Comparison of Social Society, Institutions, and Behavior Among Pirates: Kris Lane and Marcus Rediker
Artifact Description
Of the examples available from my graduate certificate coursework, the strongest example of secondary source analysis placed in context was my culminating project from the Pirates of the Atlantic World course. In This assignment, I made the choice to do a comparative analysis of two secondary sources by focusing on the characterization of social life on-board vessels engaged in piracy during the last major episode of Atlantic piracy during that occurred around the 1730s. This comparison focused mostly on analyzing historiographical debate between historian Kris Lane’s characterization in Pillaging the Empire: Global Piracy on the High Seas, 1500-1750, and historian Marcus Rediker’s characterization in his article “Under the Banner of King Death”: The Social World of Anglo-American Pirates, 1716-1726. While the two historians agree on several aspects of social organization and behavior on pirate ships, there are also several competing points as well. This example of secondary source analysis required context, as the historical facts of piracy during this period underpin the narratives and analyses the two historians espouse. Secondary sources must be clearly scaffolded with historical narrative in order to be relevant; the information the sources hold is only accessible with it. This assignment also demonstrates my philosophy for using secondary sources in the classroom: each secondary source represents the research and scholarship of the author(s), but does not necessarily represent the only possible reasonable conclusion about a topic. Sound historiographical practice and research demands inclusion of a variety of sources and writers, even those that may contradict each other, to have the full scope of truths about a topic.
Comparison of the Presentation Social Life for Late Period Pirates |