Source Analysis Paper 1

Your Name

HI 4313/ HI 6313

Instructor’s Name

Date

Guidelines for the Source Analysis Papers

In order to understand the past, historians rely upon primary sources. Put simply, primary sources are those historical records contemporary to the era being studied. Thus, a historian writing about the public reaction to the Constitutional Convention while it was convening behind closed doors would have to draw on documents (letters, diary entries, newspaper articles, etc.) written between May 25 and September 17, 1787. A book or article written in 1840 (or 1980 or 2012) describing the nation’s reaction to the gathering in Philadelphia would be considered a secondary rather than a primary source. This reliance on primary sources clearly limits the questions historians can answer about the past since not all events leave a clear documentary record. Even so, historians have proven enormously creative in utilizing all kinds of primary sources. Principally, they have relied upon a wide assortment of written documents, including newspapers, journals, pamphlets, books, cartoons, diaries, letters, financial statements, congressional bills, and all sorts of governmental correspondence and records.

For this assignment, you are to imagine that you are a historian who has happened across the primary documents that you will analyze. You may use the documents in the reader (McMillen, et al.), but you may also track down other primary documents in libraries and archives. For that matter you may turn to documents that have been digitized by reputable online repositories (you can find a sample list of such sites below).

Once you’ve settled on the documents in which you are interested, you can begin to ask questions of them: What do the documents reveal about the people who wrote them? What do they reveal about the society in which their authors lived? What did the authors value? Why were they writing? To whom were they directing their attention? What unspoken assumptions and/or biases are evident? (Non-written sources—things like artwork and photographs—demand similar questions. Should you desire to use such sources, the instructor would be happy to offer guidance about the sorts of questions you might want to ask about them.*)

Keeping in mind these kinds of questions—as well as the historical context provided by the textbook and other readings—you need to evaluate and analyze historical documents about two topics of your choosing. Thus, you need to think about what sorts of questions the documents will permit you to answer about those topics, and then you need to fit those questions into the larger context of the period in the New South about which you are writing. While you do not need to write the question that you think the documents answers into the paper, that question—or those questions—should be obvious from the paper’s thesis. Indeed, your answer to your research question is your thesis, and your paper should be organized around it. It should be provable, compelling, and supported by specific evidence from the documents.

As you examine the documents, you will often find that they contradict each other. If that proves to be the case, you’ll need to figure out which documents you give more credence to and why that is. Similarly, you’ll need to evaluate whether or not the documents fit neatly into the narrative laid out in the textbook or whether they complicate it. If they do complicate it, how so and to what degree? In short, you need to ask the sorts of questions that southern historians ask about the South’s past and provide convincing answers based on primary documents. As ever, the instructor will be happy to work with you and answer any questions you might have.

Length:Each paper should be no less than three pages and no more than five pages.

Number of documents to be analyzed:Each paper should analyze no fewer than four documents and no more than ten of them.

Multiple papers on the same subject:Students cannot write both papers about the exact same topic. They must choose either two distinct topics or look at one topic at two different times. Thus, a student could write a paper on two clearly distinct topics, say the Congressional response to the KKK in the 1870s and southern responses to Ronald Reagan’s election. Or a student could write two papers about a similar topic at different times in the experience of the New South. A student interested in agrarian discontent, for instance, might write one paper about the Populists and another about farmer discontent in the region during the 1970s.

Summarizing vs. Analyzing:The paper does not require you to summarize primary documents, but to analyze them. Analysis of the documents requires that you think deeply about them and arrange them in such a way as to make an argument. In other words, you must lay out an original thesis that presents a specific, clear, and compelling argument for the essay. You should then incorporate evidence from the primary sources to support your thesis. (Please keep in mind that the introductory blurbs to the documents in the reader constitute a secondary rather than primary source.)

Style:All papers should be written in a suitably academic style. This is not to be written as if it were a text message composed to a good friend. The expectation is that each paper will be coherently organized, tightly written, and carefully proofread. Indeed, while the paper will be judged principally on the merits of its analysis of the documents, grammatical errors and typos can prove distracting and thus factor into the grading. In addition to astute analysis, then, the quality of the writing matters.

Formatting:The paper should be double-spaced in Times New Roman 12 point font using Microsoft Word’s default margins. There is no need to include a title page; instead your heading on the first page should look like the heading above, except where it says “your name” you should insert your name; where it says “instructor’s name,” you should write the instructor’s name; and where it says “date,” you should write the date you wrote it (or the date you’re turning it in).

Citations:You may cite documents from the reader parenthetically at the end of sentences, but you must cite documents that do not appear in the reader according to the Chicago Manual of Style, the standard style guide for historians. A quick guide is available online at the following url: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. End notes are preferable to footnotes. The instructor will be glad to answer any questions you might have about proper citations.

Due Date:See syllabus

Academic Honesty:All papers are to be completed by individual students. They are not intended to be group exercises. By submitting a paper, a student is implicitly claiming sole authorship—that he or she received no unauthorized assistance. Furthermore, students must cite any outside sources that they consult. Plagiarism of any sort is unacceptable; consequently you must not attempt to pass off somebody else’s words or ideas as your own. Mississippi State University has an approved Honor Code that applies to all students. The code is as follows: “As a Mississippi State University student I will conduct myself with honor and integrity at all times. I will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor will I accept the actions of those who do.” Cheating of any sort is absolutely unacceptable and will result in an “XF” for the course and possibly other sanctions decided at the discretion of the instructor and the university. Examples of suitable online archive repositories: – Documenting the American South (http://docsouth.unc.edu/) – American Memory: National Digital Library (http://memory.loc.gov/) – Avalon Project: documents in law, history and diplomacy (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm) – Making of America: 19th century books and magazines (http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/) – New York Public Library Digital Library Collection (http://www.nypl.org/digital/)

* Oral histories offer another potentially valuable source, but for a number of reasons (including the fact that they require university certification and faculty oversight) are rather difficult to employ for this particular assignment.

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