There is no official response this week. But we’ve made it to Week 4! If you have yet to complete Project Base 1, you should probably get on that, because if you don’t have the website up and running, you’ll have a hard time doing the responses for other weeks.
Today we’re thinking about the building blocks of the historical profession: Primary Sources.
Thought Provoker
Think about your day for the last 24 hours. What evidence have you left behind of those events? How would a historian write the history of your life? What would they probably leave out because they didn’t have any evidence? Make a FlipGrid speculating about these questions. (This does not count as a response.)
Hopefully this exercise made you think about how historians do their work. We never, ever have the whole picture when we’re writing about the past (or even the present); we are always piecing together stories just from the evidence that we have. So we do the best we can–and when more evidence comes to light, we change our conclusions to fit the evidence we have.
Activities
This week you’re going to be compiling primary sources that will form the basis of your creative projects. You’ve already collected secondary sources about your war; now it’s time to think more specifically.
Step 1: Narrow your topic.
You’ve already selected the war you want to focus on; now you’ll need to pick a narrower topic within the history of that war. You can do almost anything, but here are a few examples:
- The history of women in the American Revolution
- African-American sailors in the War of 1812
- Gunnery and technology developments in the Mexican-American War
- Newspaper responses to the Seminole Wars
Step 2: Find primary sources that can help you understand your topic better.
Here at GMU, we have access to a tremendous number of primary sources. Our history librarian, Dr. George Oberle, goes through how to access the primary sources in GMU’s databases in this video.
So now, using Dr. Oberle’s instructions, go and find five primary sources that have something to do with the topic you’ve identified. I’d suggest that you open each item in a new tab and don’t close any of them until you’ve fully finished Step 3.
Step 3: Organize and describe the sources that you find.
Now that you’ve been looking at some primary sources, it’s time to learn how to keep track of them. Just like with secondary sources, it’s important that you know where your primary sources came from, and how you can use them. If you don’t know where a source came from, it’s not ethical for you to use it. So when you’re looking at sources online, it’s critically important that you keep track of where you get things from, and also what you can do with the sources you find online.
Just because something is on the Internet doesn’t mean you have the right to use it in any way. Images and text on the Internet still fall under copyright laws. We’ll be talking more about copyright in a few weeks, but keep it in your mind now.
To keep track of sources by using metadata, we’re going to learn another piece of software: Tropy. (Full disclosure on Tropy: I am the director of the project, so I obviously think this is the right tool for this job. But there really isn’t anything else out there like Tropy, and it’s also free and open-source, so I’m not getting any kickbacks from you using Tropy.)
