Using the journal Environmental History to introduce primary source analysis

In this class session, I passed out copies of Environmental History and guided students through the analysis of primary and secondary sources using the journal's cover art. Editors Nancy Langston and Lisa Brady have done an excellent job working with graphic editors Neil Maher, Cindy Ott, and Finis Dunaway to curate images that support its essays. In class, I split my students into groups and had them take notes on one of these covers and the article that it accompanied. This helped to illustrate the relationship between primary and secondary sources and provided an outline of the key elements to understand in a journal article while preparing for classwork. It took about the full fifty minutes to introduce the materials, allow the students time to analyze the documents and to bring them back to present their findings on the primary sources to the group at large. In general, this provided an effective introductory class, and gave me a chance to hear everyone participate. I think that I will fold the primary and secondary source analysis in with one another in a future version of this lesson. I look forward to sharing more about exercises in this class next week when we complete a similar exercise analyzing scientific articles.

Reading primary sources and secondary sources

Primary Sources

Begin with the cover of the journal. Its illustrations are primary sources that relate to the argument of one of the articles inside (a secondary source). Read the cover as a primary source.

Describe the following elements:

• Provenance: What is the document, Who produced the document, when did they make it? (These details will likely be described immediately after the table of contents).
  
• Content: Provide a brief description of the image or images that are shown (if it was the Mona Lisa you might say 'a portrait of a woman smiling in front of a green hilly landscape with a river winding through it').
  
• Representation: Does the image suggest reality, symbolism, propaganda, political beliefs(ideology)? Is there a combination of these representations?
  
• Assumptions and values (in the text, and our own).
  
• Relationship to other texts (Read the abstract of the article connected with the image. What does the content of the image suggest about the article).
  
• Identify the argument that the image supports. (This will also be clearer after reading the abstract).
  

Secondary Sources

Now that you understand a primary source, take a look at the secondary source that actively interprets it. This exercise will develop the scaffolding for understanding a secondary source's argument, structure and context. It should help you figure out why you're reading this particular source and what its key points are.
1) Look at the title and heading titles. These will tell you something about the source's narrative arc.
2) Identify any illustrations. Why were they included? In the sciences, figures can sometimes tell the whole argument. History is not always so straightforward.
3) Introductions usually consist of three parts:
- A hook, consisting of a short anecdote designed to draw the reader's attention.
- Historiography, or the previous works on related topics that identify the author's colleagues.
- A summary of the argument.
- Reading the introduction of an academic article your are likely to come in contact with a buzzword that you're not familiar with (high modernism, the wilderness myth, the anthropocene, etc.) Note these.
4) Conclusions in Environmental History are often short and sweet. They summarize the argument in light of the evidence presented.
5) The notes (endnotes in this case) help to explain how the author figured out their main point.