How to find and read secondary sources

A good secondary source:

• Is written by an authority in the field
• Is published by a credible press that is often, though not always, associated with a university
• Contains an argument, specific points the author wants to make, and evidence with which the author makes that argument.

Choosing the best sources for your work – strategies that will make your work more efficiently:

• Start with the most recent work(s) on your topic.  Remember that history is a “living” field, and the name of the game is to produce works that revise older scholarship with newer evidence and interpretations.  Therefore, the newest books will (hopefully) be the most innovative and sophisticated treatments of the topic. 
• These more recent works will also give you the best references to other sources, primary and secondary, that could be useful to you – “mine” the works’ footnotes to see what other sources are out there.
• If your source is a monograph or a collection of essays in book form, look for reviews of it in the major historical journals (ie. William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of American History, Historical Journal, etc.)  Note that, under normal circumstances, reviews are published one to two years after the book is published. For more recent works, you can search the H-Net lists online http://www.h-net.msu.edu/
• If your source is an article published in one of the major historical journals, then you can be relatively confident that the scholarship and sources are credible.

How to read an historical monograph or essay/article:

The main questions you should ask of any work are:

1. Are the author’s goals significant and adequately formulated?
2. How well does the author achieve his/her goals? Do they prove their thesis?

Scholarly works follow certain conventions in organization and format.  If you pay attention to these conventions, it will help you to understand and evaluate the author’s argument.

Cover and Title Page:  Believe it or not, these pages can tell you a lot about the book.  Cover art, blurbs on the back, and author information can be very informative.  On the other hand, remember that these elements are designed to help sell the book. So, they might also be a source of disappointment.

Make sure you examine and take notes on the title page.  This is where you’ll find the information you’ll need for your bibliography and citation notes.  The copyright page also contains a wealth of information – for example, was the book printed several times? When was it first printed? This information will help you to understand the perspective of the author.  If it was first published in the 1940s, for example, the cultural perspective of the author would be very different from our own.  If it is brand new, then this work could be particularly valuable as part of the “cutting edge” historiography for your topic – and, its footnotes would be a rich resource for further reading on your topic. 

After the 1970s, the book’s title page usually included the Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.  This information is valuable, because you can check how the book is categorized by subject, author, and title.  If you want to find books on similar subjects, this information could be helpful in your search. 

Introduction and Acknowledgments:

Normally, this is a part that undergraduates skip.  But again, this section can be exceedingly valuable.  In this section, the author usually explains how they became interested in the topic, why they wrote the book, what questions they will address, and how their work fits in with other works on the topic. This section is a nice way of getting examples of historiographical discussions, because there is usually a section that addresses what other historians have said – and what they have not said – on that particular topic.  They author will sometimes survey a body of historical literature, point out its defects, and then say how the book at hand will try to answer these defects.  This is precisely how the historiography section of your senior thesis should be laid out. 

In most good introductions the author presents a general thesis for their work, and tells the reader what questions/issues they will address.  If you read the intro first, it may save you time – perhaps their topic or argument has very little, if anything to do with your topic.  You can put the book back on the shelf.  Or, maybe their argument is right up your alley, in which case you’ll want to read more.

Other important things to consider about the front matter of a book:

• Check out the title of the book – does it accurately convey the author’s message? Does it give clues about the author’s approach or argument?
• Check out the table of contents – how is the book arranged? Will the entire book be of help to you, or should you concentrate on just a couple of chapters? (If the latter is the case, I suggest that you still read the Introduction and first chapter, and probably the final chapter as well. The final chapter often has summary information that could be helpful in determining the author’s general conclusions.

The body of the book:

Read the body of the book keeping in mind this overarching question: does the author achieve the goals they set out in their introduction?

• Read each chapter as a distinct unit.  Read the footnotes/endnotes.  They are a critical part of scholarly books and contain much useful information. 
• After each chapter, ask yourself what the author argued in that particular chapter; what sources did they use to support their argument?
• A piece of advice that is often hard to follow: Don’t take any notes until you finish the chapter. Go back and briefly summarize the author’s argument and use of sources after you complete each chapter. That will save time and give you a more complete picture of the building blocks in the author’s argument.

Forming an Opinion:

After you have read the conclusion, go over your notes and consider the following questions:

• Does the author’s evidence support his/her final conclusions?  Do they draw conclusions for which there is little or no evidence?
• Is the argument logically consistent?
• Did they leave anything out?  Did they ignore evidence that obviously pointed away from their conclusion?
• What sources did the author use? Were the sources adequate (in quality and number)? Did the author correctly interpret the sources?
• Do you detect any biases in the work?

This last question is an important one to keep in mind as you are reading anything – whether it is a newspaper, a magazine article, or an historical work.  No work is entirely objective and value-free.  Every author brings his or her own “cultural baggage” to her/his work.  Therefore, the question isn’t whether a work is biased, but rather how the work is biased.  And, most importantly, whether the author’s bias distorts his or her evaluation of the evidence and his/her conclusions.  Has their point of view seriously limited their research?  Has it blinded the author to other plausible interpretations of the evidence?  Sometimes, even if you find their work useful and the research on which the work is based solid and stimulating, you might disagree with the author’s conclusions because of their point of view.  This happens frequently in historical debate. 

Here are a few questions you can ask to help you determine the author’s perspective:

• Which historical forces does the historian stress? Are they “political,” “social,” “economic,” “cultural,” or “intellectual” historians? 
• How would concentration on data from one or two of the above categories affect the author’s treatment of the topic?

When you are conducting research for your own papers, you may want to get a little more in-depth information from at least some of the books you read.  Here are a few tips to help you extract necessary information:

• Keep a journal of the items you have reviewed.  You will not remember all of the data you have seen, so this documentation will be important. 
• Write down all titles and bibliographic information of all works you review, preferably on notecards.  This system is great, because you can sort the note cards by topic or title, for example.  Make a note on the card as to the usefulness of the work, and why/how the work will be useful.
• Keep a running/working bibliography of these materials going in your computer. This practice will save time when you write your historiographical and research papers over the next several months.
• Important note: remember that you’ll probably have to request many of these books from other libraries, either through ABC or through Interlibrary Loan.  So, start early, knowing that you may be waiting anywhere from two days to several weeks for your materials.
• Again, I strongly suggest using index cards or a similar record-keeping process for these searches. 

Remember the importance of objectivity as you conduct your research.  While all authors come to the table with “cultural baggage,” it is important to avoid allowing your “baggage” to blind you to crucial clues in your evidence.  Therefore, start with a broad question and try to find the answer.  Don’t start with an answer or a thesis that you want to prove.  This approach will help to keep you from trying to make the evidence fit your preconceived notions about your topic.

So, What do we do with Web Sources?

There are some really valuable sources on the Internet these days.  Most of the really good web sources are primary documents.  However, there is a growing number of fine historical essays on historical websites as well.  If the essay is written by a trained historian then it should be a fine source.  However, make sure you can answer the “Who is this guy?” question about the website author.  Here are a few things to look for or avoid:

• If the website is sponsored by a university or historical foundation, then chances are the information is credible. The one possible exception to this rule is student papers that are posted on the web. It is acceptable to use these papers for mining footnotes, but use caution when citing them as authoritative sources.  We will discuss this further in class. 
• Avoid at all costs any web pages that have been mounted on free space, or servers that aren’t associated with a scholarly institution.  Remember, anyone can put anything into cyberspace, their ability to light up a webpage gives them no special expertise in history.
• Never, never, never substitute a web essay as a shortcut for reading a book or journal essay.
• When in doubt about the credibility or usefulness of a web source, ask the professor(s)!