Monthly Secondary Source Reviews - 1760s to 1820s
Artifact Description
A second example of strong secondary source analysis from my Graduate Certificate of History program is my collection of historiographical reviews of sources from the Revolutionary/Early National America course. In these reviews, students were required to compose essays that focused on secondary books, excerpts, and articles related to scholarship about the pre-revolutionary, revolutionary, and early national periods of American history. By the end of the course, each student had composed four of these historiographical review-style essays, which covered four distinct periods of chronological time. Most central to these review essays, for me, was to not spend very many words summarizing the author’s/authors’ argument or arguments, but rather to evaluate and analyze their positions. Nevertheless, providing the contextual framework for each review was an important part of each essay. Without supporting each of my theses with historical facts and narrative, the essay itself would be stranded in irrelevance. Furthermore, each essay was read not only by the instructor, but also by colleagues enrolled in the course. In this way, an important piece of context for secondary sources existed, as we all had been building the necessary contextual knowledge together week-by-week. This reveals another of my philosophical stances towards incorporating secondary sources in the classroom: interpretations of secondary sources may vary from person-to-person, but in order for a group to have reasonable historiographical debates about them, it must be working from an equal basis of knowledge.
Source Review Essay 1 |
Source Review Essay 2 |
Source Review Essay 3 |
Source Review Essay 4 |