HIS 256: American History 1815-1900

HIS 256: American History 1815-1900
The Lincoln Letters Project
[adopted & adapted with permission of Dr. Benjamin Carp, Tufts University] The colonial historian Rhys Isaac defined history as “stories that historians write on their own pages fashioned from the stories they find in the archives.” Isaac himself, in a recent book, used a plantation owner’s diary as his window into the larger history of colonial Virginia. In this assignment, you will write a history on your own pages, using the stories you find in the correspondence of President Abraham Lincoln during the turbulent year 1861.
ASSIGNMENT A: Getting Started
Each student will choose at least THREE letters from the following online archive: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/alser.html. The letters are collected into three groups, and within those groups they appear in chronological order (although the groups overlap chronologically). Within the year 1861, go to the week that includes your birthday (give or take a few days) and select an interesting letter as your first source. [For example, if your birthday is January 10th, choose a letter dated somewhere between approximately January 3rd and January 17th.] You should use your own criteria to select your first letter—are you more interested in the military, the political, the social, the personal? Be bold, and use a letter that seems totally bizarre, confusing, unfamiliar, or otherwise intriguing. Consider using a letter that touches on people, places, or events that are strange or new to you. Above all, have fun. Once you’ve chosen your first letter, begin searching for at least two more letters that relate to the same theme, event, person(s), or issue. It may be easiest if you choose letters that are chronologically close to your first letter, but this is not required. [Your letters may be selected from any or all of the three archive groups.] Many letters appear both as scans of the original letter and as “transcriptions” that are more easily readable, searchable, and transferable to your own disk. If no transcript is available, don’t be afraid to try and tease out the handwriting! Once you have selected your three (or more) letters, save a legible copy of each letter. Upload these to Sakai. Hand in a one-paragraph explanation of what you find interesting/intriguing about these letters.
Due date: Monday, February 1st (letters on Sakai, paragraph handed in)
ASSIGNMENT B: Primary Source Analysis
Analyze your letters and mark them up. Then, search for at least THREE newspaper/magazine accounts (or other primary sources) related to the same topic. Newspapers/magazines can be accessed from the following databases through the library website [database tab]; all sites are full text and keyword searchable.
? America’s Historical Newspapers
? Historical New York Times
? De Bow’s Commercial Review
? Ladies Repository
? Princeton Review
? Southern Literary Messenger
? Vanity Fair
? The Atlantic Monthly
? Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
? The Living Age
? New Englander
Then write a paper of 1000-1250 words (approximately 4–5 pages) with a coherent argument based on your analysis of the letters and newspaper articles. Begin by considering: What issues do the letters address? Who has written them? What seems to be on the minds of the correspondents? Are they worried, angry, happy, or in need of help? Why do they write in certain ways for their intended audience? What clues do these letters offer about the pressures Lincoln faced during this year? (** These questions are to help guide your thoughts. You may or may not be answering these exact questions in your paper.**) Use the letters to draw inferences and formulate a hypothesis. Do these letters present a mystery or conundrum? If so, it will be your task to solve it. For now, it is okay to conclude your paper with unanswered questions that you hope to resolve later. As you draw a tentative conclusion about the significance of the letters, you may wish to lay out a set of unanswered questions that might lead to a conclusion, or propose avenues of research that might resolve your unanswered questions.
The letters often use footnotes to identify people and other information mentioned in the letters. You can use a textbook or encyclopedic sources [but NOT Wikipedia or other non-academic online sources] to
supplement this information for the purposes of identifying people. But reference sources do NOT count as a required source.
For tips on analyzing nineteenth-century letters, you may wish to consult Steven Stowe, “Making Sense of Letters and Diaries,” History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/letters/, July 2002. See also the handout (on Sakai), “Analysis of a Text-Based Primary Source” for dealing with both the letters and newspaper articles.
Due date (uploaded to Sakai): Monday, February 22nd
***Include a descriptive title, page #, word count, footnotes (see Rampolla), and full bibliography.
ASSIGNMENT C: Secondary Source Analysis
Now that you’ve isolated certain lives and events, find out where they fit in historical context. Use secondary sources (books and/or journal articles) on Lincoln and on the Civil War. Have historians overlooked the issues your letters raise? Do your letters have particular historical significance? How does the secondary source literature place these lives and events in context and make them understandable? (**Again, these questions are to help guide you in your quest for a thesis.**) Using the footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies in the secondary sources, try to determine whether any other historians have used these letters.
For this assignment you should use at least THREE sources beyond textbooks or encyclopedias. These sources can be either books and/or journal articles. Please be considerate of your classmates and try not to take out books for more than one night. Treat them as if they were on reserve.
The following databases are all available through the Phillip’s Memorial website:
? HELIN (PC library catalogue; access to books in all RI colleges)
? JSTOR (journal articles)
? Project Muse (journal articles)
? Cambridge Journals Online
? Oxford Journals
**If you would like to use ANY website not expressly mentioned in this assignment, you need approval from the professor BEFORE you turn in the assignment.**
Now draw some conclusions. Write a paper of 2000-3000 words (approximately 8-12 pages) in length. (The initial paper from Assignment B will be incorporated into this larger paper, although it should be revised to reflect both the comments from the professor and what you now have learned from the secondary sources.) What important events in Lincoln’s life or American history do these letters demonstrate? Have historians sufficiently appreciated these letters as sources of information? How does the larger context of Civil War history make these letters more comprehensible? Did the issues raised in these letters seem more important then than it does to historians now? Or perhaps vice versa? Did any of this cross-referencing lead you to spot errors, on the part of a letter-writer or historian? You need not answer all these questions, but one or more may point you in the direction of a conclusion.
Remember, history does not always present an easy or complete picture. Try not to be discouraged if you run into setbacks, pitfalls, or dead ends, and try to avoid wandering too far into irrelevant tangents. Build towards a central argument. Your job as a historian is to be clever as well as careful, imaginative as well as discriminating.
Due date (first draft, uploaded to Sakai): Thursday, March 31st
[This should be a complete draft – your best stab at an A paper. I’ll tell you why it’s not ;-)] ***Include a descriptive title, page #, word count, footnotes (see Rampolla), and full bibliography.
Due date (second draft, uploaded to Sakai): Thursday, April 28th
[This draft MUST incorporate both the specific grammatical/stylistic comments and the more substantive, big-picture comments. Anyone who resubmits their first draft with just grammar corrections will automatically receive a maximum final paper grade of D. Trust me – I’m NOT kidding!] ***Include a descriptive title, page #, word count, footnotes (see Rampolla), and full bibliography.