I believe that references from the past can be better than references today. Older references can be useful for giving historians a glimpse not only the time period the reference is from but how society was and how people were viewed. For example if you look at a reference from the Jim Crow era, there might be social norms and words that offend us today but they shaped the historians back then. Older material is useful because we have so much new information that it is good for students and historians to get a glimpse of the past from another perspective. I believe older materials are better because now a days, people can get new information in a book store or off the internet. But the best stuff is found in libraries or scholarly websites. Although new information is always being talked about, it is the older materials that give students and historians a perspective they might have thought they could not discover.
Brundage's suggestion to start your research not on the internet but a print database I believe is not accurate. Print databases now a days have their resources on online websites like JSTOR and other scholarly base websites. Perhaps Brundage is a little bit old school, but you can easily find a publication on a website like JSTOR. He might be right that the print database is larger, like I said you can easily attain any print article online. A researcher can type in a keyword on JSTOR and a thousand articles show up. I feel that Brundage makes a good point to start with a print database, but I believe you can start with an online database.
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