The Processes of Writing in the Voice of Fred Harrington

 Guest post by Nathan Brown

When conducting the primary source research for the reenactment, I knew that a lot of source material was available to me. Fred Harvey Harrington left an enormous paper trail from his life, especially while he was president of the University of Wisconsin. It would have required too much time to sift through all the primary source material and then pick interesting events to add to the reenactment. An outline was necessary to guide what information I wanted to find in the primary sources. I was able to use multiple secondary sources to create a general outline of Harrington’s career. Once I had this outline, I could direct my search into the primary sources.

The main primary sources that I used were the archives of the minutes from the meetings of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents. Fortunately, these minutes were digitized by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so I did not have any trouble accessing them. My strategy for finding specific references to events in these minutes was to use keyword searches based on the outline I created earlier. Once I performed the keyword search, I could then narrow down the results based on the date of the meeting. With the correct document that discussed the event relevant to the reenactment, I could create a post from Harrington’s perspective.

However, there were several instances in my research that strayed away from my outline. An example would be when I conducted a simple Google search about Harrington and received a search result from the CIA. This source consisted of a newspaper clipping that the CIA kept in its archives that covered the controversy over their contracts with the University of Wisconsin. While this was not mentioned in the secondary sources that I used, and was not on my outline, I knew that I stumbled upon an excellent source that would bring depth to the reenactment of Harrington and add more context to the setting.

One area of primary research that was disappointing was that I could not search through the Fred Harvey Harrington papers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This would have consisted of all the documents created by and sent to Harrington. An analysis of these sources would have greatly helped with my reenactment. Unfortunately, these sources were not digitized and there would have been difficulty accessing them. However, the other primary sources I utilized provided a great picture of the events in this reenactment from Harrington’s perspective.