Well written histories develop through dialogue with surviving sources. They are inevitably shaped by what the living care to know – and think they can know – about the past. In this exercise, you will identify and evaluate a substantial primary source related to the history of marriage an America. Ideally, this source will serve as the basis for your final research paper. However, this is graded as a distinct assignment, and you may switch sources or topics if you end-up negatively evaluating the source you choose here.
Please follow the steps below, and note that the written assignment includes three parts: a brief report on your search process, transcription of a few key passages from your primary source, and a longer, more formal essay assessing your source.
- First, remind yourself of the questions you have about the history of marriage. What do you want to learn more about? Review the secondary sources assigned in class to get a sense of the time periods and kinds of sources historians use to address subjects of interest to you. This might require that you read ahead; the footnotes in Nancy Cott's Public Vows and Carole Shammas's History of Household Government contain many useful leads. You can also use your own imagination: remember that primary sources can include diaries, letters, novels, maps, newspapers, various church and government records, music, poems, art, material artifacts, autobiographies, etc. – virtually any document or object that dates from the period you want to study. If you need direction to relevant material, ask the instructor!
- Once you have identified a topic and broad timespan, browse the following linked list of library resources to identify databases that will help you find relevant primary sources. These databases are searchable, electronic collections of historical information. Some of them (like EEBO and ECCO, in which the William Gouge and Samuel Richardson readings were located) will take you directly to digital copies or transcriptions of historical documents. Others will help you locate sources on microfilm or in archives. Library Resources relevant to the History of American Marriage
- Spend a few hours searching for relevant material in at least two different databases. Begin by looking for results across the entire time period covered by the database, and then narrow things down as seems appropriate. Keep a record or your search process, including search terms and the kinds of results different searches produce. Be sure you have a means for keeping track of potentially interesting material as you browse. Sometimes there are "mark records" features are built into the databases, but if you are not careful it is easy to loose track of things on-line. You should use the search process to learn how to work with the databases you selected, to get a sense of the range of material they contain (as well as what is missing), and to single out a primary source that might serve as the basis for a longer research paper.
Your written assignment will have three parts:
Part one should describe the search process, addressing the following questions in 1-2 pages:
- Which databases did you choose and why? Briefly describe the scope and content of each.
- How did you go about searching or browsing? What terms did you use? What produced the best results? Did any produce surprising results or instructive failures?
- When you searched your database across a broad span of time, what patterns did you notice in the results? Were there any time periods or types of material in which your terms appeared with particular frequency? Were there any spans of time or types of writing in which they seemed conspicuously absent?
Part two should be a single page that contains the bibliographic information for your selected primary source, and 2-3 illustrative passages from the source. This part of the paper should contain enough information to allow readers to find your source themselves. Where at all possible, please include a stable URL in version of the assignment that you post to On-Course. You can usually make these links work within On-Course by pasting http://bert.lib.indiana.edu:2048/login?url= in front of the stable URL supplied by the database. Detailed instructions for creating links that work in On-course can be found at http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=3488.
Part three should be a 3 page essay evaluating your primary source. The main objective of your essay will be to identify a historical question that you could address with this source, and your introduction should explain what the source is and how it connects to the issue you are trying to understand. The essay as a whole, however, can be a relatively informal "conversation" with the source, using the following questions as guides:
- Why does this document intrigue me? What questions underlie my interest in this topic?
- What kind of document is it? What is its genre? Try to be specific about this. The broad categories used by database makers are not usually informative enough. For example, “legal documents” could refer to statute books, lawyer’s handbooks, or sensational reports of trials. “Novels” encompasses sentimental, gothic, or didactic fiction, to name a few possibilities. Didactic fiction might be further broken down into many categories: anti-slavery, temperance, evangelical religion, anti-polygamy, and so on.
- When was it written? When was it published? Am I looking at an “original” or a reprint or copy?
- Where was it written? Where was it published?
- Who produced it? (What can you infer from the text? Does a quick search in Google or the Biography and Genealogy Master Index produce relevant results?)
- For what purpose?
- Are there other documents of this type? How does this one compare and connect with them? Do a little creative searching in your database to try to find similar documents.
- Why and how was this document preserved? Did it benefit from being part of a large print run, or was it a one-of-a kind item. Did its survival require a special effort on the part of its owners, past and present? Or did it immediately find a home in a library or archive, which has cared for it ever since?
- What kind of things can this tell me, and what can’t it tell me? How does (or doesn’t) it answer my original questions? What new questions does it generate?
- If I were to write a history based on this document, what questions could I use to define my topic? What other sources might I want to consult?
Follow this linke to see a sample essay (which doubles as a crib-sheet on William Gouge).