By this point, you have done a lot of reading on your research project and on the history of the United States since 1865. The Collaborative Annotated Bibliography hopefully is bulging with contributions of resources from our course text as well as other source materials you might have discovered in working on your research projects. In this assignment, you will choose a few key sources that will be important to your overall research project and examine them more closely.
Here’s what to do:
Review the entries made to date in the Collaborative Annotated Bibliography by you as well as your classmates.
Choose 3-5 scholarly entries that you intend to use in your research paper to analyze.
Please do not select a full-length book for this assignment, though you may select chapters from a collection of writings or such things as the primary source documents included in our course text.
Please also do not select the news media entries that you entered in Module 2 or any other non-peer reviewed (or non-refereed) publications. There will be a place for those sources in your final research projects, just not in this assignment.
After you have made your selections, read the full text of the articles carefully. Then, prepare an essay (approximately 750-1,000 words) that analyzes the key points the authors make. Your essay should:
Identify whether the documents are a primary source or a secondary source, and evaluate each one’s historic value.
Use the materials as well as other awareness you are gaining on your topic to assess how key historians who have studied your topic have approached it.
Analyze similarities and differences between the various historians’ points of view.
Address how the writings shed light on your own developing perspective on the topic.
Reflect on the time period(s) in which the historians were writing in relation to the contemporary issues surrounding your topic.
