Research help/suggestions??
I’m an undergrad history major working on my honors thesis and am struggling finding materials - I want to write on sports in the Cold War and focus on hockey if it works out. A stipulation to graduate from my university with honors is that we have to contribute something new to the discussion on our chose topic. With that in mind, I’m struggling to find anything documenting changes in American governing bodies (USOC, USA Hockey, AAU, etc) that focus on winning competitions with the Soviets.
I’m kind of at a dead end right now. If anyone on this thread has any suggestions for me I’d be very grateful!!
If I might offer a slightly different perspective?
Right now you're in a place where you have a topic and a thesis already in mind, and you can't prove it because you can't find the sources.
Why not start with the sources that you do have, and see where they lead you? You can use secondary sources to show you some frameworks that scholars tend to use, like: take a body of similar sources (newspaper articles, diaries, rules sets) from different years, and analyze changes or patterns over time. Use secondary sources to provide context.
Like (and I am making this up here) if you find a lot of rules changes in US hockey organizations related to roughing and safety, maybe someone's written a book about other changes that occurred, like an increase in intraleague rivalries or some major blowup among certain players at the college level.
It's much easier to start with what you have than with what you don't! :D
u/sunagainstgold is absolutely correct; when formulating a historical argument, "cherry-picking" sources is frowned upon. All of my professors, undergrad through grad school, stressed the importance of following the sources, not forcing the sources to align with a specific point/argument.
Perhaps also look at the 1980 Olympics...I believe that year the U.S. pulled a coup and beat the Soviet hockey team which was expected to win the gold medal. Since the film "Miracle" is an adaptation of that event, I suspect/expect that several sources exist with details which may help your paper.