Document Homework (Fall 2012)
“Sources lie, but they’re all we have.” — Jonathan Dresner
The most fundamental part of doing history is reading primary, or original, sources and using them to understand what you are studying. The fundamental question in each assignment is: what questions does this document help me answer if I read it correctly?
You can’t trust sources. Not without other evidence. Just because it says something in a document doesn’t make it necessarily true. That a document’s author may be biased also doesn’t necessarily mean that their claims are false. Other sources, and critical thinking, are required to balance and understand how materials fit together.
To critically analyze a document requires that you pay attention to:
- Context: what’s happening when and where this is written? Is this a response to something specific? Is it part of a broader historical or local issues?
- Authorship: who the author is, their status or personal situation, and especially their relationship to the events described and possible biases. Is the author an ordinary or extraordinary person for their time and place?
- Content: what the author says and how they say it, and what they are trying to accomplish. Important points and tone.
- Response: who was the intended audience (or audiences) and how those audiences (might have) responded? How might other people – unintended audiences – respond? Was this taken seriously? What happened to the author? Some speculation may be required, but be clear about what evidence you have and what the foundation for your guesses is.
- Historical Use: What’s interesting about this document, person, time? Does this document have a noticable effect on events? What questions does this evidence help to answer? Would historians have to watch out for biases or errors, and why?
Many of the documents you’re reading are what are called “prescriptive” texts – attempts to define how things should be rather than how they are – and so the questions can be narrowed down a bit:
- Context: what’s happening when and where this is written? Is this a response to something specific? Is it part of a broader historical or local issues?
- Authorship: who the author is, their status or personal situation, and typicality. In the case of legal documents, authorship is often collective, institutional, so attention to the process by which the laws were created is important.
- Content: what the document says and how it says it, and what it is trying to accomplish. Who benefits and who doesn’t? What are the important points and what tone does it take?
- Response: who was the intended audience (or audiences) and how those audiences responded? How did other people – unintended audiences – respond? Was this taken seriously? What happened to the author? Some speculation may be required, but be clear about what evidence you have and what the foundation for your guesses is.
- Historical Use: What’s interesting about this document, person, time? What questions does this evidence help to answer? Would historians have to watch out for biases or errors, and why? Since these are prescriptive rather than descriptive documents, the focus needs to be on the intent and beliefs of the author(s) rather than on using them as evidence of what happened. Does this document have a noticable effect on events?
Assignment
| M (8/27) | Hammurabi’s Code |
| W (8/29) | Instructions of Ptah-Hotep |
| W (9/5) | The Great Learning |
| F (9/14) | Thucydides, The Funeral Oration of Pericles, 431 bce* |
| F (9/14) | Thucydides, The Melian Dialogue, 431 bce.* |
| M (9/17) | Online Documentary: From Jesus to Christ, part 1 (2 hours). |
| W (9/26) | Online Documentary: From Jesus to Christ, part 2 (2 hours). |
| F (9/28) | Buddha’s First Sermon & Vow of the Bodhisattva |
| M (10/22) | Quran: Surahs 1 and 2 |
| F (11/2) | Corpus Iuris Civilis: The Digest and Codex on Marriage |
| M (11/5) | Magna Carta |
| M (11/26) | Prince Shotoku’s 17-Article Constitution, 604 |
* Note that the two Thucydides documents are due the same day, but are separate assignments.
For each document you will write a short summary (200-500 words) and a short analysis (200-500 words) of authorship, context, response, historical use. Feel free to use the textbook or other reliable sources for background information, but be sure that you give credit as appropriate. Don’t copy from the source or your background reading: paraphrasing – taking a source and summarizing or restating it in your own words – is a critical writing skill. You still have to cite your sources when you paraphrase, of course, but at least it’s your own writing.
When you make a claim about motives, responses, effects, etc., you should be able to show the evidence that supports your conclusions. It might be a passage from the reading, a page from the textbook, or something you already knew from high school, but you have to show your reader how you got from the document to the conclusion.
For the videos, you will write a short summary (200-500 words) and a short reaction or historical discussion (200-500 words).
Document homeworks are due by 9am on the day assigned. Video homeworks are due by midnight at the end of the day assigned. Homework will be turned in via Canvas.
Grading
The point of asking these questions is to come to some conclusion which is supported by the evidence. The grade will be based primarily on the completeness of the summary (whether you summarized the document entirely, and fairly, not whether you reached a certain word count) and whether you address at least some of the basic questions (authorship, context, response, historical value).
Specifics
- No Title Page. Include your name, the course and section, and the assignment at the top.
- Mark each section with the appropriate label — summary, analysis – and keep the answers in the 200-500 word range.
- Double-spacing is not required or recommended. Reasonable font, however, is: something standard and readable and a nice size. Normal margins are also a must: 1-1.5 inches.
- Don’t try to make the paper look longer or shorter by playing with font and margins.
- Spellcheck and grammarcheck your work. Don’t assume the computer is right, however: read it over yourself (reading out loud often helps). I don’t take off points for grammatical or spelling errors unless they are so numerous as to distract from the message of the paper. That doesn’t mean that I enjoy reading papers with errors.
Plagiarism and citations
Plagiarism is the use of the words or ideas of another without proper attribution and will not be tolerated. For details see the plagiarism page on the website, or ask. If you cite material from the textbook, you only need to note page number; for outside sources you must include bibliographic information, either in a note or in a works cited section. You shouldn’t need outside sources to answer these questions, however, and using outside sources instead of course materials will result in penalties. The emphasis is on learning to read and use the primary and secondary sources assigned.
Comments»
no comments yet - be the first?