Assignment: Final Project Content Outline: 

Nature/ Culture/ Commodity

This project teaches students to think about how the natural world has been transformed, for ill

or good, by the historical development of capitalism. Students will engage with this idea by

focusing on one commodity within the British Empire from the list below. Students may work on

a commodity not on this list only with the approval of the instructor. More than one student can

work on the same commodity. However, research questions and sources should be unique to

each student. Projects must engage with at least one primary source produced between c.1600

and the 1930s. The project cannot use sources from the period after 1939. Students should

analyze the commodity of their choice, depending on the literature available, according to a

specific theme. It is through engagement with these themes that students will be able to

articulate an interesting research question. Examples of themes include: Medical treatments

and materia medica; Gender and Sexuality; Natural Philosophy/ Science; Racial hierarchies;

Systems of Production; Selfhood and Labour; Media and Advertising; Selfhood and

Consumption. Student projects that combine themes in a coherent and compelling manner

would be ideal. Commodities to analyze include:

Successful research requires a flexible vocabulary for describing the research topic, including being able to capture key concepts in simple terms, as well as an understanding of synonyms and related ideas or concepts that might inform your research. 

1. Consider some of the ideas or concepts that are important to this course, and that might be relevant to many potential research topics; record keywords related to these ideas here.
 

2. Now think of the specific commodity you have chosen to study. Take a few minutes to write down what you know about the topic, including keywords that might be helpful in turning up relevant sources. 

In the discipline of History, secondary sources interpret and analyze primary sources, and are removed in time from the events they discuss. They can be scholarly or non-scholarly/popular. 

Example secondary source - journal article: Power Structure, Discipline, and Labour in Assam Tea Plantations under Colonial Rule

Example secondary source - scholarly book: Sugar plantation in India and Indonesia : industrial production, 1770-2010

⇒ Find Secondary Sources in a History Specific or Humanities Database

Still looking for information or overwhelmed by LibrarySearch results? Try a history specific database:

• Historical Abstracts - Use the advanced search function to search for research on a specific historical time period.
• JStor - Use the advanced search function to limit your search to only HISTORY journals
• Or try one of MRU's other humanties databases

⇒ Find Secondary Sources in MRU LibrarySearch 

Try limiting searches by:

• using the sidebar options (e.g. limit results to only relevant subjects, or to preferred resource type, e.g., books)
• using the advanced search to search for important terms in the subject or title fields on the drop-down menus.
• refining results to only peer-reviewed sources (searches only within scholarly journals and EXCLUDES books)
• Sign in for enhanced results, to save "pinned" favourites lists and search queries

⇒ Secondary Source Search tips

• Construct search queries using terms you imagine academics would use; avoid slang and abbreviations; make note of relevant terms as you search and skim sources
• Use key words that reflect the key concepts in your topic, and avoid long strings of natural language
  • Good search: coffee labour colonial india
  • Poor search: labour in colonial indian coffee industry
• Experiment with different search terms to describe your topic
• Put “Quotation Marks Around Your Search" to search for exact phrases, e.g. "East India Company"  
• Use OR between your ideas to search for EITHER term e.g. empire OR imperial
• Put * after the root of a word to look for multiple endings e.g. environ* will find environment, environmental, environmentalism

Video: Finding and Recognizing Scholarly Secondary Sources for History Assignments

Elements of a scholarly secondary source -- 00:56
Why we use books as well as journals are important in History research --1:51
Using LibrarySearch to find sources -- 3:32
Using filters in LibrarySearch -- 7:32
 

Historical Primary Sources: Documents or other artefacts created at the time in history under study, generally by a person or group that witnessed, participated in or contributed to the events of the day in some way. Primary sources take many forms, and the most appropriate or helpful type of primary source will depend on your topic.

Some types of primary sources related to the history of health, medicine and disease include:

Official reports, government records, policies:  

• Reports and documents connected with the proceedings of the East-India Company in regard to the culture and manufacture of cotton-wool, raw silk, and indigo in India, East India Company, 1836
• Legislative Debates of the Government of India: Opium Policy, 1925
• Proceedings Of The Assam Labour Enquiry Committee, 1906

News articles: The Opium Question in India, Times of London 1894.

Materia medica / pharmacological texts: An Essay on the Use of Red Peruvian Bark, Edward Rigby 1783

⇒ Mine secondary sources for potential primary sources

• Look closely at journal articles, book chapters and encyclopedia entries for mentions of specific primary sources, groups or people that may have created relevant primary sources, or larger categories of primary sources that miught be relevant.
• Examine footnotes carefully, looking at publication dates to help identify primary sources.
• Look for relevant primary sources you see there via Google or LibrarySearch.

Example of footnotes from the article Behal, Rana P. “Power Structure, Discipline, and Labour in Assam Tea Plantations under Colonial Rule.” International Review of Social History 51 (2006): 143–72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26405454.

⇒ Where to look for primary sources related to this course

Specialized collections:

• Gale Primary Sources: Good starting point for many topics. Cross-search a variety of historical newspapers, periodicals, images, manuscripts, and other documents covering over 400 years of archival content. Use the menu on the left to toggle between searching newspapers vs. all types of documents, limit to relevant dates and collections. 
• Government of India Debates: Legislative debates from local Indian government bodies, from 1854.
• Making of the Modern World: Good starting point for many topics. Covers the history of Western trade, the rise of the modern labor movement, the evolving status of slavery, the condition and making of the working class, colonization, the Atlantic world, Latin American/Caribbean studies, social history, gender, and the economic theories of the nineteenth century.
• Medical Heritage Library: Good starting for medical treatment and materia medica topics. Digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films with representative works from each of the past six centuries, from medical libraries around the world. Use the search this collection option nearer the centre of the screen.
• Medical History of British India:  Reports related to disease, public health and medical research in British India between around 1850 to 1950.
• Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 1776 - 1886 and more: The oldest English language scientific journal, covering topics of scientific importance within the physical, mathematical and engineering sciences. Access issues from other years here.

Basic tools

• On Google - add the terms primary sources or primary documents to your search query e.g., cinchona primary documents
• In LibrarySearch :
  • add the word sources to your search query, or search for a specific source type e.g., speeches, correspondence, diaries, royal commission, reports. E.g., tobacco sources 
  • Use the creation date filter and specify dates or years relevant to your topic, OR
  • Use the resource type filter to limit only to books (reprinted primary sources usually take the form of a book), OR
  • Use the resource type filter to limit only to newspapers. Be sure to limit by creation date, and try sorting results oldest to newest.
•  On the Primary Sources tab of this guide, browse for relevant primary source collections. Look for the Primary Sources by Geographical Area of Study heading.
   

⇒ Primary Source Search Tips

• Use terminology from the time period you are studying - e.g., melancholy vs. lunacy vs. madness vs. mental illness

• If the search tool offers the option to limit by date, use it. Be very specific to the time period you are studying.

• Be methodical - if you know the time frame of an event, browse multiple editions or publications from that time range for potential mentions of the topic/event.

Primary Sources for History

Video Chapters
1:42 - General tips for finding primary sources
4:03 - Finding primary sources in MRU LibrarySearch
5:29 - Finding primary sources via Google
6:55 - Finding primary sources via MRU History Guide, including historical newspapers

Visit the Primary Sources tab of this guide for more advice and access to MRU's digital primary source collections. 

Tertiary sources (often called background or reference sources) including encyclopedias, historical dictionaries, handbooks and companion guides, provide helpful overviews, key facts, dates, people, place and issues associated with historical topics. Good starting points include:

• Oxford Reference 
• World History in Context 
• Keep searches simple, one or two words max.
   

⇒ Find More Tertiary Sources: 
In LibrarySearch, filter by Resource Type: Reference Entries

MRU Chicago Style Citation Resources: Includes a guide for using Chicago style, examples, and instructions for inserting footnotes.

Call number: The address for a physical library item, so you can find it on the shelf. In MRU's LibrarySearch, it is displayed below the title of the book. You can follow the locate icon for a map to the book on its shelf.