Textbook needed: Through Women’s Eyes
An American History with Documents
by Ellen Carol DuBois; Lynn Dumeni
The purpose of an analysis essay focused on historical artifacts is to demonstrate in writing your ability to think critically about specific historical evidence (primary sources), often written artifacts such as literature, letters and other first-person accounts, and legal/political documents, or visual artifacts such as art, advertisements, and other print media.
Your writing should demonstrate your ability to understand the selected historical artifacts in context and to apply major concepts and interpretive approaches from our course learning. The best essays will address social change and other cultural dynamics that influenced or shaped the creation of the specific artifact(s).
An artifact analysis essay is not a book report; your writing should aim to provide analytical and interpretive thought that is not immediately evident in the historical artifacts themselves.
Think about approaching your topic selection and which sources you will use as though you are organizing a small museum exhibit or archive display.
Paper Topic Selection: Apply One of the Following Focus Areas to 4–8 Historical Artifacts/Primary Sources from the Textbook or Approved Archive (e.g. included in previous course modules)
Consult the textbook and select four to eight specific historical artifacts from our course textbook. *
Develop a focused historical analysis of the artifacts selected based on a them or concept within one of the following six focus areas:
How does gender and economic or social class inform the construction or creation of visual or written artifacts from a specific historical period?
How does gender and ethnicity, “race,” or national origin inform the construction or creation of visual or written artifacts from a specific historical period?
How are attitudes and approaches to gender expressed or represented differently in specific historical or cultural artifacts across the generations? (Please select artifacts that are or can be grouped at least a generation or 30 years apart.)
How are different worldviews reflected in and/or how do different worldviews inform visual or written artifacts from a specific historical period?
How are attitudes and approaches to gender represented differently in artifacts from diverse geographic regions within the United States (e.g., North-South; East Coast-Western territories; urban-rural)?
How have certain male historical figures – as evidenced by specific artifacts – contributed to and/or productively informed women’s rights movements in the United States and what does this reveal about the construction of gender in our culture?
If consulting the print version of the textbook: The blue framed pages at the end of each chapter offer the best starting point for identifying specific historical artifacts, although students may also select material from within the chapters so long as that material is a specific artifact and not general textbook passages. Specific artifacts most likely are paintings, photographs, advertisements, letters, first person accounts, newspaper columns, poems, legal briefs, trial transcripts, or political documents. (Feel free of course to ask your professor questions about artifact selection.)
The range of 4–8 is provided since the volume of historic content varies from artifact to artifact; for example, working with longer writing samples, such as the autobiographical writings by Zitkala-Sa and Sarah Winnemucca, provides more than enough historical material to analyze for a paper, yet selecting only historic photographs or advertisements may be harder to write a full-length paper around if only selecting 2 or 3 and so selecting more of those types of artifacts may be a better strategy.
Support your analysis with at least two secondary sources from academic databases such as JSTOR or EBSCO.
Expectations
Historical Artifact Analysis Papers should be composed to college-level standards of grammar and organization; your essay should be well developed with supporting evidence from both the artifact(s) at the focus of your analysis and relevant scholarly sources.
Strong written analysis includes the following:
A specific introduction that provides relevant, contextual background of the focus artifact or artifacts,
A clear statement of the interpretation to be offered in the essay, through a purpose statement or thesis, that directly address one of the six focus area options enumerated in the assignment instruction above,
A consistent interpretive focus on the features of the primary sources, the artifacts themselves: What do they express? What does this expression mean? How, specifically, is this expression conveyed? What does it represent? Why might the original author/creator have chosen to produce this specific artifact in this way (and for whom)?
An awareness of both the intentional, obvious features of the artifacts and the unconscious, unintentional, or culturally influenced aspects of the artifacts, such a biases or other historically informed values and beliefs,
A concluding analysis that suggests the larger significance (within an historical framework) of the artifact(s) and,
Precisely documented quotations or evidence from the primary sources (the artifacts) as well assecondary sources (research) via MLA or APA format; at least two (but no more than five in an essay of this length) relevant secondary sources should be referenced in addition to the four to eight primary source artifacts. (All need to be documented.)
Suggested length: 6–8 pages; approximately 1,500–2,000 words
Images of your artifacts/primary sources are not necessary (and in fact can mess up the Turn It In report); if your citations are correct and you. have used the textbook and/or approved archives, then I will be able to access your sources just fine.
