Got a good chuckle out of your response to my ruminations. I don't see any problem between our thoughts on this issue.

However, I am surprised that you think that scholarship must use secondary sources. I actually got a bit of a beating in my doctoral program on this issue. One of my committee members gave me a load over not using more PRIMARY sources than I did. (Writing a dissertation on Napoleon's Imperial Guard, while living in Cincinnati and the documents are in Paris, is a bit difficult.) Not being one to stand still, I did a statistical analysis of a couple dozen doctoral dissertations and showed him that I was on the high side of dissertations for the use of primary source documents. It really pissed him off. He became such a *ss, that I had him removed from my committee.

In my opinion, scholarship has more to do with coming up with some new information, some new historical truth, than it does with what sources you use. This is one place where primary sources are best, since this is the only place where, by definition, you can find stuff that no one else has published before.

Secondary sources have the problem of you don't know what sources that secondary source used, so you might, in fact, be citing the same original source several times while citing several different secondary sources. Frequently one issue that becomes common discussion in history all springs from a single source, even though it is found in hundreds of subsequent "secondary" works.

George