Draft due Friday, February 14
Final copy due Monday, February 17 (hard copy and electronic, please)
This assignment requires you to play the detective, combing textual sources for clues and evidence to form a reconstruction of past events. If you took A.P. history courses in high school, you may recall doing similar document-based questions (DBQs).
In a tight, well-argued essay of two to four pages, identify and assess the historical significance of the documents in ONE of the four sets I have given you. Click here for introductions to the sets of documents.
You bring to this assignment a limited body of outside knowledge gained from our readings, class discussions, and videos. Make the most of this contextual knowledge when interpreting your sources: you may, for example, refer to one of the document from another set if it sheds light on the items in your own. You may look something up in the library if you wish, but this is not a research assignment; the point is to squeeze as much meaningful information and insight as you can from these documents based on what you know now. (If further research would be required to resolve a question raised by your documents, feel free to note this fact in your essay.)
Questions to consider when planning your essay:
- What do the documents reveal about the author and his audience?
- Why were they written?
- What can you discern about the author's motivation and tone? Is the tone revealing?
- Does the genre make a difference in your interpretation?
- How do the documents fit into both their immediate and their greater historical contexts?
- Do your documents support or contradict what other sources (video, readings) have told you?
- Do the douments reveal a change that occurred over a period of time?
- Is there a contrast between documents within your set? If so, how do you account for it?
- Do they shed light on a historical event, problem, or period? How do they fit into the "big picture"?
- What incidental information can you glean from them by reading carefully? Such information is important for constructing a narrative of the past; our medieval authors almost always tell us more than they intended to.
- What is not said, but implied?
- What is left out? (As a historian, you should always look for what is not said, and ask yourself what the omission signifies.)
- Taken together, do the documents reveal anything significant about the period in question?
Because of the nature of the assignment, you probably will not have an overarching thesis, as you would in most papers. Instead, your essay will consist of two parts: the IDENTIFICATION and INTERPRETATION sections (the second of which may be divided into subsections, depending on which documents you choose and what you do with them). Each paragraph, however, should have a topic sentence and develop a single thought. Transitions should be logical and smooth, and your analysis should form a coherent whole.
This assignment is difficult, requiring care, attention, and imagination
(skills you have already demonstrated in your discussions of the crusade
documents). Start early, and contact me if you have any questions. Good luck!
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