Format: 3-4 pages, 12-point font, Times New Roman or similar, double-spaced, 1-inch margins, an imaginative title, page numbers, footnote citations (see Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History, Chapter 7) and/or below.
N.B.: A well-organized paper will have a strong introductory paragraph with a clearly stated thesis. It will feature transitions between paragraphs and topic sentences for each paragraph. Each paragraph will explore an aspect of your thesis statement and will then support/explain that aspect with evidence from the texts. Instead of dropping nice quotes in from the texts, explain why they are meaningful, or how they fit in with your argument and thesis.
Analyzing a Primary Source Document:
As we have seen, primary source documents are a key component of an historian’s reconstruction and analysis of a particular time period. For this assignment, you will analyze one primary source document of your choosing from Chapters 1-3 in Foner’s Voices of Freedom.
Write an essay in which you conduct a “close reading” or analysis of the document.
Some questions to consider in your essay: What type of document is it (newspaper editorial, personal correspondence, etc.)? Why does the document exist? What motives prompted the author to write the material down in this form? Who wrote this document? Who or what is left out of the document— women, children, other minorities, members of the majority—and what does this do in regard to the document’s perspective? In addition to the main subject, what other kinds of information can be obtained from the document (by “reading between the lines”)? How do the subjects of the document relate to what we know about the broader society? What was the meaning of the document in its own moment? What might its meaning be for the historian today? What does the document tell us about change in society?
You need not address every question above. These are suggestions.
In your analysis of the document, keep in mind the various aspects of primary source analysis we have focused on in class: date, authorship, audience, purpose, language/word choice, limitations/silences.
Your concluding paragraph should not simply wrap everything up in a neat package. Instead, use this paragraph as an opportunity to think about what the themes/ideas found in the document mean for later decades of U.S. history.
