History Matters: An Online History Reference Tool Worth Checking Out

History Matters - From classroom lessons to primary sources, from forums with historians to puzzles, this site is a highly regarded reference tool for educators and students. For History Day students, the "Many Pasts" and "Making Sense of Evidence" areas alone make it worth a visit.

"Many Pasts" contains more than 1,000 primary source image, print, and audio documents, screened by historians and complete with annotations, that focus on ordinary Americans through time. It's searchable by topic area, keyword or collection.

"Making Sense of Evidence" helps students and teachers make effective use of primary sources. “Making Sense of Documents” provide strategies for analyzing online primary materials, with interactive exercises and a guide to traditional and online sources. “Scholars in Action” segments show how scholars puzzle out the meaning of different kinds of primary sources, allowing you to try to make sense of a document yourself, then providing audio clips in which leading scholars interpret the document and discuss strategies for overall analysis.

In "Talking History," you can hear prominent historians on a variety of topics, including Richard White on the American West and Alan Brinkley on the Great Depression and the New Deal.

To get a good overview of the many resources this site offers, click "more about this site" on the home page. The site was developed by the American Social History Project/Center for Media & Learning, City University of New York, and the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.

Websites We Like: May 4 Collection

From The Scout Report: May 4 Collection - The shock, anger, and sadness that the world felt when four students were killed by the National Guard during a 1970 war protest on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio will hopefully never be repeated. For researchers, students, faculty, staff, and members of the community, the memories of that tragedy, both written and recorded, have been compiled by the Department of Special Collections and Archives of Kent State University. The May 4 Collection has its own website, which is comprised of such links as a table of "Contents", "Index", "Exhibits/Chronologies", "Oral History Project", and "History Day Help". The "May 4 Collection Contents" reveals that there are 211 boxes of papers, records, newspaper articles, photographs, radio recordings, and comic strips that constitute the May 4 Collection. The "Oral History Project" link explains the ongoing project of recording "first-person narratives and personal reactions to the events of May 4, 1970." It aims to record narratives of all viewpoints of those "whose lives were affected by these historical events."

Thesis Statements: Like Vaccines, Necessary but Sometimes Painful

You're probably getting your research into shape about now. After spending weeks buried in libraries, archives, universities, museums, and online resources, chances are you have a pretty solid idea about what your project is going to look like. Maybe you've even picked the color theme for your board. While deciding turquoise vs. teal is fun, don't skimp on the core of your project: the thesis statement.

The thesis holds everything together. In one or two sentences, it tells the audience what you researched about your topic, what you found out, and why it matters. This is a tall order for a couple of sentences, yet the thesis really is the glue that keeps the project focused, narrow and logical. It's your central argument, and it's supported by your research. Everything in your project--everything!--should relate directly to your thesis. If it doesn't, pitch it.

The part of the thesis that is often most difficult to express is what I call the "so what?" question. It's where you make the case for the significance of your research. Why should the audience care about this? Why does it matter? Yet, when you answer that question, you've done what historians strive to do every day: make history relevant, and show how it impacts our contemporary lives.

Check out good blog entries on thesis statements from our friends at Minnesota History Day and New York State History Day. Tobi in New York refers to the Harvard Writing Center's guide to writing a thesis, and that's a good site. Don't rely on online thesis builders to do this work for you. Like wikipedia, they might help you narrow your focus a little bit, but you stand a good chance of ending up with a nonsensical or illogical thesis statement. (I'm not saying don't use them, just approach with caution.) This particular task takes some serious brain work. Good luck!

Citations, Bibliographies and Styles: Oh My!

History Day accepts two styles for citations and bibliographies, usually referred to as Turabian and MLA.

The first of these, created by Kate L. Turabian, is typically considered a style geared for college students and can be used with all subjects. The book is A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. Turabian says the list of sources at the end of your project should properly be called the "Selected Bibliography."

The second is Modern Language Association, and the book is MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. MLA calls your source list "Works Cited."

Any way you slice it, you have to choose one of these styles and stick with it. It gets a little stickier, though, when you are choosing which edition of the style guide to use. MLA is in its seventh edition; Turabian is in its eighth. MLA in particular contains big changes from previous versions.

Does this mean you have to run right out and buy the most recent edition? No. But you do have to be consistent throughout. Avoid using the rules for online sources from the fifth edition and the rules for books from the seventh, for example. And yes, I know that the NHD Rule Book indicates the fifth edition of the MLA Handbook, but students can use any edition from the fifth forward (don't go backward, please, and start with the third--it's too out of date).

So you're looking for consistency at two levels: the style you choose, and the edition of the style guide.

So what's different in the most recent edition? In MLA's 7th edition, URLs are no longer required for citations of web sources. Further, after each citation you must indicate what type of sources it is by placing the medium of publication at the end of the citation; e.g., "Print," "Web," "Film," and so on. Check out Purdue's Online Writing Lab for a good overview of the changes in the 7th edition.

We'll work with judges to make sure they know about these changes and don't erroneously penalize a project. We encourage judges to focus on the quality of the sources and internal consistency within the bibliography.

And students can choose Turabian instead--historians tend to prefer it, I hear. And you can always ask us for some help, too. Good luck!

Primary and Secondary Sources--and how to tell them apart without ripping out your hair

One of the most challenging aspects of a History Day project is distinguishing between primary and secondary sources. The temptation is to look for a hard-and-fast rule: all newspapers articles are primary, all books are secondary. But what's that old saw? Rules are made to be broken. In the case of deciding what's primary and what's secondary, the most important rule is not about the type of source: It's that students have to contextualize the source, decide if it's primary or secondary, and be prepared to defend their decisions.

So let's review the definitions of primary and secondary sources provided in the NHD Rule Book. A primary source is "that which is written or produced in the time period students are investigating. ...materials directly related to a topic by time or participation." Examples given include diaries, oral histories, photographs, and the like. A secondary source is "usually published books or articles by authors who were not eyewitnesses or participants in the historical event or period..." Secondary sources are interpretations of primary sources.

Sounds easy, right? But let's take autobiographies as an example. On the surface, it seems obvious that autobiographies are a primary source. But what if it's clear from the dust jacket that the actual author is the co-writer credited right under the subject's name? After all, many well-known people use co-writers and instead of doing the writing themselves, record or talk through their memories with the co-writer, who then processes the material into an autobiography. Even if the subject writes his or her own autobiography, it could be 20 or 30 years after the events described. Memory fades and changes. Is the account trustworthy? What's a researcher to do?

First, remember that sources are themselves historical artifacts, bounded by place and time. They need to be considered within their context. Newspaper articles, for example, are often cited as primary sources. But students should keep in mind that a reporter was in a particular place, with a particular agenda, when that story was filed. Are there other points of view that should be considered as well?

Second, keep in mind that the task of the historian is to interpret the source--and to be able to justify that interpretation (that's what the annotation and judge interview are for). And if students learn that no one source contains historical truth, that's an enormous achievement.

Third, consider sources as a pool of information. If the historian's job is to synthesize, then analyze that information, it's tempting to just keep adding sources. After all, there is almost always another source out there. (This, by the way, is how doctoral dissertations never get finished.) But at some point, the researcher has to stop gathering sources and information, and turn to analysis and interpretation. This is when annotation really helps. How did you use this source? Why was it useful? What did you learn? Answering those questions should help students classify sources into primary and secondary--and it should also make clear where gaps in the research exist.

Fourth, be proactive about classification decisions. If a student lists an autobiography under secondary sources, he or she must explain that decision, both in the annotation and in the judge interview. If the judges don't bring it up, the student should. Because of the necessarily short time allowed for evaluation, judges sometimes wait to really dig into the bibliography until after judging ends. So if the student raises the issue first, it won't be an issue later--when the student is unable to defend the choice.

Several websites offer good explanations of primary and secondary sources. Purdue's Online Writing Lab (OWL) has a nice essay. So does Princeton, the University of California-Santa Cruz (whose essay looks at how to evaluate sources), and Ithaca College, which features a handy table comparing similar sources.

Really, though, a Google search of "primary vs. secondary sources" will get you a lot of helpful information and insight. And, of course, the History Day staff is happy to answer your primary/secondary source questions, too. Good luck!