History
Primary sources are the whole game. Secondary sources tell you how others have read them.
What counts as evidence: Primary sources, read critically for who made them, for whom, and what they leave out.
- Find primary material you can actually reach: local archives, newspapers, census records, oral histories, digitized collections.
- Ask who made the source, for whom, and what they left out.
- Build an argument, not a timeline — a paper that only narrates isn't research.
- Chicago footnotes are the norm.