The Horse’s Mouth
Archives’ primary sources
excite student writers.
IN CLASS
BY SUSAN WYLE
“Professor Wyle, I am holding history in
my hands!” The Stanford football player,
dreading his required research paper, had
just discovered the joy of working with
primary sources in Stanford Special Collections. As he pored over folders of Black
Panther papers and redacted FBI files,
the possibilities of his own research blossomed before him.
For 25 years I have been teaching
freshman and sophomore writing classes.
I have always taught with a focus
on using primary sources, first
with the help of archivist
Elena Danielson, MA ’ 70,
PhD ’75, in the Hoover
Archives and later with
Maggie Kimball, ’80,
former University
archivist, in Special
Collections. My greatest
joy in teaching has come
from watching students
discover the excitement of
working directly with materials
like the Hitler Youth training manuals,
Jane Stanford’s autopsy or Frida Kahlo’s
lipstick–laden letters to Bertram Wolfe.
Images of be-gloved students poring over
Nazi propaganda photos or Little Leland’s
early drawings stay with me as I integrate
work with these primary sources into all
my writing classes, whose themes range
from the rhetoric of propaganda in W WII
to Stanford myth and reality to the mythology of the American West.
Hoover Archives specializes in holdings
pertaining to 20th- and 21st-century war,
revolution and peace, including the Chiang
Kai-shek papers, Russian Revolutionary
albums, Hitler’s dental X-rays, black-and-white psychological warfare documents,
and even WWII survival kits from German
and American soldiers. Green Library’s
Special Collections boasts holdings dating
from the cuneiform tablets to rare scientific tomes to all of the Stanford family and
X-RATED: Kahlo’s love letters and Hitler’s scans are among
the holdings in Special Collections and the Hoover Archives.
University papers.
While students
love the excite-
ment of holding the
documents in their own
hands, one great benefit of
working with primary sources is
that the research also impacts their sense
of themselves as researchers, analysts and
contributors to historical records. Jessica
Pham, ’ 13, wrote her paper on the propa-
ganda materials and methods used to train
Hitler Youth. She writes, “Instead of read-
ing an author’s arguments and opinions in
a secondary source, I instead had to make
my own inferences and analyses while
examining primary sources. . . . There was
no other person’s argument attached to
the propaganda poster that targeted youth;
. . . I myself had to analyze the artistic
creations and see which aspects of them
were lies, without an author in a secondary
source to point them out to me.”
ASSU President Michael Cruz, ’ 12,
wrote as a freshman about Jane Stanford’s
struggles in “Love, Lawsuits, and Libel,”
and then for his sophomore paper, “From
Allies to Adversaries: A Reexamination
of Cold War Origins.” He writes, “I loved
my time in the Special Collections and
Archives! . . . I’ve gone on to be a History
major and am writing my the-
sis using materials from Spe-
cial Collections and Archives.”
When the topics excite
them, students have an
enthusiasm that is con-
tagious. David Newcomb,
’ 14, recently wrote on the
Spanish Civil War, using
the collections at Hoover. In the middle
of his annotated bibliography he wrote:
“Working in the archives is awesome. In
some vicarious way, by holding the physi-
cal documents, you are taken back to the
era and you begin to feel the sentiments of
revolution growing inside of you.”
‘I myself had to analyze
the artistic creations
and see which aspects
of them were lies.’
