What are critical thinking skills?
Critical thinking skills allow you to analyze a Primary Source to gather as much information as possible from it. Using your own experiences and prior knowledge of a historical event, much of which you develop when you read books and other secondary sources about a topic, you can raise questions and problems about the sources that help you determine whether or not the source is useful for your project.
Critical thinking skills recognize that human beings have limited perception -- we just can't see and comprehend everything that happens. Understanding this fundamental fact is essential when considering your own or instructing students in the use of critical thinking skills with primary sources.
-- UConn Libraries
To determine how important a document or source is to your research you should ask yourself several questions:
Begin with an observation of the document in term of it as an object:
-- UConn Libraries
How to Cite Digitized Primary Sources
Citing primary sources correctly is an important part of studying primary sources, for a number of reasons.
It is important--and ethically necessary--to provide full credit to the creators and publishers of documents, and to allow future scholars to find the source quickly and correctly. Citing a primary source is also crucial to critical thinking and analysis because it requires that the student think carefully about where the source came from, who made it, and in what context the student first discovered it.
-- The Library of Congress
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