For this project I used a variety of sources. I used memoir, biography, and oral history, as well as more traditional academic articles and statistics. I feel that this variety can add multiple layers to a project, creating a more in-depth look at any given topic. The statistics and academic articles give a more fact-based foundation to the paper, and then the other types of documents give a more personal point of view. In class discussions about methodology, we often considered the problems associated with memoir and oral history. These forms of history are subjective, and therefore not completely reliable. The people who tell stories about their lives could be influenced by a number of different factors that cause them to say possibly false things, or hold back parts of the truth. Memory is moldable, so it is possible to think something happened when it did not. As well, sometimes trauma or a wish to forget certain aspects of one’s past can cause them to leave things out that could be essential to their history.

These issues with subjective historical accounts means that it is useful to look into other sources to understand the full picture. This is the reason that I chose to use such a variety of sources. When multiple subjective accounts match up, that implies that there is a significant amount of truth in them. Also, if these accounts are backed up by facts and statistics, there is greater credibility in the stories. One may argue that the facts and statistics should be enough then, to get truthful information for a paper, however I feel that they lack a personal quality that adds an interesting and important perspective. The personal accounts make the research more presentable and interesting to an audience, and they also shed valuable social information on the facts. Humans live with a subjective mindset, so as a historian trying to better understand what life was like for people in an earlier time period, it is important to understand what life felt like to those people. In a reflection of my past assignments, I would often choose sources based on assignment criteria for a course. For example, if I needed a certain amount of primary and secondary sources, that is what I would look for. The reasoning was mostly criteria — not because I saw the benefit to my paper. Now that I have discussed and considered multiple types of sources, and I have seen what kind of a product I can get from source variety in a project, I will use this method for future assignments, not just for criteria’s sake, but for the paper’s benefit.