How to Read a Secondary Source Reading secondary historical sources is a skill which may be acquired and must be practiced. The key is to think about the material being presented and to connect it to other material you have covered. To evaluate secondary sources, explore the following parts of the text or artifact by following these steps: 1. Structure: First read and think about the title -- what does it promise for the book or article? Then, if you have a book in hand, look at the table of contents: this is the "menu" that reveals the structure of the work. You can use this as your outline for your notes or create your own brief outline. 2. Thesis: Always read a secondary source from the outside in: read a book's foreword and introduction (or the article's first paragraph or two); then read the conclusion or epilogue. Ask yourself what the author's thesis might be and check it against your outline to see how the argument has been structured. 3. Argument: Continue to read the source from the outside in. For a book, quickly read the first and last paragraph of each chapter to get a good idea of the themes and arguments. Then skim through the chapters, taking cues as to which paragraphs are most important from their topic sentences. It is up to you to judge which passages are more important based on what you know so far about the book's themes and arguments. Highlight passages that seem to be especially relevant by placing them on notecards or making margin notes. Your notations should include your reactions to those passages: is it a good piece of evidence for the author's argument or is a particular statement valid or credible? The idea here is to evaluate the logic of the argument and the base of resources on which the author relies. 4. Resources: Read the footnotes! They are the nuts and bolts of history writing. When you come across a particularly interesting or controversial passage, watch to see what is cited. What primary sources has the historian used? Have they been used effectively? Are her sources credible or reliable? How does the use of the sources influence the kinds of arguments made? What other sources might have been used? 5. Motives: Why did the author write the book? Find out who the author is/was and the context in which she or he wrote the book. What political and cultural institutions or events might have had an impact on the author's reason for writing this source? What ongoing historiographical discussion (e.g., a hot topic at a history conference, in a journal or listserv) do you think this source is contributing to? Understanding the ways historians construct their arguments is essential to writing good history papers. Secondary sources, including your own research paper, are constructed for various reasons, including the following: No one has begun to analyze a particular issue, and so the author is developing a first interpretation of it. Gaps or deficiences in the scholarship in a particular topic created a need for a monograph to help close them. A popular or commonplace interpretation of an issue begs for a more accurate interpretation with which to debunk it. Existing scholarship of a topic is too simplistic, and an author might add complexity by examining and evaluating particular details. Debate on a particular topic might foster yet another perspective which will demonstrate that one side is more persuasive than another. Debate on a topic must be recast because the participants are asking the wrong questions or viewing the issue in an inappropriate way. A case study of a general historical argument or principle about a topic could provide reinforcements for that principle, require modifications of it, or negate it entirely. A test case of a broad interpretation of a large or complex topic would entail a study of one portion of that larger argument. The results of that test case may reinforce the broad interpretation, require its modification, or negate it entirely.
