Annotation
The aim of this course is to help students get familiar and comfortable with primary sources and to learn how to extract the most information from them. While the course will follow a basic chronology of twentieth-century American history, it is not going to represent a full chronological or comprehensive narrative. Rather, the documents selected will help students to understand and analyze either specific moments, themes, or issues in US history.
The focus of each class will be discussion about the assigned primary sources and your analyses of them. Make sure you bring your sources to class and are prepared not only to discuss the sources and what they reveal, but also potential research questions for future scholarly enquiry. I will provide factual and historical background when needed as well as additional primary sources we will analyze together in class.