While researching the economic impact of the 1918 flu pandemic, I needed original hospital admission records from a small Midwestern town that were not digitized.

My goal was to locate the records, assess their reliability, and extract data to support my thesis on regional health outcomes.

I contacted the local historical society, arranged an on‑site visit, negotiated access with the archivist, photographed the fragile ledgers, and used paleography techniques to transcribe the data. I cross‑checked the figures with state health reports to verify accuracy.

The primary data revealed a 30% higher mortality rate than previously reported, strengthening my argument and earning my paper the department’s best research award.

In a project comparing narratives of the 1848 Revolutions, I encountered starkly different accounts from contemporary newspapers and personal diaries.

I needed to assess which sources offered the most reliable perspective for my comparative analysis.

I examined each source’s provenance, author bias, publication context, and corroborated facts with secondary scholarship. I applied source criticism frameworks (e.g., external and internal criticism) and weighted accounts accordingly.

My balanced synthesis highlighted the political bias in newspaper reports while validating personal diaries as primary eyewitness evidence, leading to a nuanced chapter praised by my advisor.