Will have to pick any interesting event of
Carthage (N. Africa) and make a presentation on that.
Instructions for assignment are
STEP ONE: Choose a Cultural Document
The Document should be a primary source related to your regional group. This may be because the subject matter of the work (ex. a novel or poem) might be related to your region, or because the author of the work is from your region.
Try to look on the internet for “Greatest people from ____” or various forms of such an inquiry.
Wikipedia can be very useful to find links and further reading suggestions that can lead to excellent source material.
If you found a particularly interesting historical article or book, check their footnotes for relevant material.
Choose a reasonable selection of material:
This would be one chapter of a novel or book-length source; one or two acts of a play; a small set of poetry; a pair of magazine articles; a pamphlet.
Possible Primary Sources available online. See links on the Research Help Module.
Documents and excerpts from leading nineteenth century thinkers can be found on the Modern History Sourcebook at Fordham University; the Hanover Historical Texts Project; and on Marxists.org. It is recommended to select longer documents and avoid brief excerpts.
Points to the Past contains numerous sub-databases including newspapers, official documents and literature. Tends to favour British history. For nineteenth century history consider the Times Digital Archive as a starting point; for twentieth century history the Times and Daily Mail archives are excellent. For eighteenth century history consider Eighteenth Century Collections Online or the Burney Collection of newspapers.
Museum websites, run by reputable institutions. Ensure that you are finding primary sources, not descriptions written by the museum. If you want to work with art or material artifacts contact the instructor.
Analyze the Document as a window into a past human society.
Provide at least FIVE slides that show specific quotes or aspects of the document and the explanation for how this evidence represents the people that wrote, published, bought and preserved this piece of literature. What were their values, power structures, daily lives, beliefs etc.
Use your knowledge of historical context to show the significance of specific elements of the primary source. We want to know about the real people, not the literature itself.
Focus on the intentions of the author as a key lens. Why does this writer make these comments about the time and place that they live in?
In ONE slide try to answer (with a focused argument) this broad question: Why does this document exist in this particular form and fashion and why should we, as historians, spend our time trying to understand its significance?
