Personalizing History Project: Final Paper
The final segment of our Personalizing History Project will be a written assignment that brings together the collective history of the Re-Thinking American History Timeline with the materials you have gathered about your hometowns over the semester. Here’s what I’d like you to do:
Re-thinking American History
- First, visit a cemetery in the neighborhood, borough, or town where you currently live. Take a walk through the cemetery and try to find a marker memorializing someone who lived between the years 1865 and the present day. Gather information from the memorial about the individual’s name, date of birth and death, and any other details that might be recorded on the stone.
- Using your local newspaper, public library and historical society archives, see if you can learn a little about the individual. You might turn up nothing, but see if you can find the individual’s obituary, at least.
- Go to the Re-Thinking U.S. History Timeline and create entries in with the individual’s name, birth, death, and any other notable details that you might discover.
Re-imagining the Past
- For the written assignment, please review the M5 Study Guide: Historical Imagination. Your assignment will be to use historical imagination to write an essay of approximately 1,000 words, from the perspective of the individual whose name you discovered in the cemetery. The essay will cover the history of America that unfolded during their life. You might imagine this history as being a story that the individual is sharing with a child, grandchild, or great-grandchild who has outlived that person.To write the history:
- Examine all of the Re-Thinking Historic Timeline entries that occurred in the 20 years preceding the individual’s birth as well as the entries that occurred during the individual’s lifespan.
- Review any of the learning materials from our previous course modules that you feel might be helpful in preparing this story.
- Your essay should:
- Synthesize details from the timeline into narratives that the individual constructs for descendants.
- Include footnotes referencing quoted and paraphrased material.
- Catalogue all sources you used into a bibliography, including the references included with the Wiki entries you use.Please use the Chicago Style for citations, and take care to ensure that the citations are completed properly.
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