Finding Secondary Sources Transcript

So, if you want to use World History Commons to find great secondary sources, there's a couple of different options.Teaching, Methods, and Reviews, all offer different types of secondary sources. Teaching are assignments, there are some syllabi, and the language of this particular, of World History Commons is that long teaching modules have four or more sources and short teaching modules have three or fewer sources. And so long and short teaching module refers to the number of primary sources that are associated with them. And when you click through onto a module in
Teaching, you'll generally see an overview, which provides you with a secondary source explanation of kind of what the module is about. Oftentimes, you will see an essay. The term "essay" refers to secondary source content that was created, most of the time, by a history teacher or faculty member. It can be an actual essay but it can also be a syllabus, it can be a bibliographic review. This is the content, this is the secondary source material generally under "essay." And then you will see primary sources that are associated with that lesson, the bibliography, and the credits. Another place to look for secondary sources on World History Commons is under Methods. Methods is when you are trying to figure out
how to teach type of source, say newspapers, or you're doing music. And here the entry point is the methodology. Like, you're starting with the how to teach this source. And then, say if you go and you look at analyzing
music, which is one of the Methods sections. It will start, it will give you an essay, you'll have your overview, and in particular, these are incredibly useful if you have no idea where to start teaching a particular topic. Many people are great with text but they struggle when they get outside of text. So Methods is a great place to start with new sources, that perhaps aren't in your expertise. Reviews are generally website reviews or source reviews, collection reviews done by history teachers, history faculty, and they will allow you to kind of get a general sense of the usefulness of a particular collection or of a particular website. They're reasonably abbreviated, so in the course of five minutes you'll have a sense of whether or not this is gonna be a useful source for you and that may save you a good bit of time instead of trying to search through fifteen different websites to find out if they're any good. If you just look at a series of reviews, the review collections, and websites, you might get a sense of what might work for your class. And so those are three ways in which I use World History Commons to find secondary sources.