Silk Road: Websites

For example, if you want letters from soldiers in WWII, you would type:

correspondence (for letters)

AND

"world war II" OR "World War, 1939-1945" 
(remember to put 2+ word phrases in quotation marks")

• Sources or documents - for general primary sources (examples: medieval sources, civil war documents, papal sources)

• Personal narratives, autobiography or memoir (examples: Pearl Harbor personal narratives, battle of the bulge memoir, autobiography world war II)

• Correspondence or letters (examples: Civil War correspondence, French revolution letters)

• Diary (examples: Civil War diary, woman diary early modern france)

• Interview, oral history or speeches (examples: Cold War interview, Japanese internment oral history, Malcolm X speeches)

• Pamphlet (examples: pamphlet chastity, women rights pamphlet)

• Pictorial works - for photographs or artwork (examples: Vietnam pictorial works)

A primary source can tell you a lot about a specific event, person, or period but they must still be checked for relevance and legitimacy.

Consider what your sources reveal and what they don't. 

• Purpose and motives of the author
  • Why do you think the author wrote this?
  • Who is the author and what might be his/her place in society?
  • What evidence in the source tells you this?
• Argument and strategy used to achieve these goals
  • What kind of case is the author trying to make?
  • Is the author credible? Why?
  • Who was the intended audience at the time this was created? Was it meant to be public or private? If so, whom was it meant for? For example, a letter to from a soldier to a mother or wife might mask the atrocities of war. How might the content differ if he wrote to a father or brother instead?
• Presuppositions and values (both in the text, and our own)
  • What presumptions and preconceptions do you (as a reader) bring to this text? For example, are there parts that you find objectionable, racist, sexist, but readers of that time period might have found acceptable?
  • How might the difference between our modern values and those of the author influence the way you understand the text?
• Epistemology
  • What does this text tell you without outright telling you?
  • How might this text support an argument you've found in a secondary source?
• Relate your source to other texts
  • What patterns/ideas regularly appear throughout your sources?
  • What major differences appear in them?
  • Can these be supported by other primary or secondary sources?