Researching Sultana

Guest Post by Hayley Jasinksi

The primary source research for my character (Sultana) was particularly interesting. There were quite a few unique sources, such as the video of Sultana introducing one of her cubs for the first time. It was really neat to watch a video that a newsreel production company had filmed, produced, and released for public consumption; ideally, people would watch this newsreel before a movie in a theater. Unfortunately, there were a bit of information and sources missing that I would have liked to use in addition to what I had already found. Because Zero was born in the time before smartphones and even easily moveable cameras, there were not very many images of him specifically. There were plenty of depictions of Sultana’s cubs, but not very many of Zero himself. This was surprising to me because his birth was a momentous occasion in Milwaukee’s history and the zoological practice.

For my search, I mainly used our class bibliography to find primary sources; this document was created by a former student of the class and our TA. This document was rich with many sources for each of the characters in the reenactment, as well as a timeline and other supplemental information. This is how I found the video that I mentioned above. Additionally, I used some of our class readings as primary sources and had the help of several fabulous librarians and archivists who helped me on my quest for sources. As a class, we visited the American Geographical Society Library several times, and many of the polar bear materials inspired me to go deeper in my research quest. There are many mythical representations and drawings of polar bears that inform us in the current day about what people in the past thought of these creatures. This class is not my first experience looking for useful primary sources, so I had the advantage of knowing what to look for and how to look for it. However, this was my first time having to locate and use several primary sources for a project instead of one or two.