Richard J Walter Secondary Sources

When looking at secondary sources one must take a different view than when analyzing a primary source. There are several credentials that must be met for a truly reliable secondary source. First, who is the author, are there any authors, or was a university or nonprofit responsible for the source? Second, who published the source, is it a website, a journal or a book? Third, who is this source geared toward and what does it want its audience to know or understand? Fourth, what makes this source so credible and reliable? Finally, the most crucial item to look at is the source itself, what is its argument, where is it at in the scholarly conversation, if it is in the conversation at all. Those are the primary objectives to look at when analyzing a secondary source. The Source that will go through all these checkpoints in this paper is an article written by Richard J. Walter titled The Intellectual Background of the 1918 University Reform in Argentina. …show more content…
Walter is a Professor at Washington University in St. Louis in St. Louis Missouri. He has been writing pieces that cover the Latin American countries as early as 1968 with his first book Student Politics in Argentina: The University Reform and its Effects, 1918-1964. He has an extensive history with writing about Latin American countries like Argentina, Buenos Aires, and Chile. In fact, it appears as if the source is one of his earlier works in his career. As for the publisher or who takes responsibility for the article being presented, that would be Duke University Press. Duke University is a very well known publisher in the fields of humanities and social sciences. It sets very high standards for the books, reviews, and articles they publish. The credibility of this article is huge when seeing that the author and the publisher are both very well known. The next objective is to examine the audience this piece wishes to influence and the references the author uses in the