One of the reading
tasks often required in college classes is research. Research provides you the
opportunitiy to find out more about a topic than you now know. One of the things you
often find out is that the information you find in one source is inconsistent with the
information you find in another. It is even more difficult now because of the wealth
of information available on the internet. In the past editors of print material (magazines,
journals, and books) reviewed documents submitted for publication for accuracy.
Today we can all publish things on the web, and no one is checking them. Perhaps
the great challenge in research is not finding information, but figuring out which
information to believe, which is "the truth."
History often presents
this kind of problem. Too often we think of the history we read as the
"true" story of what happened in a particular period. Instead, a history
text is really someone's presentation of what happened. As with the presentations
you do or the papers you write, it reflects a series of choices the author made about how
much to research, what to include from that research, and how to organize and tell about
it.
In order to evaluate
the accuracy and the validity of the information you're reading, you need to learn more
about
- the source of the information,
- the context in which it was written, and
- the extent to which the information is corroborated
by others.
To learn more about evaluating information sources,
we're going to examine some documents related to the "New Deal."
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