Working in the Archives, which was edited by Alexis E. Ramsey, Wendy B. Sharer, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Lisa S. Mastrangelo. This is one of the textbooks for my research class, and the personal essays cover a variety of different primary source research methods in addition to other types of research. I’ve found the book intriguing and an enjoyable read, and I’ve learned a great deal about research from it that I have already incorporated into my own methods of research. Secondly, some of the articles in Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s book Central Works in Technical Communication may also prove of use regarding how to use sources, the importance of research, and methods for presenting it. This particular textbook is much drier, and it does focus mainly on technical communication, but some of the essays have proven useful to understanding how to present research once it is done. Finally, for those doing historical research, Purdue Owl’s guide on Chicago Style or this quick guide on Turabian from GMU will also prove indispensable for any academic presentations of materials you may use or discover in your own research. For the research process itself, I would the OCLC WorldCat database or the Library of Congress (particularly if you’re looking for American primary source documents).
Works Cited
Yakel, Elizabeth. 2010. Review of Searching and Seeking in the Deep Web: Primary Sources on the Internet. In Working in the Archives, edited by Alexis Ramsey, Wendy Sharer, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Lisa Mastrangelo, 102–18. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.