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.
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