Introduction: decoding historic documents
When you're doing historical research, you often encounter documents that are difficult to categorize. Without knowing more about suchworks, it's difficult to advance a knowledgeable argument about them. For instance, the Egyptian Red Book" (1885), a satire that is part of the Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA) , reveals little about itselfdirectly. It includes no author, introduction, table of contents, statement of purpose or even references to the figures represented in the text and the images. Few of the cartoonshave named figures or artists. The pamphlet presents itself to the reader like the political cartoons it contains: an overt message with very little background, a visualsermon to the converted with little consideration for those outside the know. If you would like a synopsis of the story addressed in the Red Book you may skip to our sketch of the historical events .In order to understand both the intended and historical meaning of the text and the images, it is important to find out what sort of work the "Egyptian RedBook" is. We will use the following questions to guide our research:
- What is the significance of the term "Red Book" in the title? To answer this question, we will look up the term in dictionaries and examine other red--and green--books.
- How do we categorize the work? We'll see how librarians have descibed it by using the catalog.
- How does this work compare with others that come from the same period and/or that address a similartopic? Let's analyze the "Red Book" in relation to newspapers and magazines from the same time period.
Defining key terms: "red book"
Often the first clue to a document's significance is its title. To begin, then, we should define what is meant by"Red Book". What is the significance of "Red" here--why not blue or green? The adjective "Egyptian" indicates that the work focuses on a particular country, but it's not clearhow. Time to head to the library to find more information! We will use online reference materials to begin our sleuthing. For the purposes of demonstration, we will describehow to conduct this research using Fondren Library's resources, but a similar process will work at most other research libraries.From the
Fondren home page select the Collections option and then the Online Reference Sources option that
appears next to it.