Your mission is to choose an event in American History that happened between 1898 and 1933. It can be an aspect of a war, a discovery and/or an invention, a court trial, a Hollywood scandal, a bizarre murder, a labor strike, a riot…the field is wide open. Flip through your text book or pull up some timelines on the Internet and choose an event. DO NOT TRY TO DO AN ENTIRE WAR. It is too big of a topic to do well in such a short paper. Instead focus on say a battle or war being declared…or in the case of WWI, implementation of the Sedition Act, the Zimmerman Telegram, or labor strikes. PLEASE TALK WITH ME ASAP IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT WHAT TO CHOOSE: I can help clear up ambiguities that may arise and make your life easier. You next task is to do some secondary research so you have a good grounding in the event itself as well as what was going on in a larger context. THEN you will need to find copies of newspapers or magazines from the era: the best way to get the complete feel of the coverage is to go to the Timberland Library and look at the Aberdeen World, the Vidette, the Grays Harbor Washingtonian and other papers. Hoquiam, Aberdeen, Montesano and other libraries in Grays Harbor and Pacific counties have these papers on microfilm. Alas, with the COVID-19 pandemic going on, this may be possible, so do the best you can with what you get off the internet. You do NOT have to limit yourself to Grays Harbor or even Washington state. However you will need to have examples from the print medium of the time in your paper. (Links to an external site.) You may also want to look at bigger papers: both the NY Times and the Seattle Times have historical archives you can access via Internet. Several magazines such as Harpers and The Atlantic Monthly are available online from this era. In NORMAL TIMES other resources you may want to use are some of the local museums such as the Polson Museum Some of the museums are open, sort of. SIGH….again, do your best. TRL and GHC’s library do have curbside pick-up. Examine how the event was recorded at the time. Does it compare with how “history” has accounted for the event? What else was going on at the time? Do those events play any role in your chosen event? If so, how? Include actual examples from the newspapers etc in your essay. You can use advertisements, pictures, whatever people would have seen in print.
