Chapter 3: Finding and Evaluating Your Sources

Chapter 2 already leaned on primary sources — a probate inventory here, a runaway notice there — to build Ann from a generic type into a specific, defensible person. This chapter steps back and makes that method explicit: what a primary source actually is, how it differs from a secondary one, how to tell a credible source from an unreliable one, where to find both without a research budget, and how to actually put them in front of a guest once you have them.

3.1 Primary and Secondary Sources, and Why Both Matter

A primary source is created by someone with direct experience of, or involvement in, a historical event: a diary, a letter, a court deposition, a period print or illustration — photographs obviously aren't available for the eighteenth century, but woodcuts, engravings, and paintings fill much of that role. A secondary source is predicated on primary sources and offers analysis, interpretation, or context built from them: a monograph built around a thesis, a peer-reviewed journal article, a museum's own exhibit research. Start with secondary sources for the framework, then use primary sources to make a persona, an object, or a claim specific rather than generic — the same order Chapter 2 already recommended for building a biography.

This applies regardless of method. Most of this book is written for first-person interpretation specifically, but the guidance in this chapter comes from Alex Robb, a history interpretive specialist who works primarily in third person, in full period dress, at Washington Crossing Historic Park — and his point stands for either approach: good sourcing is what separates a real educator from someone coasting on the excuse that "the public doesn't know any better." That phrase gets used, consciously or not, to justify skipping the research a guest can't personally check. It's a comfortable excuse, and it's also a betrayal of the actual job.¹

3.2 Evaluating What You Find

Not every source that looks credible is. A few specific failure modes are worth learning to spot:

• Circular citation. A secondary source's bibliography is one of the fastest ways to judge it — but only if you actually check where its citations lead. Nineteenth-century popular histories in particular are full of citations that look legitimate but, traced far enough, refer only to other nineteenth-century secondary accounts, never bottoming out in an actual primary source. A forthcoming reassessment of the crossing of the Delaware has reportedly found exactly this pattern in a large share of the received popular narrative — citations chasing each other in a circle rather than grounding in anything a reader could independently verify. The fix is simple but has no shortcut: follow the citation trail all the way down, and be suspicious of any claim that keeps citing other people's retellings rather than an original document.
• Modern secondary scholarship is comparatively easy to vet: check whether it's peer-reviewed, and lean on museum- and institution-run recommended-reading lists and book reviews — the Museum of the American Revolution and the Journal of the American Revolution both maintain exactly this kind of vetted, regularly updated guidance, not just for the Revolution specifically but for eighteenth-century social history generally.²
• Pictorial sources are harder to evaluate than written ones, because they usually arrive with none of the context a title page or byline gives you for free. It helps to sort period images into two rough categories. Some are satirical or caricature — full of exaggeration and symbolism, meant to convey an opinion about a type of person rather than document an actual moment. A junior naval officer posed daintily, sword drawn, pointing at nothing in particular, is telling you what the artist thought of junior officers, not depicting something that plausibly happened on a real ship. Others are closer to genre painting — an ordinary sailor going about an ordinary task — plausibly sketched from something the artist actually observed, without any larger point to make beyond documenting daily life. Both kinds have real value for material culture (if an artist painted it, it existed and someone was at least somewhat familiar with it), but only the second kind should be read as anything close to a literal snapshot.

3.3 Do's and Don'ts for Using Source Material

Do:

• Use a variety of written and visual material rather than leaning on one type.
• Make sources accessible: let a guest actually see or handle a source (or a clear reproduction of one), rather than only paraphrasing it in speech. It's a subtle, effective way to reinforce that what you're saying is grounded in something real.
• Corroborate across multiple sources before treating a detail as representative. Chapter 2's own caution about a single runaway notice — a lead, not a conclusion — applies just as much here: don't rely on just one thing, primary or secondary, if you can find a second and a third.

Don't:

• Don't reach for sources outside your persona's actual context. If you're researching Philadelphia's maritime trades, a source about mariners in France or the Chesapeake doesn't help you, however well documented it is — the eighteenth century was genuinely global, but it was also intensely regional, and people a hundred miles apart could dress, speak, and work differently enough to matter.
• Don't resist new scholarship just because it contradicts what you already believed, unless the claim itself is genuinely outlandish. Good new research correcting old, poorly sourced assumptions is a gift to your interpretation, not a threat to it.
• Don't let an exception in the record become the norm in your portrayal. If something is well documented as rare, keep it rare in how you present it — interpreters are drawn to unusual, flashy details precisely because they're memorable, but that instinct can quietly misrepresent an entire period if indulged too often.
• Don't discredit a primary source over a factual error. A period letter confidently predicting an attack that never came isn't a bad source — it's direct evidence of what people actually believed in the moment, without the benefit of hindsight you have and they didn't. That's historical empathy: understanding why someone believed what they believed, not judging them by what you know now that they couldn't have.
• Don't lose your own interpretive style trying to become someone else. It's fine, even valuable, to admire another historian's or interpreter's work closely — but you'll reach guests better as a comfortable version of yourself than as an uneasy imitation of somebody you're not.

3.4 Building a Research Toolkit

Good sourcing doesn't require an academic's access to archives. In roughly the order worth trying:

• Networking, first and always. Fellow interpreters, local and state historical societies, and site staff at other institutions are a free, renewable source of material you'd never find searching alone — everyone doing this work has assembled their own personal library of sources around their own interests, and most are glad to share.
• Libraries and bookstores. A library points you toward older secondary scholarship; a new bookstore keeps you current with what's just been published; a used bookstore gets you both for less.
• Free full-text archives. Google Books, HathiTrust, Project Gutenberg, and Archive.org between them host an enormous volume of out-of-print and public-domain material as scanned originals or plain text, searchable and almost always downloadable. Founders Online, the National Archives' free full-text database of the Founders' papers, is powerful enough to answer oddly specific questions in seconds — a search for "chocolate" alone turns up well over a hundred mentions across the Founders' correspondence, which is a faster and more reliable start than paging through a single diary hoping to get lucky.
• Digitized period newspapers, most comprehensively through the Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection — free, full-text searchable, and the fastest way to find runaway notices, shop advertisements, and shipping news for a specific place and year without leaving your desk.
• Low-cost used-book marketplaces, like AbeBooks and Alibris, for out-of-print monographs at a fraction of their original price, usually with free or cheap shipping.
• Scholarly search. JSTOR's free tier allows up to a hundred article reads a month with nothing more than an email address — not comprehensive, but a strong first stop for peer-reviewed treatment of a specific trade, topic, or region. Google Scholar is a faster, if less curated, way to see what's been published on a topic at all before deciding what's worth chasing down through JSTOR or a library.
• Subject-specific specialized archives. Almost any narrow enough subject has one: interpreters working naval or maritime personas, for instance, have a dedicated home in ibiblio's Naval Documents of the American Revolution collection. Finding the specialized archive for your own persona's trade or region is usually a matter of asking around (see networking, above) rather than guessing at a search engine.
• Museum online collections, many of which pair a searchable object database with an art historian's own contextualizing notes and close-up images — genuinely useful for material culture research without ever leaving your desk (see Chapter 5. Material Culture: Dressing and Furnishing the Person: Material Culture for more on reading objects this way).
• Social media, used deliberately. Museum- and site-run Pinterest boards are a fast way to find close-up images of clothing, objects, and art organized by topic or artist. Long-form YouTube channels can go deeper than a blog post — Townsends' Friday deep-dives are a good example, walking through a single topic with period paintings and objects at some length, with the same caveat Chapter 14 already applies to Townsends generally: useful and often excellent, but one channel's take, not a vetted consensus. A handful of podcasts focused on the Revolution and eighteenth-century life round this out well.

One workflow habit is worth adopting before you've gathered your second source, not after your fiftieth: keep a single running document for each persona or program, with the organizing question or theme at the top, and dump every source into it as you find it — a quote, a citation, a link, a half-formed idea about how it connects. Cite as you go. Note where a quote or fact came from the moment you write it down, even if it's only an author's last name and a page number, or just the hyperlink. The alternative — a genuinely great find with no record of where it came from — is a completely avoidable failure, and it is far more common than it should be; as Katherine Pittman, who has portrayed Martha Washington at Colonial Williamsburg for over a decade, puts it, going back later to relocate a source you know you read somewhere is one of the most reliably wasted hours in this kind of research.⁵

3.5 Bringing Sources Into Your Interpretation

Finding and evaluating a source is only half the job; the other half is actually putting it to work in front of a guest.

• Show it, don't just say it. Portraits, direct quotes, maps, period ephemera, and technical charts and tables all make a source tangible in a way that paraphrasing alone doesn't. As Chapter 5. Material Culture: Dressing and Furnishing the Person: Material Culture's discussion of possessions as conversation already argues for objects, letting a guest look at, read, or handle the source itself does more work than describing it well.
• Know your audience and lead with the salient points. As an interpreter, you are — in a phrase worth keeping — an ocean of knowledge; don't drown the person standing in front of you in it. Chapter 12. Working a Crowd: Groups, Children, and Hard Questions: Working a Crowd covers reading a guest's engagement level and adjusting depth accordingly in more detail; the discipline this chapter adds is specifically about source material: pick the two or three most salient points from what you know, lead with those, and let genuine curiosity pull you further rather than delivering everything you've found regardless of interest.
• Admit honestly what you don't know. This is different from the deflection techniques Chapter 12. Working a Crowd: Groups, Children, and Hard Questions: Working a Crowd covers for a guest trying to catch you out — this is about genuine gaps in the documented record, the kind Chapter 2. Building a Persona from the Ground Up's section on living with gaps in the record already describes. There is no shame in telling a guest that the record simply doesn't say, especially where a fire, a lost archive, or a poorly documented population has left real, permanent holes. Saying so honestly shows guests that research is ongoing and imperfect, which is itself true and worth teaching.
• Work on retention deliberately. A short, vivid source is easy to remember; a long memoir or an unfamiliar trade's technical detail takes repeated exposure before it becomes something you can produce on demand. Reread a favorite primary source periodically — each pass tends to surface something you missed or had let slip. And the single most reliable trick: build the source material directly into your kit rather than trying to hold all of it in memory. A quote on a card, a period image in a folder, an object with a documented history sitting on your table — once it's physically there with you, you no longer have to worry about remembering to bring it up.

3.6 A Practice Exercise: Countering a Myth

A good way to drill all of this at once, alone or with a colleague: pick a popular misconception about the eighteenth century — broad ("everyone died young") or specific to your own persona or site. Find a combination of primary and secondary sources that actually refutes it. Then practice delivering a gentle, non-condescending correction, in character or in third person, using what you found. The goal isn't to make a guest feel foolish for holding a common misconception; it's to replace it with something more accurate without squashing the curiosity that got them talking to you in the first place.

With a working method for finding and trusting your sources in hand, the next chapter turns to what you do with them once you open your mouth: Chapter 4. Finding Your Character's Voice.

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1. Alex Robb, history interpretive specialist at Washington Crossing Historic Park (Bucks County, PA), "Primary and Secondary Sources" workshop presentation, given as part of the same workshop series described in Chapter 1. Why First Person, and Why It's Hard.↩︎

2. The Journal of the American Revolution, also cited in Chapter 2. Building a Persona from the Ground Up and Chapter 8. Portraying Across Station, Race, and Bondage, and the Museum of the American Revolution, both publish ongoing book reviews and recommended reading well beyond military history specifically.↩︎

3. Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection, whose own catalog entry discusses the painting's well-documented inaccuracies alongside its status as an enduring, allegorical image of the event.↩︎

4. Robert F. Smith, Manufacturing Independence: Industrial Innovation in the Quartermaster's Department during the American Revolution (Westholme Publishing, 2016).↩︎

5. Katherine Pittman, who has portrayed Martha Washington at Colonial Williamsburg for over a decade, discussed this as part of the same workshop mentioned in Chapter 1. Why First Person, and Why It's Hard; see Interpreting History for session details.↩︎