Depending what theme/group you are in, you will be using a selection of primary and secondary sources to develop your storymap. A secondary source is one that was created by a historian or other interpreter of the past. A primary source is one that was created in the time and place in the past that you are researching.
There is not a strict word count for this project and I will not be counting, but to include all that is expected will probably require at least 400 words per source.
For each Primary Source, you need to include:
The source’s time and place in the past — full citations are not required.
Critical information from the introduction regarding who created the original source, who the (likely) audience was, and why the course was made.
Key evidence (probably, but not necessarily, quotes.
Interpretation of those quotes.
Thoughts about how the source answers the prompt question and/or what it represents about that time and place in history.
For each Secondary Source, you need to include:
Author, title, and date of publication (if available) — full citations are not required.
Explanation of what the author’s main idea is.
Explanation of what kind of evidence the author uses to support their conclusions.
A quote.
Explanation of how this source, its information, or ideas relate to at least one of the primary sources you are using for your storymap.
Working with Primary Sources
Every source that is part of this project includes an introduction that provides critical context and background information. For some sources, this is just a paragraph; for others, it may be two pages long or more. Read this carefully before you read the main text, and read it again afterwards.
{Some but not all sources have an additional intro at the end of the document describing the wider context.}
Pay particular attention to who wrote/spoke the primary source (sometimes this is buried in the text), who their intended audience was, and why.
You will need to use key details from this introduction in your storymap but you should not draw quotes from this introduction.
All sources will include a prompt question written by me at the top. You are welcome to ignore this if you have your own ideas, but for most students you’ll want to shape your interpretation in response to this question.
Two Keys to a Strong Interpretation
Key 1: Using Context
We can make terrible mistakes in understanding the past if we do not take into account the contexts of our sources. Foremost, we need to understand who made our sources, what their intended audience was, and what the source was supposed to convey in its time and place in the past.
Consider, for instance, this quote, which came from Colombia, 1964.
If we read this uncritically, the source appears to indicate that the people of Colombia were all rising up in rebellion against their corrupt, inept, and murderous politicians. However, there is also that phrase, “in solidarity with us.” Who is this “us”?
When we glance at the intro to this source, we learn that this was an early proclamation of a revolutionary army called the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) which grew out of the Communist Party of Colombia and which waged war against the Colombian government from 1964 through the early 2000s. This statement was made as these communists were first deciding that political oppression was so extreme that meaningful change could not happen through the normal political process and that revolution was necessary. The FARC styled itself as the “people’s liberation army,” but in reality it was quite small at the time.
With this information, we can then conclude that the assertion that “the Colombian people… rise up to fight in solidarity with us” was more of a hope than a reality. But we need to think about the audience as well. The intro is not very explicit about this, but an educated guess is that it was meant to 1) express the shared intentions of the revolutionary fighters in order to solidify they commitment to the cause, and 2) encourage the wider population of Colombia — especially those disgruntled about the government — to join the revolutionary struggle. This this in mind, the source lets us see that these revolutionaries were asserting that they were (or should be) the true representatives of the Colombian people. In other words, the revolutionaries were contesting the government’s claim to represent the will of the nation. The revolution was, in part, a struggle over how “the people” was defined and who spoke and acted on its behalf.
Key 2: Close Attention to Language
A strong interpretation is one that examines closely the word and phrase choices of the author and considers what these meant in their original context in the past. Below, for example, are two excerpts from a letter from 1939 by a Costa Rican social scientist, Clodomiro Picado, who (like many Latin American elites at the time) feared that the racial composition of his nation was declining.
A quote such as the highlighted one allows us to see the sense of emergency that white leaders of Costa Rica felt about influx of African descendant people into the nation. “Blood,” “blackening,” “gold,” and “charcoal” all are evidence of what these leaders thought was at stake in the racial composition of the nation and why they thought they had to control the reproductive future of the citizenry.
But this quote is also sensational. Sometimes the most shocking statements of prejudice are so distracting they do not help us dig deeper into the thinking of the time. If you are interpreting Picado’s letter, you want to know not only what conclusion he arrived at (as seen in the quote above) but also how he arrived at that conclusion. Again, close attention to his word choice is an effective way to do this.
Consider these lines from the same letter:
“Principle groupings,” “immutable” (i.e. unchangeable), “hereditary”: these terms all show us how Picado and other social scientists and politicians of his age thought about race. To them, it was something inborn, permanent, and classifiable. To them, race was scientifically proven (now we know that race is not a biological reality). All people fell into one or another race, and this unchangeable inheritance determined an individual’s capacity and defined a nation’s potential. They therefore looked around the world, and judged that a nation’s prosperity depended on its racial composition: white Europe was wealthy, black Haiti was poor. (In this way they ignored how imperialism and capitalism created inequality.) Thus, drawing on what they thought was good science, it is not surprising that national leaders in the mid-20th century believed it was their duty to regulate their nation’s racial destiny.
