Kyle Handke
MS History Portfolio
Applying the Past: Primary Sources as Tools for Historians
Primary sources provide historians with information created during the time they are studying. These sources offer a better comprehension of the attitudes and reactions of those who experienced the events under examination. Therefore, primary sources are the seed for a historian’s work by laying the foundation for their thesis as well as the argument to support it. Before beginning my MS program, my use of primary sources was rudimentary and was focused more on proving sources existed rather than how they applied to my research. As an MS student, I intend to work in a museum or similar setting where those who view the sources may have little or no knowledge about them. Effectively conveying the information within these primary sources to others will be crucial in a museum.
My first use of primary sources at the graduate level was in HIST 530: Minnesota 1862. During this course, I completed a research paper: “Civic Support: Minnesota Communities and their Involvement in the Civil War”. With this assignment, I began to understand how to use primary sources as a foundation for a topic and then use them to guide my research. Beginning with a search of newspaper articles from the years of the American Civil War, I encountered other sources such as letters and government documents. It was through the exploration of these primary sources that my research was adjusted and modified.
In the case of a museum, it will be important to help the public understand things such as context or relevance as they pertain to the museum’s theme. Thus, it is important to provide a straightforward, but thorough, presentation of primary sources in a form that can be understood without the exactitude of conventional historical research. One such assignment was my Narrated PowerPoint presentation on the influence of primary sources in my research for "Civic Support." During this presentation I explained how primary sources affected my research and why they were relevant. This assignment prepared me for a museum career by challenging me to summarize and communicate the importance of the creation, preservation and relevance of primary sources.
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Another crucial graduate experience involving the use and evaluation of primary sources was HIST 609: U.S. China Relations. Throughout the semester, several sources were examined and vetted for use in my final paper “Cold War Thawing: Richard Nixon’s 1972 China Visit and the Renewing of Sino- American Relations.” Though this paper was structured in a similar fashion to “Civic Support," it required a greater effort to locate sources because of barriers such as language and Cold War era censorship. As a result, this paper was a significantly more challenging use of primary sources and required unique approaches to locate them. Prior to beginning my paper, I completed an annotated bibliography which explains the viability of the primary sources I was able to locate.
Due to limited sources reflecting Chinese perspectives, I was forced to compare what U.S. sources stated with what actually happened. This experience also challenged me to distinguish what was publicly stated by U.S. officials from information that was later declassified or circulated privately. Both of these instances taught me the importance of context with regard to the conditions under which the sources were created. Hence, this required consideration for the strengths and weakness of sources and what other information they could yield. Overcoming and working with these challenges has prepared me for a museum career by compelling me to examine and identify less evident influences on information.
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Finally, my use of primary sources was tested during my internship at the Betsy-Tacy Society. During my internship, I was tasked with creating a document that contained a large collection of Madame Alexander dolls. This document was used by the Betsy-Tacy Society to record information about the dolls such as their dates of production, their current condition and value. Working with the dolls required me to treat them as primary sources and apply the same assessment and evaluation questions in my research as written sources.
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