1. Students will learn about archives & special collections and their role in our society's collective memory
2. Students will learn about (and engage with) primary and secondary sources in history research.
3. Students will learn about history scholarship and how to use it in their own research.
Primary sources might be impactful, but if we don't know anything about the source, then does it lose value? Let's play a game! With no meta data, can we guess who is in the following images?
Who is this handsome fella (with amazing hair!)?
Why aren't these worth any money!? They're really old!
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University of Washington Civil Rights & Labor History Consortium. “Antiwar GI Newspapers.” Antiwar and Radical History Project, http://depts.washington.edu/labpics/zenPhoto/antiwar/gipaper/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2020. (below)
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My Dad had old photo albums of black & white photos with titles neatly written in pencil on the black paper (it was hard to read). But we would sit and he would say, "oh, that's your grandpa; in this picture he is on a ship headed to France for the first world war!" With millions of millions of bits of history, how do scholars and archives decide what gets researched or preserved in a library? [remember the 2 big questions: What exists? What matters?]
First-Hand Accounts
(Primary Sources)
Primary sources are those bits and pieces made up of photographs, diaries, oral histories, interviews, unpublished manuscripts, letters and so on. Many of these collections are housed in libraries around the world and are waiting for that context, or to be joined with other stories and important narratives that communities share in their collective identity.
Marriott Library Digital Items (from ours and other Utah collections)
The Digital Public Library of America dp.la
ArchiveGrid
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Flickr Commons
Statewide Portals
California (online archive)
Utah Div. of State History
Oregon Historical Archives
Others...
National Archives Samples:
National Library of Korea
National Library of Chile
google searches (put in your own keywords):
oral history:immigrant greece
oral history:immigrant guatemala
diary:women vote
diary:evolution
Scholarship & News & Stories (Secondary Sources)
Secondary sources are stories that interpret the first-hand accounts and often include multiple persons and their points-of-view. Scholarship in history is very picky about what and who they use as sources and often build arguments like court cases, citing many points of evidence ranging from interviews, other articles, government documents -as well as the first-hand accounts listed above.
Print Books & Ebooks in the library catalog [sample book search for history of women & equity in the 1800s]
America: History & Life
JSTOR (go to 'history' subject in adv. srch)
Historical Newspapers (this one sometimes appears in the primary source list)
Utah Digital Newspapers
New York Times Historical Newspaper (from 1851 onwards!)
The Pittsburg Courier (prominent African-American newspaper from 1911-2002)
QUIZ!
Is this a primary source -or a secondary source?
