Pre-Break Schedule
Week 0 (January 22): Introduction
In class:
- PHILIP J. LAMPI, “The Federalist Party Resurgence, 1808–1816: Evidence from the New Nation Votes Database,” Journal of the Early Republic 33, no. 2 (2013): 255–81.
- Mapping Early American Elections project team, Mapping Early American Elections, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University (2019)
- Making Memes, Mashable
Due January 27:
- Join the class Slack group and post your meme about this class in the #memes channel (due Monday).
- Read:
- Steven Li, “How Does the Internet Work?", Medium
- Caleb McDaniel, “How to Read for History”
Week 1 (January 27, 29): Library visit + How the Internet works
Monday, January 27, 2020
In class: Library visit! Meet at Fenwick 1014A—do not come to the classroom!
Due February 3:
- Small project #1: Register for a domain at Reclaim Hosting and install WordPress. Pick a theme and write a blog post about your goals for this semester in this class (be thoughtful about this!). Post the URL of your post to Blackboard.
- Read “The American Revolution” in The American Yawp and write a post about it following the assignment parameters on the Assignments page. (Remember to post your link to Blackboard!)
Week 2 (February 3, 5): Using the Internet to find credible sources / American Revolution Part 1
In class
- Karen Yuan and Matt Peterson, “The History of ‘Fake News’ in America," The Atlantic, January 9, 2018
Due February 10:
- Blog post: Select a conflict that you’ll be focusing your energy on this semester. Write a blog post about why you picked that conflict. (Post your link to Blackboard!)
- Small project #2: Install Zotero and sign up for an account. (Watch these videos for a better idea of how to install and use Zotero.) Add one of each of these types of sources about your conflict to our shared class Zotero group: book, journal article, webpage. Make sure the metadata is complete and accurate! On your blog, write a post explaining why each of these sources should be considered reliable (according to the criteria discussed in class); include a bibliography generated from Zotero.
Week 3 (February 10, 12): Using and citing primary sources / American Revolution Part 2
Due February 17:
- Blog post: Write a blog post reflecting on your experience of copying from Monday’s class. How does what we did change your understanding of how communications worked during 19th century wars? How does it connect to the way information travels today? How does it relate to modern ideas about preservation and access to materials?
- Reading blog post: Jonathan R. Dull, “A New Navy Fights France and the Barbary States, 1783–1805,” in American Naval History, 1607-1865, Overcoming the Colonial Legacy (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 33–48.
Week 4 (February 17, 19): More about metadata / Early naval wars
Due February 24:
- Small project #3: Find five primary sources (online, or if you’re very ambitious, in an archive!) about your conflict. Add them to Tropy, making sure you fill out the metadata properly. Then write a descriptive blog post about your items, discussing how they fit into the history of your conflict, including a screenshot (metadata and image visible) of each of your items in Tropy.
- Tropy installation: tropy.org
- Additional metadata templates (and instructions for using them)–you’ll need these templates in order to fill out all the metadata fields properly
- You need at least these elements (but must also fill out fields for others that are available):
- Title
- Archive
- Identifier
- Web URL
- Reading blog post: “The War of 1812” in The American Yawp
Week 5 (February 24, 26): How analog things become digital / War of 1812
Due March 2:
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Blog post: Find a collection of documents online that relate to your conflict (start here but you may have to look elsewhere). Remember that you should be finding a collection of documents created about a specific topic, not a general-purpose or wide-ranging archive. Write a blog post about what your collection is and what its value is for your conflict.
- What is the purpose of the collection?
- What kinds of documents are being collected? What kinds of documents are missing? (Think about what we’ve talked about re: how archives are created.)
- Has the material been made machine-readable? How do you know? If it is, has the collection been made machine-readable through OCR or transcription?
- Make sure you include a link to your online collection. Also include a screenshot of one document that illustrates the collection’s connection to your conflict.
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Reading blog post: Jonathan R. Dull, “A Precarious Neutrality Ends in a Second War against Britain, 1805–1815,” in American Naval History, 1607-1865, Overcoming the Colonial Legacy (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 49–64.