Primary source assignment
Due Wednesday by 8 PM
A primary source is any historical evidence written or
produced at roughly the time you are researching. For example, if you are writing
a research paper on a trial from the second half of the nineteenth century, an
article written and published in a magazine from 1867 would be a primary
source, a book published in 1889 would be a primary source, and a letter
written in 1905 would be a primary source. A study written in 1998 would not be
a primary source, it would be a secondary source.
The most obvious primary sources are: newspapers, magazines,
diaries, letters, legal materials (including legal
decisions published around the time of the incident). Some of these materials
will be published in books, some will be on line, some
are on microfilm.
For this project, you need to begin to look into primary
sources that are relevant to your research project. There are a number of resources
available to you at UF, this exercise is intended to
introduce them to you.
For this assignment, you need to use the methods described below to
identify two different primary sources that you think will be relevant
to your project. For your assignment, I want you to send me an email in which
you tell me: what two primary sources you identified, why you think they might
be relevant to your paper, and how you found them.
- On
line card catalog: There may be newspapers, diaries, or collections of
letters published about subjects related to your paper. The catalog is the
way to find those, using normal search techniques. You may find materials
on microfilm this way, or materials that are on line, or materials that
are bound as books.
- Newspapers:
To try to find newspaper microfilms from the area you are researching
your best bet is to try to find out the titles of newspapers from that
area and search for their titles directly. If that doesn’t work,
experiment with keyword searches that involve the words
“newspaper” and “the name of the city or town”
your trial takes place in.
- Court
records: We have other old trials on microfilm and on line. You might
want to look at some of them. You can find trials by searching the
catalog for anything containing the word “trial” or you can
try other more specific combinations, like “trial” and
“adultery.”
i.
People doing projects that involve English materials
might want to look through the “Old Baily”
records, which we have on microfilm (we may also have it on line). These are records
of trials.
- Databases:
There are several data bases that might be helpful to you, the list that
follows is not complete:
- Making
of Modern Law: To get to this, go to the library webpage and click on the
link to Database Locator. In the next screen, type in Making. You should
link to Making of Modern Law, which is a collection of old books on legal
principles.
- American
South: To get to this collection, click on the Database Locator again,
and type American South in the next screen. You will get to a database
that collects digital materials on the South from a variety of libraries.
- Library
of Congress: To get to this collection, click on Database Locator and
type in Library of Congress in the next screen. You will get sent to the
Library of Congress collection, which includes primary source materials
about many aspects of American History.
- Using
this same method, you can connect to other databases, including: Early
English Books (on line books from England); North American
Women’s Letters and Diaries (which contains on line editions of
these materials); Proquest Historical
Newspapers (which has the New York Times from 1851 on, and some other
newspapers as well).
- You
may go to the Making America collection at the University of Michigan,
and search this collection which has all sorts of materials. The url is http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/
- You
can use lexis/nexis to find cases from the
state and time you are writing about.
- Another
resource is the reference librarian at the library. Once you have
identified your specific focus, you can go to the reference librarian and
ask him/her if there are any databases or resources that might be
specifically relevant to your project.