CONTENT AND CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF SELECTED PRIMARY SOURCE

• "We have no other recourse left but to fight for our rights with arms in hand." - Rizal
• History reading


  Ways that historians interpret the world
• Categories of historical study

  • Political
  • Ideological
  • Social
  • Economic
  • Artistic
• Historians study


  Basic systems (feudalism, monarchy, etc.)
• Types of texts historians read

  • Memoir
  • Biography
  • Historical fiction
  • Political map
  • Thematic
  • Data Tables
  • Textbook
  • Juried Essay
  • Polemic Essay
  • Editorial
  • News story
  • Political Cartoon
  • Graphic Novel
  • Graph, chart, table
  • Artwork
  • Interview
  • Documentary
  • Video
  • Trade books
  • Legislation
  • Legal Documents
  • Photographs
  • Historical artifacts
  • Translations
  • Blogs, tweets
• Primary Sources


  Artifacts, documents, recordings, etc. from time period
• Secondary Sources


  Interpretations of primary sources
• Tertiary Sources


  Interpretations of secondary sources
• Contingency


  Chance; Coincidence
• Out of the conversations grew Bunau-Varilla's conviction that if the Panamanians tried to declare their independence, the United State would use force.
• Because people had difficulty finding work during the depression, Roosevelt created a number of works programs.
• The balance is certainly struck in the history of decisive battles: Those most contingent of events whose effects alter the parameters of possibility. In this context, the 'great men' of history such as William the conqueror do not control and predict the uncontrollable and unpredictable. Rather they are those best able to take advantage of the chances thrown their way and make things happen.
• History is an interpretation
• There are competing narratives
• History is an approximation of the past
• History is contested and contestable
• To understand history, one must have historical empathy
• Historians care about historical significance
• Some events and issues are more significant that others
• Sourcing


  Determining where information came from
• Contextualization


  Determining what the circumstances were when the information was written
• Corroboration


  Determining the extent of agreement and disagreement across sources
• Historians question how inclusive the interpretation is—what perspectives are included and what is left out
• Historians question the coherence of the historical arguments—whether or not they make sense
• Historians look at word choice as a signal of an author's perspective
• Historians try to find out where a story begins and ends (periodization)
• Historians read history as an argument—a presentation of warrants, claims, and evidence, even if the text has a narrative structure
• Textbooks commonly combine narrative, exposition, and description
• Texts use conventions of chronology (before, after, next, In [date], later)
• Texts borrow technical vocabulary from the other social sciences (economics, political science, sociology, etc.)
• Texts have a lot of difficult general academic vocabulary
• Texts employ metaphorical language (e.g. The gilded age)
• Primary sources often use outdated language and ideas that are difficult and sometimes uncomfortable to read
• Sentences are complex—the information can be buried in long noun phrases
• Sentences are about time, place, and manner (over the next decade; they gathered in Philadelphia, their harsh stands made enemies)
• There are participants/actors, processes, and goals
• By 1932 the unemployment rate had soared past 20 percent. Thousands of banks and businesses had failed. Millions were homeless. Men (and women) returned home from fruitless job hunts to find their dwellings padlocked and their possessions and families turned into the street. Many drifted from town to town looking for non-existent jobs. Many more lived at the edges of cities in makeshift shantytowns their residents derisively called Hoovervilles. People foraged in dumps and garbage cans for food.
• The presidential campaign of 1932 was run against the backdrop of the Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the Democratic nomination and campaigned on a platform of attention to "the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid." Hoover continued to insist it was not the government's job to address the growing social crisis. Roosevelt won in a landslide. He took office on March 4, 1933, with the declaration that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
• Historians must be aware of the climate of opinion or shared set of values, assumptions, ideas, and emotions that influence the way their sources are constructed and the way they perceive those sources.
• An individual's own frame of reference-- the product of one's own individual experiences lived--must be acknowledged by the perceptive historian in order to determine the reliability and credibility of a source in relation to others.