Understanding the past and conducting research takes a leap forward when we delve into the realm of primary sources. Unlike secondary sources, which offer interpretations and analyses of historical events or phenomena, primary sources bring us face-to-face with the raw materials of history itself. These can be diaries, letters, speeches, photographs, artifacts, scientific data – the very things created at the time we are studying. Engaging with primary sources equips students with a unique set of skills and fosters a deeper understanding of the past (or present) under investigation.

Firstly, primary sources hone critical thinking and analysis. Unlike the information offered in textbooks, they require students to become detectives, meticulously examining the content, language, and context. A student analyzing a political cartoon from the French Revolution must consider the artist's bias, the intended audience, and the historical context to decipher its true meaning. This process cultivates a healthy skepticism towards information and the ability to construct well-reasoned arguments based on evidence.

Secondly, primary sources allow students to connect directly with the voices of the past. Reading a soldier's diary from World War I provides a more visceral understanding of the war's impact than any textbook account. Similarly, analyzing a scientific experiment from the dawn of a new discovery allows students to appreciate the challenges and triumphs of scientific progress. This direct encounter fosters empathy and a richer understanding of the human experience across time.

Thirdly, primary sources can reveal hidden perspectives and challenge established narratives. History is often written by the victors, leaving the voices of marginalized groups unheard. Unearthing primary sources like slave narratives or protest songs can illuminate these forgotten perspectives and offer a more nuanced understanding of the past. This challenges students to critically evaluate traditional narratives and consider the complexities of history.

Of course, working with primary sources requires additional effort. Locating them can be challenging, and deciphering their content, especially older documents, may require additional research. However, the rewards are substantial. By mastering the skills of source evaluation, analysis, and interpretation, students become not just consumers of knowledge, but active participants in the construction of historical narratives.

Primary sources are not simply dusty relics of the past; they are vibrant portals to a bygone era. By incorporating primary sources into their research, college students embark on a journey of discovery, developing critical thinking skills, gaining a richer understanding of the past, and potentially even uncovering new perspectives. This empowers them to become not just informed students, but independent thinkers equipped to grapple with the complexities of the world around them.
 

Primary sources, the firsthand accounts and creations of a particular time period, offer an unparalleled window into the past. But unlike textbooks, they don't interpret information for present day users. To unlock their secrets, we need to become active investigators. Here's a roadmap to navigate the world of primary sources:

Step 1: Consider the Source.
•    Who created it? What was their background, profession, and possible biases?
•    What is it? Is it a diary entry reflecting personal views, or a government document aiming for objectivity?
•    When and where was it created? Understanding the historical context is crucial.
Step 2: Decipher the Content.
•    Read actively. Annotate the text, underline key points, and look up unfamiliar terms.
•    Consider the language. Older texts might have different meanings or colloquialisms.
Step 3: Analyze and Interpret.
•    What is the main point? What message is the source trying to convey?
•    Is there evidence to support the claims? Can you corroborate the information with other sources?
•    What is the source NOT telling you? Limitations and biases are important to consider.
Step 4: Connect and Contextualize.
•    How does this source fit into the bigger picture? Does it confirm or challenge existing narratives?
•    What can you learn about the time period or event from this source?

Reading primary sources takes practice, but the rewards are immense. By becoming a detective of the past, you'll gain critical thinking skills, develop a deeper understanding of history, and potentially uncover hidden perspectives. 

The Catholic University Archives are part of the Mullen Library Special Collections. Special collections are libraries or library units that house materials requiring specialized security and user services. Special collections can be found in many different organizations including research libraries, universities, colleges, schools, national libraries, public libraries, museums, art galleries, archives, historic houses, cathedrals, subscription libraries, learned societies, hospitals, companies and monasteries.

Materials housed in special collections can be in any format (including rare books, manuscripts, photographs, archives, ephemera, and digital records), and are generally characterized by their artifactual or monetary value, physical format, uniqueness or rarity, and/or an institutional commitment to long-term preservation and access. They can also include association with important figures or institutions in history, culture, politics, sciences, or the arts.

At the Catholic University, Special Collections consists of four distinct parts which include the Rare Books, Museum, University Archives, Manuscript Collections, and the Oliveira Lima Library. The Rare Books Collections contain approximately 70,000 volumes, which range from medieval documents to first editions of twentieth century authors. The Manuscript Collection, also known as the American Catholic History Collection, collects personal papers and institutional records which document the heritage and history of the American Catholic people. The Museum Collection contains approximately 6,000 objects, including paintings, devotional objects, and anthropological materials. The Lima Library preserves, acquires, describes and makes available materials relevant to the study of Portuguese and Brazilian history and culture.

The University Archives serves as the official and institutional memory of The Catholic University of America. As such, it acquires and administers non-current university records. University records are organized by office, department, or program and document the history and activities of the institution. Materials often include minutes, reports, correspondence, photographs, and audiovisual materials. 

This is the envelope in which Pope Leo XIII sent his letter establishing the Catholic University of America in 1887. Note the red papal seal. An artifact related to the establishment of The Catholic University of America in the late 19th century, it is a primary source of that time period from our University records. 

Pope Leo XIII Letter establishing The Catholic University of America

Other digitized documents related to the found of the University:

Catholic University of America Founding Documents

Special Collections collects manuscript material documenting the history of the American Catholic people. This includes but is not limited to individuals and organizations related to the history of Catholic social action, philanthropy, social thought, labor, immigration, international peace, and the poor as well as Catholic intellectual, educational, cultural, religious, and spiritual lives.

Manuscripts consist of all materials that are not otherwise classified as official University records, and include many types of unpublished primary sources such as literary manuscripts, letters, diaries, scrapbooks, business and organization records, photographs, maps, oral histories, sound recordings, film, and video.

Collections range in size and scope from smaller collections of personal papers (less than 1 linear foot) to massive collections of records belonging to major national Catholic organizations such as the National Catholic Education Association (nearly 700 linear feet). 

The Ursuline Convent Collection

The Ursulines are a prominent order of nuns in United States Catholic history. Founded in Brescia, Italy by St. Angela Merici in 1535, they came first to what is today the U.S. via New Orleans, Louisiana in 1727. Admitting Protestant girls for education helped mitigate anti-Catholicism in the years prior to the American Civil War. 

The Ursuline convent on Mount Benedict in Charlestown, Massachusetts, was the realization of a dream of the Rev. John Thayer (1758 - 1815), a Protestant who converted to Catholicism and served as a priest in Boston from 1788 until 1792. The final years of his life were spent in Ireland, where he procured funds for establishing a convent in Boston. The funds that Thayer collected were remitted to the care of the Rev. Dr. Francis Anthony Matignon (1753- 1818), who encouraged his parishioners in Boston to contribute to the project. The convent, however, did not become a reality until 1817, when the Rev. John Lefebvre de Cheverus (1768 - 1836), Bishop of Boston, got behind the effort. The Ursulines soon outgrew their original quarters and removed to a new edifice on Mount Benedict in July 1828.

The original members of the religious community were recruited by Thayer during his fundraising campaign in Limerick, Ireland. There he inspired two of the original founders, Mary and Catherine Ryan, to make their novitiate under the Ursulines of Three Rivers, Canada, which was a branch of the Ursulines of Quebec. Soon the convent consisted of ten sisters, the majority of them coming to Boston from Quebec including the Superior, Mother Mary Edmond St. George.

The Ursuline community's principal mission was to administer a boarding school for girls aged six to fourteen. The number of students rose to 55, a few of whom were French-Canadian, while the greater number were children of New England Protestants. The education was comprehensive, covering religion, classics, music, and social graces.

Public opinion soon was to rise against the Ursulines and their school. The revival of evangelical Protestantism in the early 1800s, plus disdain for working-class Irish immigrants, gave rise to militant anti-Catholicism and reemphasis on traditional nativism. The convent was an obvious target, and rumors spread that the Ursulines were mistreating their students. When the townspeople gathered at the gates of the building on August 11, 1834, they proceeded to burn down the convent without interference from authorities.

After the fire the Ursulines attempted to continue their work in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Once again, they were harassed. As a result, some of the religious decided to return to Quebec, and others joined the Ursulines of New Orleans. In 1838, an attempt was made to restore the Ursuline community in Boston, but there were no accessions to their ranks. Two years later, their Bostonian ministry was disbanded.

The collection spans the years 1832 - 1903 and includes correspondence, a hand-written copy of an eyewitness report of the convent's burning, a scrapbook history, printed items including journals, pamphlets, and newspaper clippings, and a photo and sketch of the convent. It documents the ministry of the Ursulines of Quebec in Boston during the early 1800s and demonstrates the strong anti-Catholic sentiment that existed in New England.

The entire digitized Ursuline Convent Collection.

An ad promoting the Ursuline Convent's educational services.

Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor

The papers of Terence Vincent Powderly, also part of the Manuscripts Collection at the Catholic University of America Archives, document his impact on American history and consist largely of his official correspondence as General Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, 1879-1893, as well as his tenure as an official for both the Immigration and Labor departments, 1897-1924, and Mayor of Scranton, 1878-1884. In addition, there is personal correspondence, photographs, memorabilia, legal and financial records.

In the 1880s, the Knights of Labor was the largest labor union in the United States, and while they were predominantly Catholic in membership, the Catholic Church wasn't sure Catholics should be Knights. Some priests and bishops were perplexed by the secrecy and perceived radicalism within the union and sought to bar Catholics from joining. Others believed that unions could promote better lives for workers. In 1888 the matter was resolved through the efforts of Knights Leader Terence Powderly and Baltimore Archbishop James Gibbons, when their attempts to gain Vatican permission for Catholics to join the union met with success. Indeed, the issuance by Pope Leo XIII of Rerum Novarum followed Archbishop Gibbons' plea to allow Catholics to participate in unions.

A Finding Aid to the Papers of Terence Powderly

Sample document: 

This letter from a Knights of Labor member to Terence Powderly written in 1882 underscores the concerns some had with the Catholic Church’s skepticism over laborers joining unions. 

The American Catholic History Classroom
The American Catholic History Classroom is a continuously-updated primary document site featuring a range of materials related to the American Catholic experience. The online classroom is built around the University Archives collections. Several of its pages draw revolve around labor-related collections like the Powderly papers to explore issues related to American Catholics, Catholic social teaching, and the labor movement.

Catholics and Labor Unions focuses on the Knights of Labor and the Catholic Church.

Mother Jones and the Children's Crusade (1903) explores the work of Mary Harris "Mother" Jones work supporting striking textile workers, many of whom were children, in Philadelphia in 1903. See also, our digitized Mother Jones Collection.

Monsignor George Higgins, Cesar Chavez, and the Unionization of California Agriculture, 1955-1977 explores the work of the Catholic Church in helping to unionize striking workers in California.

Catholics and A Living Wage revolves around the work of priest, economist, and early twentieth-century Catholic University Professor, Father John A Ryan: How much do you need to live? Can you have too much? How much is too little? Prompted by the increasingly obvious gulf that developed between the richest and poorest Americans in the wake of the dramatic industrial change in the late nineteenth can early twentieth century U.S., Father Ryan addresses the question of what constituted a living wage from a Catholic perspective.

Like other Americans, Catholics in the U.S. were shocked when they learned of the violence being committed against Germany's Jews during Kristallnacht, the name given to the anti-Semitic pogroms that took place across Germany and Nazi-occupied territories on November 9-10, 1938. It offended their sense of Christian love and tolerance, religious freedom, individual rights and basic human dignity. Catholics, however, did view the persecution of the Jews in 1938 slightly differently than those of other faiths, as their culture, while American, had its distinct aspects. By 1938 there were over 20 million Catholics in the American Church. They were concentrated largely in cities, where they had created networks of parishes, schools, colleges, orphanages, seminaries, and hospitals. Persistent anti-Catholicism often meant that Catholics of a range of classes and ethnic origins felt less comfortable in public institutions than within their own. It also meant, however, that the U.S. Catholic Church, while managed by a predominantly Irish- and German-American hierarchy, was ethnically diverse. Hence, Catholics cultivated a sense of respect for ethnic diversity, necessitated in part by the church's inner variety and in part because it was an American ideal.

American Catholics, however, also drew on other practices embedded within both their religious and national traditions. Anti-Judaism-theological opposition to Judaism-had been present in Catholic theology and culture from its earliest days. Catholic anti-Judaism informed the emergence of racial anti-Semitism-the race-based hostility toward Jews practiced by the Nazis. Anti-Semitism was and is also American. As the historian David Gerber notes, because the American political system emphasizes ideals of religious liberty and individual expression, anti-Semitism usually remains "ordinary," practiced privately and generally without government sanction on an every day level, in social, economic, and educational institutions, through random verbal and physical harassment, and through the promotion of negative stereotypes in art and media. 6 While less intense and consequential than in Nazi Germany, then, anti-Semitism was nonetheless alive and well in the United States, particularly in the 1930s. The mid-to-late 1930s was a period in which "extra-ordinary anti-Semitism" threatened to become the basis of a mass political movement in the United States. This anti-Semitism blamed Jews for the Great Depression and had strong anti-Communist elements-indeed many of these anti-Semites admired Adolf Hitler and detested Stalin's Soviet Union, fearing its atheism would spread to other parts of the world. Father Charles Coughlin, a priest in Michigan, exploited this anti-Semitism in his popular weekly radio broadcasts and publications.

The Catholic University broadcast condemning the Nazi pogroms against the Jews in Germany, delivered on November 16, 1938, was organized by Father Maurice Sheehy, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Education at Catholic University and assistant to the Catholic University rector. Sheehy was an adept organizer who managed the university radio station, possessed many contacts within the church, in the Washington, D.C. community, and in national politics. Sheehy gave the first address of the 27 minute broadcast, which was carried by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) radio networks. Sheehy was joined in the broadcast by Archbishop John J. Mitty of San Francisco, California; Bishop John M. Gannon of Erie, Pennsylvania; Bishop Peter L. Ireton of Richmond, Virginia; former Democratic Presidential Candidate and Governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith, and Catholic University Rector, Monsignor Joseph M. Corrigan. The participants were selected to represent both lay Catholics (hence Smith's inclusion) and clerical leaders' unified view that the violence unleashed on Jews and Jewish property in Germany was immoral, contrary to Christian teaching and against American ideas of religious and civic freedom. They also compared the treatment of the Jews by the Germans to the persecutions of Catholics in Spain and Mexico. ⁹

This American Catholic History Classroom website, American Catholics and Nazi Antisemitism, explores the Catholic University broadcast in the 1930s context, and includes a recording of the broadcast itself.

Special Collections oversees the university museum collection. The first donations of museum items date to before the school opened in 1889. Up until 1905 the collection was displayed in Caldwell Hall. Starting in 1905 and continuing until 1976 parts of the collection were either displayed in McMahon Hall or Mullen Library, or were put into storage. In 1976 the university museum collection was put under the management of the Archives and the collection was housed in Curley Hall vault, with items being used in campus exhibition or loaned to campus offices to be displayed and enjoyed as office decoration.

Archbishop John Carroll (1736-1815) was the first bishop and archbishop of Baltimore and founder of the American Catholic hierarchy. Educated by the Jesuits in Bohemia Manor in Cecil County, Maryland, then under the Jesuits in Europe, Carroll was ordained a priest in 1761. After teaching and traveling in Europe in the 1760s, he returned to Maryland in 1771 after the suppression of the Jesuit order.

Carroll sympathized with the American Revolutionary cause and accompanied Benjamin Franklin, his cousin Charles Carroll, and Samuel Chase on a diplomatic mission to Canada to gain support for the cause of the patriots in 1776. He absorbed the ideas of the American fight for independence, believing that the emerging system of government would greatly benefit the Roman Catholic church in the emerging United States. As with many other leaders of the fledgling republic at the time, Carroll’s own Jesuit order and he himself were involved in the institution of slavery. 

Carroll is known, as historian Thomas Spalding notes, “the architect of the Maryland tradition in American Catholicism.” He communicated on administrative matters related to the American Catholic church with the Holy see, and was named the first bishop of the first diocese, that of Baltimore, in 1789. Additionally, his civic mindedness and patriotism informed his early leadership of the church. He supported principles such as the freedom of conscience and separation of church and state. He believed Catholics should participate in public affairs, and helped found numerous Catholic educational institutions, as well as organizations such as the Library Company of Baltimore, and the Maryland Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge. 

The University Museum collection contains A set of orange vestments that belonged to Archbishop John Carroll (1735-1815), first American bishop, ordained in 1790. They include: chasuble, tunic, dalmatic, chalice veil, stole and maniples.

The Rare Books Collection in Mullen Library, part of Special Collections at the Catholic University of America, supports and enrich the instructional, research and service programs of the University and to provide service to the research community at large. Rare Books acquires, arranges, describes, preserves, interprets and makes available to researchers, materials, which, because of their uniqueness, value, provenance, content, form, or physical condition which require special treatment. The holdings of the Rare Books Collection, some 70,000 volumes, range from medieval documents to first editions of twentieth century authors. 

The University’s Rare Books collection contains an unparalleled collection of catechisms, donated in the 1960s in large part by Rev. Roderick A. MacEachen, a Professor who taught Catechetics in the University’s School of Theology. Along with catechisms given by several other donors, the collection amounts to nearly 4,000 volumes and date from the sixteenth century to the late twentieth century. Rev. MacEachen collected the manuals during his travels through Europe and the United States. Several of the holdings in this collection are the only copies known to exist and thus they classify as rare books. The entire collection is of great value to the study of the history and development of catechetics — a little-explored area at the present time.

The catechisms are not yet available digitally, but can be accessed by appointment in the Rare Books reading room.