Michael Heng

Trista Maroudas

HIST-1700-F17

November 2nd, 2017

Reflection

All of the essays Ive written in this class have helped me greatly brush up on my writing

skills, especially document based assignment 2, it made me consider both sides of an argument

and contextualize two pieces of primary sources, which I have never done before. Its good to

analyze primary sources because they are basically what happened, it is the 100% truth, and as a

learner, I have to understand the primary source slowly and carefully, a primary source may

come from a different time period so the writing may be harder to understand, this encourages

slow analyzation and careful reading. Secondary sources are usually easier to understand and

may have some more context to it. Secondary sources sometimes gives more perspectives and

viewpoints, for example in an article about a past event, it may compare that event with what is

happening today. As life learners we learn a lot from both primary and secondary sources. For

finding the sources, in my web browser I would type in what I was researching and add the

phrase primary source another good way I found my sources were national archives or even

online museums. At first I thought about topics in my head that had prominent opposing sides, I

then looked up a list online of significant events in the U.S. WW2 brushed my mind, then BAM,

I thought about Japanese internment camps. In some ways researching did alter how I viewed the

topic, I learned a lot of new statistics and treaties signed by presidents.