How to Read a Primary Source

Evaluation

Good reading requires about asking questions of your sources. Keep the following in mind when reading primary sources. Even if you believe you can't arrive at the answers, imagining possible answers will aid your comprehension. Reading primary sources also requires that you use your historical imagination. This process is all about your willingness and ability to ask questions of the material, imagine possible answers, and explain your reasoning . To evaluate primary source texts, your might follow the MAPER approach to guide your assessment. MAPER means:


Motives and goals of the author
Argument and strategy author used to achieve those goals
Presuppositions and values (in the text, and our own)
Epistemology (evaluating truth content)
Relate to other texts (compare and contrast)


Motives

Who was the author and what was her or his place in society (explain why you are justified in thinking so)? What could or might it be, based on the text, and why?

What was at stake for the author in this text? Why do you think she or he wrote it? What evidence in the text tells you this?

Did the author have a thesis? What - in one sentence - was that thesis?


Argument

How did the author of the text make his or her case? What was the strategy for accomplishing its goal? How did the author carry out this strategy?

Who was the intended audience of the text? How might this have influenced its rhetorical strategy? Cite specific examples

What arguments or concerns did the author respond to that were not clearly stated? Provide at least one example of a point at which the author seemed to be refuting a position never clearly stated. Explain what you think this position may be in detail, and why you think it.

Do you think the author was credible and reliable? Use at least one specific example to explain why. Make sure to explain the principle of rhetoric or logic that makes this passage credible.


Presuppositions

How do the ideas and values in the source differ from the ideas and values of our age? Offer two specific examples.

What presumptions and preconceptions do we as readers bring to bear on this text? For instance, what portions of the text might we find objectionable, but which contemporaries might have found acceptable. State the values we hold on that subject, and the values expressed in the text. Cite at least one specific example.

How might the difference between our values and the values of the author influence the way we understand the text? Explain how such a difference in values might lead us to mis-interpret the text, or understand it in a way contemporaries would not have. Offer at least one specific example.


Epistemology

How might this text support one of the arguments found in secondary sources we have read? Choose a paragraph anywhere in a secondary source we have read, state where this text might be an appropriate footnote (cite page and paragraph), and explain why.

What kinds of information does this text reveal that it does not seemed concerned with revealing? (In other words, what does it tell us without knowing it's telling us?)

Offer one claim from the text which is the author's interpretation. Now offer one example of a historical "fact" (something that is absolutely indisputable) that we can learn from this text (this need not be the author's words).


Relate: Now choose another of the readings, and compare the two, answering these questions:

What patterns or ideas are repeated throughout the readings?

What major differences appear in them?

Which do you find more reliable and credible?

Permissions and acknowledgement

Patrick Rael,Reading, Writing, and Researching for History: A Guide for College Students. (Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College, August 2000).