Article Summary

Last week I had you briefly summarize three journal articles. For this assignment, I’d like a more in-depth summary, the sort you will need to offer in the upcoming Annotated Bibliography. Write a two-paragraph summary of the most interesting or controversial of the academic journal articles you’ve found so far in your research, using the following template:

• In the first ¶, focus on summarizing the article’s topic (defined narrowly, not broadly).
• In the second ¶, focus on summarizing the author’s take on its topic—and how that take differs from the views of other scholars you’ve read.
• Be sure to give a proper Chicago Style bibliographic entry, so I can find your article if I need to.

Paste this HW into the comment field, below.

In Class Reading for controversy, as well as for consensus.

Fragments

1. Add one quality fragment (on any topic)
2. Read back through the archive and add value to what someone else has already posted by adding a comment in response that draws on what you’ve learned about YOUR topic.

Slideshow Draft

Put together a collection of 3 images that capture the storyline from your written report. Obviously, your presentation should have a lot more than 3 images, but think of these three as forming the vital core of your storyline.

Don’t settle for the first three images that you find. Find 10 or 15, and then decide on three to use for this assignment.

Use the file upload feature in the comment section to add your images below. You can only add one image to a given comment, so you’ll need to “reply” to your first comment to add your second and third images.

Include a text caption for each image that you upload.

From a Written to an Oral (and Visual!) Report

For Class

• Read through the fragments of the past uploaded by other students. Find one that’s related to your topic but was uploaded by another student and reply with a thoughtful comment.
• Add a new fragment as well, on any topic you like but something that hasn’t been added up to now. In a written comment, explain why this fragment is worthy of our attention.

In Class effective presentation

Academic Journal Articles

Find three academic journal articles that touch on your topic. They can come from academic journals OR from collections of articles bound as books (i.e. from an “article anthology”). Some strategies for finding articles (try them all, so you get experience using each of these tools):

• Use the standard BU Library search system
• Try out one of the specialized databases available through the BU library portal (I particularly recommend “America: History and Life”)
• Plunder the bibliography of a published book or article you found earlier
• Look on Google Scholar (scholar.google.com)

Note: to count for this assignment, the article must (1) date within the last 20 years, (2) be written from a historian’s perspective, (3) focus at least in part on the events and culture of the period we’re studying.

Pro Tip Looking ahead to the essay, what aspects of your topic are you interested in learning more about? Use keyterms (names, events, places) from your Written Report to narrow the focus of your searches to articles that touch on aspects of your topic that are of particular interest for you.

For Class Print out the first page of each article. At the top of each page summarize the article’s mission as follows:

1. One sentence naming the article’s topic
2. One sentence voicing the prior understanding that the author addresses (the article’s They Say)
3. One sentence voicing what the author has to say in response to that prior understanding. What new insight or findings does the author present (the article’s I Say)

Fragments HW Find and post another fragment of the past. Explore the possibility of a video fragment, a newspaper article, or a magazine other than Life. Do give the year and any other info necessary for someone else to trace down and use your fragment.

In Class

• Evaluating Academic Journal Articles (which of yours are any good?)
• Primary Sources as Illustrations, not Evidence
• Qualities of a good presentation (Steve Jobs & the iPad)

Engaging Narrative

Writing HW, Part One: Organizing Your Material

A two-page synthesis of your secondary source notes. Go back and read through the notes you’ve taken and decide what events and issues you regard as most important. This is a crucial moment, the first step toward developing the narrative you’ll present in your written report (due shortly after the next class). To organize your secondary source notes, do the following:

1. First, go back and read through the notes you’ve taken and make a list of the events and issues you regard as most important.
2. Once you’ve got the list together, the next step is to figure out a logical order to present these events and issues so as to form a coherent story about your topic. Move your list items around until you’re happy with the sequence; then number your list of key events and ideas.
3. For each item in your list, look for corresponding bullet points in your source notes, and cut and paste these bullet points below your list item.
   • Where your sources repeat one another, put references to both sources at the end of a single bullet point.
   • Where your sources make similar points but differ in tone or perspective, describe that difference in a separate, subordinate (indented) bullet point.
   • If your sources differ substantially in the stories they tell, show that fundamental difference by presenting each source account as a separate bullet point; then follow those bullet points with an indented bullet point describing the contrast between the accounts.

Writing HW, Part Two: Developing A Narrative

By now, you should have a pretty clear sense of the story you’re going to emphasize in your written report. Write a paragraph briefly describing the kind of story you’re telling. A good historian is a good storyteller. So think about what kind of story you’re uncovering here: is it a tragedy? A farce? A comedy of errors? A triumph? A disaster averted? A cautionary tale? A downfall caused by excessive ambition? A hysterical overreaction? Explain briefly.

Turning HW In

Paste HW part Two into the comment field below, and upload HW Part One as a .pdf or Word file.

Secondary Source Research

Research HW: Gathering Material

Three typed pages of notes on key facts and ideas you’ve learned about your topic from reading secondary sources. At this point you should be working from at least three secondary source accounts of your topic, all of which should be published, academic sources, ideally books rather than narrowly focused journal articles.

• Use a separate page for each source. At the top of each page of notes, indicate the source author, title, publisher, year of publication, and place of publication.
• For each source, take note of what that source regards as key players and events.
• Format as bullet points, briefly describing each key point in a separate bullet point.
• End each bullet point with a parenthetical citation (last name of author and page #)

How much is enough?

Looking ahead to the big assignments which fall due over the next three weeks, here’s a list of what you should be collecting:

• Your written report will need at least three scholarly secondary sources—ideally books rather than narrowly focused journal articles—as well as one or more primary source fragments from the past to use as illustrations
• Your presentation will need a wealth of primary source fragments from the past.
• Your annotated bibliography will need a wider range of secondary sources: journal articles as well as broadly focused books. You may also choose to include collections of primary sources in your bibliography.

In Class

• Chicago Style
• Finding (and making sense of) Journal Articles

Bibliographic Plunder

HW Part One

Using the Bibliography published in The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s (link), references from Wikipedia articles, and other leads, find at least 3 scholarly monographs on your topic. Check them out from the library and bring them with you to class.

In class we will look over your books and talk about how to distinguish what makes a useful source at this stage in research.

HW Part Two Pick out a crucial event relevant to your topic: a turning point or vital development in the story of what happened. Click on the TIMELINE link just above this post and add your event as a “Reply” to the appropriate year. Be sure to read over other students’ prior contributions before posting. If someone else has already covered your event, come up with something else to contribute.

HW, Part Three Find and submit one “Fragment of the Past” that confirms your preconceptions about life in this period—or one that challenges what you thought you knew. Submissions go here.

In class

• Critique Timeline contributions
• Attila’s guide to internet research via Google Scholar and BU Library Databases.
• Upcoming major assignment: the Written Report.
  • Audience: college freshmen like yourself.
  • Writing Goal: bring your fellow students up to speed (what do they already know and what do they need to know).
  • Source citation: a footnote (or endnote) whenever you
    • give information that you learned during the research phase
    • want to point to a source with a more detailed account

Preliminary Findings

Reading HW Read the shaded sidebars on pp. 36-39 and pp. 47-48 of the introduction to Halliwell’s American Culture in the 1950s. These case studies on Disneyland and on Brown v. the Board of Education illustrate the kind of scholarship I’m looking for in your written report on the 1960s: a brief account of a particular aspect of history and culture. As you read these two passages, watch out for the following elements:

• Narrative: how might you sum up the story he’s telling in one sentence?
• Authorities: what claims does Halliwell back up with secondary sources? what claims does he leave unsourced? what can you learn about Halliwell’s research from looking at the details in his endnotes?
• Fragments from the Past: where does Halliwell use primary sources? What function do they serve?

Research HW Read about the topic you selected for this unit (selections here) in Wikipedia and other easily accessed resources. Make sure to read around your topic, trying to find a broad range of articles that bear on it.

Note that there may be no article that focuses specifically on your particular, so be inventive and look for articles that reference or relate to your topic in some way.

Writing HW Paste into the Comment Field, below:

• A list of TEN key individuals, organizations and events, ranked in order of significance. If you’re covering a movement, consider including not just movement activists, but political opponents and enemies.
• A paragraph written by you providing a basic outline of what you’ve learned. Your paragraph should briefly sum up the “story” of what happened in your topic during the 60s. You may also want to note which topics from our course are most closely connected to yours. If possible, conclude your ¶ with a question motivating further research: What would you genuinely like to know more about? What strikes you as odd or in need of further explanation?
• Following the ¶, list any 2 or 3 leads on secondary sources (authorities). These should be published sources, not mere websites. You’ll find these leads at the bottom of each wikipedia article, under the headings “References,” “Further Reading,” and “Bibliography.”

Fragments HW Now that you’ve familiarized yourself with your topic by reading wikipedia and the like, search for references to your topic in Google’s Life Magazine archive (instructions for searching the archive here). Then pick an article or advertisement that strikes you as particularly vivid or revealing and post it as a Fragment of the Past (instructions for posting screenshots here). In your comment, explain why you think this fragment is worthy of notice. Then add a link to the particular page in the magazine (for prettier links use bit.ly or goo.gl to create short urls.)

In class Finding books at Mugar Library: Attila’s guide to bibliographic plunder (Farber & Bailey handout). Difference between books and journal articles. What to make of an “article anthology” bound as a book. Using Google Books to preview materials.

Handout the Bibliography from David Farber and Beth Bailey, The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s.

The Mythology of the 1960s

Course Prep Take a few minutes to read the course guidelines, all posted on the front page of the course website: Roadmap, Course Philosophy, Why 1960s America, and Semester Grading.

Reading HW Read David Farber, Preface and Chapter 1 from The Age of Great Dreams

Write a short ¶ in response to each of the following questions. Paste your response in the comment field below, using two ¶s to separate your ¶s:

1. Farber opens Chapter One with an account of how three leaders from the period spent New Years Eve in 1959, at the dawn of the new decade. Why those particular individuals? Who are they, and what larger trend do they each represent?
2. The rest of Chapter One provides a baseline for the start of the 60s, mostly by reference to events of the prior decade. List three things you learned from this account—preferably not just dull facts but stuff that surprised you, that challenged your preconceptions about this era.

In class—bring your laptop to class!

• Choose Topics for Unit One
• Discuss Farber
• Introduce Fragments of the Past
• Tertiary vs. Secondary sources. Using Tertiary sources (Wikipedia and the like) to learn the basics of a topic. How is the topic organized? Concept of the “parents”, “children” and “siblings” of a topic. What is Wikipedia good for? Where / how can you use it in college-level research?
• Demo of good summary.

Which MLK?

Just a few days ago, the New York Times published a piece challenging the sanitized version of history that’s told every year during celebrations of Martin Luther King’s birthday. Today, King is (almost) universally celebrated in America, one of just a handful of historical figures around whom we come together as a nation. Yet, as Jason Sokol reminds us, King was far from a unifying force during his lifetime. Even a decade after his murder, he was a divisive figure, someone reviled by the conservative right. That changed after the vote to make his birthday a national holiday, but only by

Sokol’s piece serves as an excellent introduction to our study of 1960s America this semester. The past defines us: history is a story we tell ourselves to discover who we are, both as individuals and as a nation. Yet in studying the past we often learn that our most familiar stories are also the most distorted, comforting half-truths that are equal parts fact and myth.

After reading Sokol, I want you to take a minute here at the semester’s start to consider ONE of the following:

1. How does Sokol’s account change your sense of what America is all about?
2. How does his essay make you feel? Is it better to believe the myth or know the truth?
3. How does his narrative challenge what you thought you knew about the 1960s?

Paste the question you’re answering, together with a 1-¶ response in the comment space below. Make an effort to reference particular details from Sokol: vague responses leave readers with the impression that you didn’t do the reading.

In class: Course Dogma; Myths of the 1960s; learning as process of refining initially crude preconceptions; learning history as process of consulting experts and grappling with instances/documents/fragments of a lost past.