More on the #1Report paper

The #1Report paper must start with a primary source. This document is a window onto the soul of the era when it was written. It is like a relic or a fossil that an anthropologist finds or a clue at a crime scene that a police investigator has uncovered. The first priority is to read the document and to discover what it means or at least try. Like any in-context piece of information it was directed for a particular audience that is not you, 21c first-year students. It was written more than a hundred years ago so you can imagine that those reading the document then had information that allowed them to understand the document that present day readers like yourself do not have. So it is difficult to read for us. But we can start to read it and find what seems logical and coherent in it and describe it to our readers in a partial sort of way. For those things that are understandable because of the knowledge we have of the era and topic we can write about with ease, but the ideas and events in the document that are not known to us we by necessity have to start with questions.

The paper should start with a summary of what the student writer knows about what he/she has found in the document. First, you might speculate as to the answers to particular questions you don’t have immediate answers for. Then you will want to start doing research and pulling up sources that help you answer these questions. The paper should start with a summary of what the student writer knows about what he/she has found in the document. Along with what you know you know about the document you should start to ask questions about what you don't know. These questions should hang on ideas posed in the document that revolve around the topic conversation.

In other words, if the topic is health, then the document presents ideas about health that the people of the era thought about and struggled with. The approach to these ideas might not be presented in language that we can understand. Therefore, we need to ask questions and look for answers in those who were writing at the time and to those who have written subsequently. With these questions in hand the student writer then proceeds to the second part of the essay where he/she tries to find answers to the questions posed by the document by doing research on the topic and the era.

One way to find answers to the questions you have is to investigate the writer of the document. Look at his/her biography and see if there are clues to answering the questions. Also, look to the document writer’s contemporaries. See if they can shed light on the questions you have about the document. Finally, look to more modern sources that allow you to see the document in its cultural and historical context. Context is everything here.

What were the people like that are talked about or addressed by the document? What were their concerns, their opinions, their social mores, their religious and philosophical understandings, their views on a multitude of things, etc. Try to fill out the biography of the people who lived in the US 100+ years ago. They are undoubtedly the same in many respects to ourselves but there might be some true differences what might account for the way the document speaks about the topic.

And remember that the document is just a partial, ephemeral snapshot of the era. It is their knowledge of the thing at the moment. With every momentary commentary on the events of the day it will be missing things that we take for granted because we have historical hindsight. Yet, the document can be evaluated rhetorically. We can ask about the document's purpose, the ethos of the writer, and its intended audience. These questions will allow us to discover how it fits into the conversation at the time about the topic we are interested in joining.

For this is the reason we are looking at these documents to begin to understand the conversation about X that has been going on for centuries. The people writing these documents are just our nearest contemporaries who have engaged in these conversations. They are just distant enough to puzzle us but not distant enough to preclude our understanding of them and their culture and practices so that we can come along side of them and see them as relatives in the culture and practice of the ideas we are interested in understanding today.

Notes on how to approach the first paper: #1Report

Paper structure. First, get a sense of what people where talking about in relation to your topic at the end of the 19th C, early 20th C. The best way to do this is to read through the article I've posted in the mindmap but also to do a bit of research about your topic during that era. Second, pick a figure, the moderator I've chosen (e.g. Muir-ecology), or someone else who is involved in the topic and tell us how he/she is important for your topic. What ideas are they talking about? Who are they talking to about these ideas? What difference did these ideas make at the time? Etc. Third, pick one of the ideas that seem important and write in more detail about what your person has said about it, why he/she was key in regard to this idea, what happened as a result of the work that this person did, etc. And finally, tell us why what this person did is important now.

In general. The era we are exploring initially can be framed by two wars: The Civil War in this country and World War 1 (WWI), the first world-wide war. This is a suggested limit. You wouldn't want to go much later than 1920 and not much earlier than the 1820s. The period encompasses the start of the industrial revolution and the great emancipations of slaves and serfs. Britain was the world power and the period can be loosely called Victorian after the long-reigning Queen of England during this period. It also contains many of the important revolutions--1848 in Europe and 1917 in Russia. Important inventions from the steam engine to the light bulb to Penicillin and the machine gun occurred during this period. It is also the period where many modern institutions are born -- the World Bank, the Red Cross, the modern university system, to name a few -- and when certain ideas also come to prominence that still influence us, for instance: evolution, socialism, the Protestant ethic, the unconscious, etc. Also, the great middle class was established in this country as was the ascendance of capitalism and progressivism. A growing sense of a period between childhood and adulthood -- adolescence -- was more clearly established with reforms to child labor laws and the institution of mass education. At the end of the era romantic love became a staple of popular entertainment. People started to have more leisure and more money to spend on consumer goods. Catalog companies like Sears and Roebuck started to bring these goods to families in isolated homesteads across the country. Women's rights became a pivotal issue leading up to American women getting the vote with the 19th Amendment in 1920.

That's a brief over view of the era and some of the events and ideas that marked it. These factors are still important for us today. The era 1820-1920 has defined our world more distinctly than any other before it. It is just distant enough to provide a sense of strangeness at the same time what these people lived through is very familiar. For instance, the idea of the West where cowboys and Indians struggled is well defined. The reality of the years in question -- right after the Civil War -- is more strange and different than you might imagine from the sense one gets now of the era from TV and movies. We have done a lot to mythologies this era so what is the truth? Often the truth is bound up in what the society at the time says is the truth which gives us a sense of shifting sands so it takes some digging to develop a more complicated notion of the truth of an era. Typically those in control of the message have a more powerful lock on the truth while those who are marginalized are not able to contribute at all to our understanding. The truth in these cases gets skewed and it is up to us by research to unearth the real nature of things.

Trying to see the deep structures of a culture at a particular time takes reading all kinds of documents that a particular culture produced. You would want to read pamphlets, newspaper articles, scientific journal articles, fiction and poetry of the era as well as other more popular expressions of everyday life. But as it is true these days, popular culture gives a narrow take on the culture that has to be put into context and be supplemented by other more mundane facts and statistics as well as a notion of what the everyday person was like, what made them tick. This can be quite difficult in light of the sort of filters we have developed and our own feeling that we are much different from these people and have no connection to them. There is need for you to approach this project with open eyes and with the idea that you may not be much different from these people after all.

Feel free to post a comment or question to this blog post and I will respond to you.