Body of Evidence: Introduction

Examine the linked clippings, a collection I assembled several years ago when teaching a research course centered on 1950s America. It contains every mention of the word “motorcycle” in the pages of Life from 1947-1962.

Sources like these aren’t rich enough to sustain analysis when examined one at a time. But amassing a bunch of minor sources allows you to make claims about cultural tendencies. By bundling ads or articles together as a “body of evidence,” you create a composite source of significant complexity and richness. Because this is an exhaustive collection, you can use the relative abundance or absence of motorcycle references in a given year as a rough gauge of cultural interest in motorcycles.

What patterns do you see in this collection of articles? Decide on ONE thing that motorcycle signified to mainstream America in the 1950s. (Let your classmates cover other stuff.) Write a short piece calling attention to details from specific photographs as evidence for your claim. Post the results in the comments, below.

Bonus Listening

Last year I happened on a podcast that’s a splendid instance of source-driven historical inquiry. Please read or listen to “Wipe Out,” episode 397 of 99 Percent Invisible: website | podcast.

Turning in your Bibliography

When your bibliography is complete, Print/Export to .pdf. Give the file a name like “Your Name.pdf”

Choose an entry that you’re proud of (both the bibliographic details and your brief summary of that source). Paste that passage into a comment below. Use the “upload file” option to attach your .pdf essay to that comment.

Article Summary

Last week I had you briefly summarize three journal articles. For this assignment, I’d like a more in-depth summary, the sort you will need to offer in the upcoming Annotated Bibliography. Write a brief 3-paragraph summary of the most interesting or controversial of the academic journal articles you’ve found so far in your research, using the following template (revised early this morning, so OK with me if your HW follows the original one):

• Topic: In the first ¶, focus on summarizing the the material the article covers/presents. In what sense is this a narrow part of your much broader research topic?
• Thesis: In the second ¶, focus on summarizing the author’s vision/understanding of that topic. How does the author distinguish his/her thesis from the work of prior scholars? Alternatively, how does the author’s vision differ from that of other scholars you’ve read?
• Evidence: In a third ¶, what kinds of evidence does the author present? Data and statistics? Personal letters? News articles? Interviews?
• Be sure to give a proper Chicago Style bibliographic entry, so I can find your article if I need to.

Paste this HW into the comment field, below.

In Class Reading for controversy, as well as for consensus.

Lecture pre-empted for the Third Team Forum.

Academic Journal Articles

Find three academic journal articles that touch on your topic. They can come from academic journals OR from collections of articles bound as books (i.e. from an “article anthology”). Some strategies for finding articles (try them all, so you get experience using each of these tools):

• Use the standard BU Library search system, turning on the filter for “peer-reviewed article” and for “available online”
• Plunder the bibliography of a published book or article you found earlier
• Look on Google Scholar (scholar.google.com)

Note: to count for this assignment, the article must (1) date within the last 20 years, (2) be written from a historian’s perspective, (3) focus at least in part on the events and culture of the period we’re studying.

Pro Tip Use keyterms (names, events, places) from your research so far to find articles on aspects of your topic that interest you.

For Class On your GoogleDocs research findings page, create a new heading, “Peer-Reviewed Articles.” Then list bibliographic information for each of your articles, along with a BU library link and a screen capture of the first page. In addition, for each article give the following three bits of information:

1. One sentence naming the article’s topic
2. One sentence voicing the prior understanding that the author addresses (often explicitly voiced as a reference to the work of prior scholars)
3. One sentence voicing what the author has to say in response to that prior understanding. What new insight or findings does the author present (the article’s I Say)

Choose one of these article write-ups to highlight in the comments below.

In Class

• Evaluating Academic Journal Articles (which of yours are any good?)
• Primary Sources: Illustrations or Evidence?
• Qualities of a good presentation (Steve Jobs & the iPad)

Plundering the (Virtual) Shelves of Mugar

Ahoy, Matey! We pirates be a greedy bunch, and there are books aplenty at Mugar—and many of them are available online!

But don’t weigh yourself down with leaden coins. Many a book bears a promising title but turns out, upon inspection, to focus on matters irrelevant to your inquiry. So sit yourself down under the light of Mugar’s many lamps and crack open each of your books to see what lies therein. Then, if the book is indeed of use, turn it to further use by trawling through its notes and bibliography for leads on other books you might find and plunder.

Remember that your focus here is historical: you’re looking to learn the history of an movement or idea. That may be easy for some topics—the history of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, for example, has been extensively documented. By contrast, there are lots of books on dinosaurs, but few (none?) on the history of dinosaurs as a cultural phenomenon. If you can’t find a book with a focus that’s exclusively historical, however, you may be able to find some that discuss the topic’s history in the introduction or in early chapters. So it’s really important that you crack the covers on your books before you check them out of the library: read the table of contents and skim through the introduction and several chapters to get a sense of what’s on offer here. What approach does the author take to the topic? Does the book adopt a historical perspective at some point, attempting to explain the present by reference to the past? If so, you have a source worth your while.

Research Findings Create a Google Doc for publishing your research findings:

1. Go to docs.google.com
2. Make sure you’re logged in to your bu.edu google account. (This will facilitate sharing, below.)
3. Start a New Document
4. Click on Share, then under “Get Link” choose the “Boston University” option.
5. Copy link, then add the link to your post on this website on the Topics for Unit Three page.

In the coming weeks, you’ll be using this Google Doc to keep a record of your research findings. This will provide your classmates access to the fruits of your research, and it will make it easier for you and I to confer during office hours.

For today, paste a list of 3 single-author books you think look interesting formatted Author, Title, Year, Link. The link you’re looking for is the one that the library website displays after you’ve clicked a green “Online Access Available” link. It might be labelled Jstor or Proquest Ebook Central. In your Google Doc, format the link as an embedded link, rather than as a long text string. Skip two lines between entries.

After you’ve done all that, make a screenshot of the table of contents for the book that strikes you as most promising, and upload the screenshot in a comment, below, along with two sentences describing what this book is about and why you want to read it.

Reading

Michael Gerson, “The Last Temptation,” an article from the current issue of The Atlantic magazine. Gerson offers an example of a writer seeking a deeper understanding of a present-day phenomenon by studying its past.

As you read, note moments where Gerson surprises you. Type one such quotation in as a comment, below. If someone else has already put up the quote you were planning, write a reply commenting on what made that moment in the essay surprise you. In particular, what’s Gerson doing, as a writer, to engage his readers in this way?

Example of a Multisource Essay

Reading HW Download and read the excerpt from Brett Harvey’s oral history of women’s experience of the 1950s that’s posted among the Readings on our Blackboard Site. As you read, make a list of all Harvey’s sources. I found about 10.

Harvey’s account of motherhood in the 1950s is partially interest since those suburban moms gave birth to late-60s teen rebels. But my principal aim here is to provide you with an example of the sort of scholarship I’m looking for in the upcoming essay. Harvey has assembled her account by piecing together both Evidence and Authority sources. But, because she’s writing for a popular audience, her book lacks scholarly source citations. So you’ll have to read carefully and do a bit of guesswork to piece together what sources she’s drawing on at any given moment of this chapter.

In the comments below, post ONE of the sources you identified by reference to the page and the moment in her argument. For instance, (these are both made-up examples):

• “On p101 in speaking of family trips, Harvey draws from a 1950s travel brochure published by the American Automobile Association.”
• “On p120 Harvey draws on another historian (I assume) to provide a brief history labor-saving appliances like clothes-washers from 1930s up through the early 60s.”

Preliminary Findings: Wikipedia

Read about the topic you selected for this unit in Wikipedia and other easily accessed resources. Make sure to read around your topic, trying to find a broad range of articles that bear on it.

Note that there may be no article that focuses specifically on your particular, so be inventive and look for articles that reference or relate to your topic in some way.

Writing HW Paste into the Comment Field, below:

• A list of TEN key individuals, organizations and events, ranked in order of significance. If you’re covering a movement, consider including not just movement activists, but political opponents and enemies.
• A paragraph written by you providing a basic outline of what you’ve learned. Your paragraph should briefly sum up the “story” of what happened in your topic over the past few decades (reaching back as far as a century if you like). If possible, end this ¶ with a question motivating further research: What would you genuinely like to know more about? What strikes you as odd or in need of further explanation?
• Following the ¶, list any 2 or 3 leads on secondary sources (scholars/authorities). These should be published sources, not mere websites. You’ll find these leads at the bottom of each wikipedia article, under the headings “References,” “Further Reading,” and “Bibliography.”

In Class: Books in Mugar
Please bring your laptop with you to class, preloaded to this link: http://www.bu.edu.

The Earliest Essays, 1 of 2

Read Montaigne’s “On Cannibals,” available in the Readings posted on the Blackboard site.

Respond to ONE of the following in 3 or 4 sentences, then rewrite your response and submit in 2 sentences MAXIMUM:

1. Point to (or quote) a moment when Montaigne draws on “Authorities.” (Don’t duplicate what others have already posted.)
2. Point to (or quote) a moment when Montaigne draws on real-world experience or “Evidence.” (Again, try to avoid duplication.)
3. Looking at the examples posted in response to questions 1 & 2, does Montaigne seem more dependent on Authorities or on Evidence? Which does he trust more?
4. Connect Montaigne to Hall’s conception of the essay from last week.