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Speaker 1: Hey, guess what I learned about recently?
Speaker 2: What's that?
Speaker 1: The Dust Bowl.
Speaker 2: The Dust Bowl… is that like some sort of championship game in the Cleaning Olympics?
Speaker 1: No, it is not.
Speaker 2: Ok, what is it?
Speaker 1: Here, I have a definition. Ready?
Speaker 2: Let's hear it.
Speaker 1: The Dust Bowl was a 150,000-square-mile area in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and portions of Colorado, Kansas, and New Mexico, and was the scene of an agricultural nightmare in the mid-1930s
Speaker 2: Ok. Cool. Got it.
Speaker 1: Actually, maybe a better way to describe the Dust Bowl would be to show you this.
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Photo: "Dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas," April 18, 1935
Speaker 2: Whoa.
Speaker 1: Or this…
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Photo: "Dust Bowl Farm in the Coldwater District North of Dalhart, Texas," June 1938
Speaker 1: Or this.
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Photo: "Migrant Mother, Nipoma, California," 1936
Speaker 2: I think I'm starting to understand the Dust Bowl a little better now.
Speaker 1: That's because we're looking at primary sources.
Speaker 2: When we conduct research, we can put the sources we find into two categories: primary and secondary.
Speaker 1: And we can define each source type like this. Primary sources are firsthand or eyewitness accounts of something: interviews, letters, journal entries, original documents, photos, or on-the-scene video footage—the kind of material that can only be created by someone who witnessed something for themselves, and documented it.
Speaker 2: Also, original materials that reflect or illustrate something about the time in which they were created, like music, films, paintings, or artifacts.
Speaker 1: Right. And secondary sources are secondary accounts: articles, commentaries, maybe analyses written about something after the fact.
Speaker 2: For example: articles, essays, or editorials written by people who used someone else's recounting to go off of, because they themselves weren't there.
Speaker 1: There are different, totally legit reasons to use both source types to help support claims we make, or help explain an idea that we have. But we're going to focus on primary sources here, and why they're uniquely cool.
Speaker 2: Think about the differences between the two source types. If I was going to write a research essay about, let's say, what life was like for Americans during the Great Depression of the 1930s, there are tons of references—secondary source references—I could read. Researchers and historians have plenty to say about what daily living was like for someone at the time.
Speaker 1: And those are good to read. But think about what we might learn from a primary source. Let's look at this picture again.
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Photo: "Migrant Mother, Nipoma, California," 1936
Speaker 2: This is a photo from a series taken of a woman living in a California migrant work camp in the '30s. We can't say this photo shows what life was like for all Americans at the time, but when we research the photo, we learn that many Americans who lost their jobs in the Great Depression, had to leave their previous lives behind, in order to find work.
Speaker 1: We can learn a lot from the setting in the photo, the woman's clothing and expression, and her children. We can get a window into a type of life than we may be unfamiliar with–something that a secondary source reference may not be able to convey. And that can inspire us to ask some questions that could help direct our research later. Questions like: Where is the woman? Why does she look so sad? Why do her clothes look worn? Does she live in the tent behind her? If so, why?
Speaker 2: Or check out this photo from around the same time:
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Photo: "Missouri Family Seven Months from the Drought Area on U.S. Highway 99," 1937
Speaker 2: This is a car belonging to a migrant family in Oklahoma, making their way across the Dust Bowl of the Midwest. What do you notice?
Speaker 1: I notice a young child playing on a blanket in the dirt right away. I see the baby's mom behind her, wearing some sort of face covering, possibly to keep from breathing in dust or dirt from the road.
Speaker 2: Anything else?
Speaker 1: The truck looks like it's carrying everything the family owns, including their mattress. It makes me wonder what the family's life was like before the Great Depression hit, and what they had to leave behind. And it also makes me curious about what the person taking the photo was thinking, and why they took it.
Speaker 2: And if we want to go further and explore different aspects of the Great Depression, we can find other types of primary sources too, beyond images like these: newspaper reports or editorials about the plight of Americans in different parts of the country, transcripts of speeches made by President Hoover as he tried to calm the nation's fears about economic hardships…
Speaker 1: …original letters or journal excerpts written by people who lived through the time, and told their story firsthand.
Speaker 2: Remember, we can gain valuable information about the Great Depression from secondary sources: factual information, data, a sense of historical context…
Speaker 1: …but these primary sources can help us understand the Depression's effects, in a real and vivid way...
Speaker 2: …without the filter of some other commenter retelling the story for us. Remember that secondary sources are written by secondhand observers who may let their own opinion affect what they have to say about a topic.
Speaker 1: True. A historian writing about the Great Depression will have a certain point of view about what life was possibly like… but I may get a more accurate perspective of that time in history if I interview someone who was actually alive during the time.
Speaker 2: Whether it's through an image, a written account, or an interview, one of the best ways to really understand the past is to use primary sources that help us see it through the eyes of someone who was there.
