Assignment Goal: A five-page essay that analyzes an important historical primary source document or artifact in order to answer a historical question about a keyword, and utilizes at least one historian’s writing about it. Historians create secondary sources, and the essay gets secondary source credit ONLY if they are quoted for interpretive or evaluative statements. The essay can use facts from secondary sources, but to gain credit in the essay the quote used must be a statement of analysis, a showing of cause (causality), an interpretation, a position on a historical dilemma, or a claim that the keyword was beneficial or harmful to America.

Step One: Moving from Keyword to Primary Source

Choose one of the numbered keywords found in the Keyword list for Chapters 24-30, and locate the passage section in American Yawp that discusses that keyword. This is your topic background, but you need to find a TEXT or other document (audio, video) or artifact (artwork, object) that will serve as the focus of your essay.

Example: A student named Fiona chose the keyword “Great Recession” and reads the American Yawp text about it in Section V of Chapter 30. The textbook says that a major cause of the recession was a government law entitled the “Commodity Futures Modernization Act”. Yawp also says this law “exempted credit-default swaps—perhaps the key financial mechanism behind the crash—from regulation” (30.V.ii). Fiona focuses on the question, “How did such a law cause the hardship of the Recession?” She decides to find out. She decides the main primary source text is the CFM Act itself. Now she needs to find out how this law allowed banks to collapse, people to lose their homes or jobs, and soon after put the burden to repay the lost money on average Americans instead of forcing banks to take the loss.

Step Two: Moving from Primary Source to Secondary Source

Locate an essay or book written by a historical scholar that analyzes the primary source as one of its features. Use the Queens College Library search engine to locate this source. DO NOT USE YOUR WEB BROWSER SEARCH ENGINE. You will not get credit for this essay if you do not use at least one peer-reviewed academic article or book-length study of your topic. You may use multiple secondary sources for this essay, but at least one must be an academic study that, somewhere in its content, interprets and examines your primary source.

Any secondary source used must be over 3000 words in length (approximately ten printed pages).