"Professor Wyle, I am holding history in my hands!" The Stanford football player, dreading his required research paper, had just discovered the joy of working with primary sources in Stanford Special Collections. As he pored over folders of Black Panther papers and redacted FBI files, the possibilities of his own research blossomed before him.
For 25 years I have been teaching freshman and sophomore writing classes. I have always taught with a focus on using primary sources, first with the help of archivist Elena Danielson, MA '70, PhD '75, in the Hoover Archives and later with Maggie Kimball, '80, former University archivist, in Special Collections. My greatest joy in teaching has come from watching students discover the excitement of working directly with materials like the Hitler Youth training manuals, Jane Stanford's autopsy or Frida Kahlo's lipstick–laden letters to Bertram Wolfe. Images of be-gloved students poring over Nazi propaganda photos or Little Leland's early drawings stay with me as I integrate work with these primary sources into all my writing classes, whose themes range from the rhetoric of propaganda in WWII to Stanford myth and reality to the mythology of the American West.
Hoover Archives specializes in holdings pertaining to 20th- and 21st-century war, revolution and peace, including the Chiang Kai-shek papers, Russian Revolutionary albums, Hitler's dental X-rays, black-and-white psychological warfare documents, and even WWII survival kits from German and American soldiers. Green Library's Special Collections boasts holdings dating from the cuneiform tablets to rare scientific tomes to all of the Stanford family and University papers.
X-RATED: Hoover Archives house a scan of Hitler. (Photo: Toni Gauthier)While students love the excitement of holding the documents in their own hands, one great benefit of working with primary sources is that the research also impacts their sense of themselves as researchers, analysts and contributors to historical records. Jessica Pham, '13, wrote her paper on the propaganda materials and methods used to train Hitler Youth. She writes, "Instead of reading an author's arguments and opinions in a secondary source, I instead had to make my own inferences and analyses while examining primary sources. . . . There was no other person's argument attached to the propaganda poster that targeted youth; . . . I myself had to analyze the artistic creations and see which aspects of them were lies, without an author in a secondary source to point them out to me."
ASSU President Michael Cruz, '12, wrote as a freshman about Jane Stanford's struggles in "Love, Lawsuits, and Libel," and then for his sophomore paper, "From Allies to Adversaries: A Reexamination of Cold War Origins." He writes, "I loved my time in the Special Collections and Archives! . . . I've gone on to be a History major and am writing my thesis using materials from Special Collections and Archives."
When the topics excite them, students have an enthusiasm that is contagious. David Newcomb, '14, recently wrote on the Spanish Civil War, using the collections at Hoover. In the middle of his annotated bibliography he wrote: "Working in the archives is awesome. In some vicarious way, by holding the physical documents, you are taken back to the era and you begin to feel the sentiments of revolution growing inside of you."
I will never forget the baseball player who sent me an email, saying that he could not tell his team why he had disappeared, but it was because he was "obsessed" with his topic and was spending every moment with materials about the lack of Allied bombings of the railroads leading to concentration camps. Years later, when he was a professional baseball player, he wrote to thank me and said that he still remembered his research project. Other students have gone on to part-time jobs in both libraries, researching for absentee researchers or working with archivists. Still others, not satisfied with one project, set up weekly meetings with archivist Mattie Taormina in Special Collections just to continue perusing the treasures.
Students need new skills for this kind of research, not least to navigate the Finding Aids. They must learn how to pick and choose from the vast holdings, how to handle the delicate papers with or without gloves, how to prepare for help from the archivists, and finally, how to integrate primary sources with secondary sources for the research-based argument papers they must produce. The steps of finding an argument, developing a thesis, and using evidence to back up assertions begin to make more sense to students once they have something they really want to share.
HANDLE WITH CARE: Archivists give guided tours to acquaint students with research sources. (Photo: Toni Gauthier)Motivation soars when students have to give oral reports—now they have a chance to photograph the archival materials and create a presentation in which they can share correspondence from Reilly, Ace of Spies or AIDS education posters in Africa or David Starr Jordan's eugenics papers. Creating a paper and presentation not solely based on secondary sources gives students a reason to write up their findings: Using these archival materials guarantees that their projects will be unique.
Some students carry on the research they started in their freshman year. Pham continued her work on Hitler Youth and genocide, traveling to Cambodia to study Cambodian genocide and, most recently, spending a summer internship with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Committee on Conscience. A number of students have showcased their research during the freshman admit weekend, standing proudly next to huge posters displaying pictures of Ambrose Bierce and The Wasp or Eadweard Muybridge and his Animals in Motion studies. Two students were selected to go with me to South Dakota to the 2009 Western Literature Association Conference, where they gave a talk about using primary sources to study madness in the Gold Rush and the work of Mary Austin in the early environmental movement in America.
Students and teachers who use the materials at Stanford inevitably feel awed and fortunate to have such a wealth of history available, but everyone is welcome to come and use the materials—people from all over the world are in the reading rooms doing just that. You don't have to be a student or researcher. Any interested person can come in, register and begin to explore.
Susan Wyle, '74, MA '76, is a lecturer in the program in writing and rhetoric and the author of Revisiting America: Readings in Race, Culture, and Conflict.
