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The first step is to do a query on-line or in person looking through the database for your subject. Once, you get these sources you scan through them, looking at the book jacket on the back, publish date, background of the author, table of contents, index, and read the preface and introduction. Most historical works that are reliable tell you upfront what the book or article is going to be about, and has ample evidence either in footnotes, endnotes, and or a bibliography. This can lead to more sources. Once you get a quick idea of what the book is about, then you are ready to decide if you want to use it and enter it alphabetically as an entry to your bibliography according to MLA format. Then in one paragraph you describe what this book, or chapter in a book, or article, or document is about, the author’s method, conclusions, and its usefulness. The writing here is extremely tight, active voice, and its always helpful to quote or cite within the paragraph, but its not necessary. Your opinions are not necessary here. This paragraph is single-spaced and block indented.
The first thing a researcher must do is track down her research sources: the books, articles, and documents that she will closely study in becoming an expert on her topic. Throughout the notecard-taking process, a researcher maintains what is called an “Annotated Bibliography,” which is the list of sources that she will use or may use for her final paper with a brief description about why and how this may be an important resource for the research paper.
Your third Moving Voices benchmark is to complete an Annotated Bibliography of at least three sources. All three must be physical books or magazine/journal articles.
(Remember that your final paper must have at least five sources, four of which must come from the library.)
Each listing of your bibliography must have two parts:
You must observe proper formatting technique. The bibliographic listing should be double-spaced with a hanging indent. The annotation should be single-spaced as a block quote.
On the due date, you must also bring in the hard copy of every item on your working bibliography, whether it’s a physical book, photocopy of a magazine article, or printout of an Internet article.
Here are two examples of a proper listing:
White, Richard. “Refugees: a world made of fragments.” The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991: 1-50.
Explores how the French encountered an already shattered world by the 1640s, caused by disease, warfare, the fur trade, and Iroquois domination in Huronia (1). Applies Eric Wolf’s theory of “interaction and interrelationships” to examine how Iroquoian peoples influenced and were influenced by foreign colonizers, such as the French, Dutch, British. Describes in detail how the Seneca raided and pushed other tribes around the Great Lakes out, having already formed a strong confederation prior to European contact. Redefines European motives as already constructed before contact with indigenous peoples of the area focusing on stages that led to the political economy of the fur trade. States a theoretical model of Indians at this time as not tribes with chiefs in territories, but more composites of depopulated groups from disease, allies against more common enemies, and villages represented by different indigenous peoples.
Wolf, Eric. “Introduction.” Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997: 1-24.
Describes the framework, purposes, and implications of his book. Evaluates social, political, cultural, environmental, and economic transformations of peoples involved in European domination—both Western and Eastern Civilizations and people on the periphery, including indigenous peoples. Explains that he uses a central concept—interconnectedness, relationships, interaction to assert, that the “world of humankind constitutes . . . a totality of interconnected processes . . . ”(8). Explores the misguided social scientific concept of cultures, nations, communities as uniform or not changeable or not dynamic, such that “we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls” (13). Rather cultures interact and transform each other.