Primary Source Interpretation

For this assignment, you will need a copy of Andrew C. Isenberg, The California Gold Rush: A Brief History with Documents. Four copies will be on two-hour reserve in the library after March 28.

Historians interpret the past by asking questions and interpreting evidence that may provide the answers. In this assignment, you will use The California Gold Rush: A Brief History with Documents to ask and answer a question about the history of the United States in the middle of the 1800s.

Prompt:

By the time gold was discovered in California in 1848, the United States was already undergoing major changes. The California Gold Rush both reflected those changes and accelerated them. The Gold Rush, then, is an excellent place to look for answers to questions about American society in a moment of dramatic transformation. In this assignment, you will use The California Gold Rush: A Brief History with Documents as your tool for figuring out how the Gold Rush represented an important moment in American history.

Assignment:

Each part of this assignment should be answered in a document submitted to Canvas by April 25. Your answers should be clearly written and directly related to the instructions below.

Part 1: First, read the Andrew Isenberg’s “Introduction” (pp. 1-22). As you read, identify important themes or problems in the history of the Gold Rush. From those themes, develop historical questions about the Gold Rush.

Write 4 historical questions about the Gold Rush. (4 points)
A good historical question will not produce a yes/no answer or a single piece of data in response (a date, a person, an event). It is a question that asks why or how something important developed or what its larger significance was, or it invites interpretation of some specific aspect of a larger event in order to understand its root causes and significance. We’ll talk more about good historical questions—and look at some examples—in class.

Part 2: Second, find documents in “Part Two: The Documents” (beginning on p. 23) that you think will help you answer these questions.

Identify 4 sources for each question and write a one-sentence description of each source (so, 16 total sentences). (6 points)
Your source description should address why you think this source is related to the question you assigned it to.

Part 3: Finally, select one of your questions to answer.

Write a 300-word essay that answers one of your historical questions. (10 points)
Rephrase your question as a direct statement, and use the sources as your evidence to support that statement. Your essay should be no more than 300 words.

In your essay, cite any quote or evidence you take from a source by name of the source’s author and the source’s page number in parentheses. For example: (Azariah Smith, 25)

Your submitted assignment will look like this:

Part 1 & 2:

Question 1

Source description

Question 2

Source description

Question 3

Source description

Question 4

Source description

Part 3: Essay Title

300-word essay that answers one of the above questions.

Grading:

Part One: 4/4 points for 4 good historical questions. Complete-sentence questions that could reasonably be answered by the kinds of sources provided in The California Gold Rush: A Brief History with Documents.

Part Two: 6/6 points for 16 sources, accurate complete-sentences descriptions of how the source relates to the question to which you assign it.

Part Three: 10/10 points for a clear answer to one of your questions; the evidence is related to the question and is used to support the argument. The essay is clearly written, with few grammatical mistakes.

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