who can we quote in national/ personality study (1 Viewer)

[sweetalmond]

I'm doing south africa for national study and nelson mandela for personality. My teacher says we don't necessarily have to quote historians, like we can quote mandela himself, or his colleagues, his family, journalists, prisoners who were with him, even groups of people like what a political party etc.
But should we have a balance of historians and non-historians?
Also, how many historians would constitute a wide-range because south Africa and mandela is not the most widely taken elective for the course so there is basically very minimal information on historians that is accessible to the normal student (unless the library bothers to buy specific books, there are mostly just biographies with fragments of relevant info to the course. furthermore, South Africa books have basic, elementary information, and historians on the subject are hard to access due to my local and school libraries mostly having non-academic, more picture-book/ textbook versions.
The reason I asked about whether we should include more historians than non-historians is I was reading part of an essay by a friend from another school who got band 6 on Russia, and she mostly included varying historians. however, I have a lack of access to varying historians, I think the only one I have is Robert Ross.

 

[atcha]

If you are close enough, just go to the State Library of NSW. They have a massive range of books and I am sure will have texts from relevant historians. You don't want to spam a huge range of historians in your responses because it just dilutes it but it should be fine to have a couple that you know quite well.

 

[cem]

You can join the State Library online and access a large section of their catalogue online - costs nothing to join.

Don't overload your responses with quotes anyway. If the quote isn't enhancing your response it is simply a quote.

Remember too that it is probably better to paraphrase the historians general idea as that shows that you actually understand the historian's argument rather than just know a random quote or two.