I'm grading papers this morning, and it is gratifying to see papers that are using primary sources. One student turned in a paper about colonial mental illness treatment. While it had some factual errors (based on the secondary sources she used), it was a well-written and well-structured essay. Most gratifying of all was to see that she was using primary sources, such as Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, volume 7, which contains a discussion of the colonial government assisting a man in building an insane asylum for his son.
Students today have so many advantages over when I was an undergraduate--and books.google.com is one of them.
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