1st Year Secondary Literature Quiz

This quiz is designed to introduce some of the key points about selecting and using high-quality secondary literature in your essays. These skills will help you build your essays on firm foundations by making sure you are engaging with the most valuable materials. You can retake this quiz as many times as you like and can revisit it as often as needed over the course of your degree.

1. Secondary literature…

Records events as they are happening, or shortly afterwards.

Analyses primary sources and/or engages in scholarly debate over primary source analysis.

Compiles and indexes summaries of scholarly work into easily digestible and searchable formats.

Dramatizes historical events for entertainment.

2. We all know we shouldn’t be citing Wikipedia in our assignments, right? But why is that? (select all that apply)

We do not know who the authors are, because it is crowd sourced.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, making it vulnerable to being doctored.

It is free to access, which means it has not been proofread.

It is an encyclopaedia, making it a tertiary source, and not a direct product of scholarly research.

We cannot check its sources because it provides no references.

While it aims to cite its sources, the quality of those sources are mixed.

It has not necessarily been reviewed by experts on the topic.

3. Where are the best places to go for help with finding high-quality secondary literature for your assignments? (select all that apply)

The undergraduate handbook.

Your seminar tutor.

The module reading lists for the weeks relevant to your question.

Your personal tutor.

The AI Summary on Google Search.

4. What is different about how we are using “historiography” in these two sentences?
“Historiography has its trends and schools of thought, from Marxism to Post-Modernism.”
“We want you to situate your argument within the historiography.”

The first is discussing how we categorise historians’ work in academic History, the second is asking you to just list the categories relevant to your argument.

The first is explaining that every historian subscribes to a specific ideology, the second is asking you to discuss the work of other historians (the secondary literature).

The first is discussing the broader study of how we investigate and write History, the second is asking you to discuss how the historical scholarship (secondary literature) has influenced your answer.

There is no difference, this is a trick question.

In the next two questions, you are going to be given some scenarios in which an essay uses: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. by Talcott Parsons (New York, 1930). You need to decide whether it is being used as a primary source, secondary literature, or a tertiary source, in these scenarios:

5. “In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, beliefs that modernity and secularism were inter-twined were so common they can be seen, not only in newspaper articles, but academic work like Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”

Primary source

Secondary Literature

Tertiary source

6. “In his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber argues that by challenging religious institutions and emphasising the secular world, the Protestant Reformation was key to the development of Capitalism. Scholarship has since challenged these ideas on numerous fronts.”

Primary source

Secondary Literature

Tertiary source

7. How old, is too old? What are some of the issues with using scholarship that’s more than fifty years old as secondary literature? (select all that apply)

They didn’t have personal computers back then, so their methodology was completely different.

Some of its approaches and arguments may have faced significant critique.

The author is probably dead and so cannot respond to criticism.

More recent scholarship has probably re-evaluated these sources, and new sources may have come to light.

8. Sometimes it’s helpful to do an internet search of a topic area or historian, but why do we need to be careful with the AI generated summary on services like Google?

AI only uses poor-quality material like Wikipedia to generate its answers.

AI predicts the answer, it doesn’t think critically, so it can hallucinate responses and give incorrect information.

AI has no access to primary sources, so it cannot explain historiographical subjects.

9. You are writing an essay on the following question: “What role did religion play in the European colonisation of Latin America?”. What keyword search should return good results in the Warwick library catalogue?

Religion colonial Latin America

“Role of Religion in European colonisation of Latin America”

Religion colonisation “Latin America”

Early modern Christianity Latin America

10. Spot the odd one out, which of the following is not secondary literature:

Mary Jean Corbett, Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (Ithaca, 2008).

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (London, 1813).

Sally Holloway, ‘The Foods of Love? Food Gifts, Courtship and Emotions in Long Eighteenth-Century England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2 (2024) pp. 111-134.

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(New Wikipedia's logo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

(Max Weber, 1918, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

(The Mass of St. Gregory, feathers on wood panel, the oldest dated feather work with a Christian subject. Made by or for Diego Huanutzin, nephew and son in law of Moctezuma II to present to Pope Paul III, dated 1539, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

(Portrait of Jane Austen, 1873, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Department of History

1st Year Secondary Literature Quiz

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