Benchmark #01: Artifacts & Interviews

due 9/24

Historians search for first hand accounts, artifacts, and evidence to contextualize moments in history, in order to tell an interesting story, an important remembrance of our past. We Americans will continue to retrospect on our past. One day future generations will look back to us, the living, and try to uncover, the “clash of civilizations between the West and East,” or the first woman, or African American elected president, or how people responded to the threat of global warming. Historians often look at what every day people are thinking, saying, and doing in times and places to provide evidence for their arguments, theories, or evaluations. Historians don’t always study the big battles, the famous heroes and villains, the major catastrophes, but rather, the current historical cutting edge research is about stories that haven’t been revealed – yet.

Creative storytellers use detailed descriptions, such as the way things felt, smelled, tasted, looked like, sounded, and through their oration evoke our senses to help us journey to that time and place. In literature and history, or humanities, we call this a “sense of place,” or an “evocative moment.”

You will go to your homes and try to uncover four artifacts that you will present to class. Be creative, look far and wide, ask lots of questions, and remember the theme of movement of people, places, and ideas in your family history, contextualized with in American history. For each artifact prepare one brief paragraph about that artifact. One of them must be a summary of an oral interview, which will be a two-page double-spaced summary.

Artifacts:

Can be physical objects, such as a button, bullet shell, passport, photo, coin, piece of cloth, family tree, dish, letter, newspaper article, radio, vinyl album, and so on.

Can be on different stories of various people and times.

Can be pictures of actual artifacts.

Can be imagined, such as a baseball to represent the real one that you imagined they used. Or a picture of a similar event or person.

Interview (one of the four artifacts):

Oral Interviews are one of the most important primary source documents for historians. You are gathering evidence, facts, and stories.

Generate Five Questions to ask relatives: due next class, 9/18 or 9/19
Interview relatives, in person, or by phone. Take good notes in your notebook. Ask as many questions as you need to in addition to the ones you generated. Interview as many relatives as you can, to get multiple perspectives, or the same ones as many times as time will allow. You may record them, however you like, but you don’t have to. You do need to summarize the evocative, interesting, or important aspects to the interview. Remember to think about their personal story and the connection to the historical context (time and place).
Interview Synopsis (Qualitative Historical Research Summary): two pages, double-spaced, word-processed, that describes who was doing what, when, where, why and how. Due Monday, 9/24.