You’ve spent a lot of time this quarter tracking down original media accounts from various times in U.S. history. You’ve examined original articles in the colonial press, the partisan press, 19th-century magazines, Civil War newspapers, early 20th century journalism, and the ethnic press. You’ve had the opportunity to review original advertisements, early radio clips, films, newsreels, military information campaigns and more.\n\nI assigned these activities to give you a first-hand sense of how media have evolved throughout U.S. history and to introduce you to some of the online databases and archival materials available for your research. By browsing through these resources, you’ve had the opportunity to experiment with various search strategies, which, I hope, will help you when you want–or need–to track down original sources in the future.\n\nResearch Topic: For our final exercise, I want you to select one of the following topics discussed in Barnouw’s The Sponsor and find at least four primary (authentic) U.S. media sources directly involving your topic that were published or produced during the time period discussed by Barnouw. Strive to find different types of media forms, too.\n\nThe anti-Communist campaign against the CBS television show, Danger (pp. 48-49)\nThe Federal Trade Commission\’s actions against the advertising campaigns for Rolaids, Campbell Soup and Colgate Rapid Shave Creme (pp. 90-91)\nThe controversy surrounding the Atomic Energy Commission\’s promotion and marketing of \”the peaceful atom\” (pp. 162-167)\nStep #1: Plan your research strategies\n\nSelect your topic.\nOutline your search strategies, including your ideas about how to search for various types of primary media sources (possible databases, key words, time frame and the like).\nReview Barnouw’s endnotes to see if he documented the information. (You’ll quickly see the value of complete citations, including page numbers.)\nLook for original ads, programming, etc. depending on the topic (remember the advertising, film, newsreels and broadcast archives that you’ve browsed through this quarter).\nSearch for newspaper, magazine and trade industry articles (broadcast and advertising) to see if the print media covered the topic (remember all of the full-text databases available through the UW libraries).\nCheck for video, film and audio clips (remember YouTube, google and the UW databases).\nStep #2: Prepare your findings\n\nBegin with the topic you selected and the page numbers where it’s discussed in The Sponsor.\nIdentify your media selections and provide complete bibliographic citations. This time you do not need to include a section about your search strategies; however, if you want to explain how and why you selected your sources, please feel free to do so. If you decide to use only one media form (for example, newspapers), then be sure to explain the steps you took to locate other media forms.\nSummarize briefly your selections and compare and/or contrast your findings with Barnouw’s points (about two pages). \nProvide complete bibliographic citations of your four primary media sources.\nInclude working links/URLs or copies of your sources.\nProofread carefully.\nGrading Criteria\n\nSuccess at finding four appropriate primary media sources (60 points); Summary/analysis of findings (30 points); Documentation/bibliographic citations (10 points); Missing links/copies (-1.0)\n\n
