Primary Sources
One of my favorite courses to teach is my department’s class on historical methods. For a final assignment in the course, students have to create a bibliography of sources that could support the writing of an upper-level seminar paper, and annotate several of the entries. My students often ask how many primary sources is enough, and they’re never very satisfied by my honest answer of “it depends.” I started thinking about this from their perspective. Surely there’s a threshold historians…