History 100W

Primary Source Assignment

The goal of this assignment is to accustom students to planning their research using primary source documents. Each student in the class is provided with a collection of primary source documents relating to a single topic or historic event. It is not difficult to compile such collentions from library sources, or students can be assigned a book of primary sources. Bedford St. Martins publishers has produced a lengthy series of books, each dealing with one topic, and this is what I have assigned for this assignment.

If necessary, as an introduction to this assignment, students may be given earlier work on Primary and Secondary Sources on this page. Students are to read the sources they have been given, and then to design a paper of a given length (12-15 pages works well) using only these sources. Students do not need to actually write the paper, but simply create a 3 to 6 page plan, identifying a research problem and then describing how these sources could actually be used in writing such a paper.