ScottB's onMason

Can I use it?  Can I copy your notes on sources?  Where did you get this information??  I can not just say I used the National Park Service website as my source for information.  Deeper into the NPS site is info on soldier names, for example.  When I look closely I see the NPS says “the source for this data was General Index Cards into the Compiled Military Service Records“.  That would be a secondary source.  Or for regimental histories, can I quote Frederick Dyer’s Compendium of the War of the Rebellion?  I’m not sure.  Are Mr Dyer’s sources quoted?  Does he give credit to where his information comes from?  Unless the primary source of the material is provided, the student may not use that source.

Secondary Sources.  An example is when someone writes about someone or something else using primary sources.  Examples would be:

• A history textbook
• A journal or magazine article which explains or reviews previous discoveries
• A book about the effects of Vietnam

Topics we could research through secondary sources on soldiers in general:

• Changing attitudes, between when they joined to when they left
• Religion
• Diet – connection to illness
• Physical condition
• Recreation
• Clothing or lack thereof
• Weather

I won’t find information on my soldier’s boots but I could find information on the general state of boots at the time.

Gathering secondary sources into Zotero is very easy.  When I visit any page, the Zotero icon in my search bar does not always come up and I can not figure out why it sometimes does and sometimes does not.  But simply enough I can right click on any page, and below the cut and paste or back and reload options, a Zotero prompt is amongst the choices.

Is Zotero a verb yet?  Can I say I Zoteroed a page from encyclopediavirginia.com after I googled “civil war weather”.  I found this there:

“Meteorologically, the Civil War took place at the tail end of what is often termed the Little Ice Age, a period of general cooling and unpredictability that most scholars date from roughly 1310 to 1850. Despite what its name suggests, the Little Ice Age actually encompassed dramatic fluctuations in weather, with one year bringing an intensely cold winter and easterly winds, and the next heavy rains and raging heat.”

I Zoteroed a page from civilwar.com that told me this after googling recreational activities of civil war soldiers:

Free time was also spent in card games, reading, pitching horseshoes, or team sports such as the fledgling sport of baseball, a game which rapidly gained favor among northern troops. Rule booklets were widely distributed and the game soon became a favorite. Soldiers also played a form of football that appeared more like a huge brawl than the game we know today, and often resulted in broken noses and fractured limbs. Holidays were celebrated in camp with feasts, foot races, horse racing, music, boxing matches, and other contests. But while on active campaign, the soldiers were limited to writing, cleaning uniforms and equipment, and sleeping.

I find Zotero to be a really useful tool to catalog the sites I need for my research.