This week we'll focus on using newspapers and magazines as primary sources. This can be a little tricky because newspapers and magazines can be used as primary or secondary sources. Newspapers and magazines are primary sources when they offer first person accounts of contemporary events (e.g., a reporter provides an eyewitness account of action in a war zone, of a community responding to a flood, of a sporting event, etc.). Newspapers and magazines are secondary sources when the reporter analyzes material that they have gathered or researched (e.g., interviews, documents, statistics, etc.). Of course, many newspaper or magazine articles mix first-person accounts with background research so the question of primary/secondary source will depend on how you are using the article. Scholars will sometimes analyze a set of articles about a given event or person to see what types of themes emerge (as in the Espiritu this week). So Espiritu is using these newspaper articles as primary sources to make an argument about the ways in which the Vietnam war is remembered. Finally, scholars also look to newspapers and magazines that are outside of the mainstream to better understand different communities, cultures, and practices (as in the Herring article this week).
Here are some places to look for sources this week:
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (500+ newspapers from 1836-1922)
Newspapers available electronically through our library's website (Early American Newspapers, Af-Am 19th Century newspapers, NY Times, LA Times, LA Sentinel, Chicago Defender, Times of London others)
Queer Zine Archive Project
Readers Guide Retrospective (click through link from library page). Readers Guide is the place to go to find citations for articles in magazines. Generally, you won't be able to access the full text so you'll still need to track down the magazine, either at the library or through illiad.
Finally, here is one example of a scholar talking about working with newspapers as evidence.
No comments:
Post a Comment