Trust the Course Bibliography

Guest Post by Eli Norlander

My first primary source that I researched was a long letter that Billy Mitchell wrote to his father. I never ended up using this source for any tabling except to just have on the table in case anyone liked my main primary source enough to read past Billy Mitchell’s Op-Ed. To find the letter from Billy Mitchell, I believe I just searched some key words into Google and scrolled for a while, clicking on links that seemed like they would yield what I was looking for. Eventually, I found the letter on the Milwaukee Historical Center’s digital archives site. This was helpful because their website is made for researchers just like me. The information about the piece was very thorough, including the date it was written, the location that it was written, and a plain-text version of the cursive writing. However, the content itself was not particularly helpful or in my mind, interesting enough to present to an audience mainly because it was almost too personal of a letter without a whole lot of historical significance other than framing Billy as a person.

This led me to turn to the course bibliography to find a piece that at least had some big quotes that I could pull out as attention grabbers. The primary source I chose, Billy’s Op-Ed against Coolidge, was exactly what I was looking for. It was slightly more difficult to find some of the additional details about the article, because it was from an aviation magazine that featured his letter because of his significance to the art of aviation. This piece made it very easy to research additional context information, because Billy talks directly about so many historical events that I could take a few notes to put next to their corresponding sections on my poster. This allowed my information to be driven by Billy’s words and thoughts while backing him up with additional information to show just how far ahead he was able to think.

This helped to bring out for myself a lesson on the importance of combining primary sources with secondary and tertiary sources. The Ostfriesland bombing was something that I could research through secondary sources, whose authors had themselves studied first-hand sources to gain a broad perspective on the event. Obviously, Billy was not alive to witness Pearl Harbor himself, so I had the choice of grabbing primary sources to pull from about the attack or seeking out secondary sources. I ended up maybe going even further to tertiary to find some numbers on the total number of airplanes that were involved to see just how accurate Billy was in his prediction. Numbers really seem to draw the attention of viewers as they walk through the museum and I had some striking graphs there, so having the numbers to compare was very useful.