Nancy A. Hewitt - Exploring American Histories, Volume 2: A Survey with Sources

A painting on the front cover shows the front of Saint Paul's cathedral, with several people of different racial backgrounds traversing the steps in front of and sidewalks around the cathedral.

Text on the inside front cover reads, Take the lead in succeeding in your history course.

Taking your first college history course might seem like a challenge. These excerpts from the Bedford Tutorials for History will give you tools for succeeding in your history course.

Taking Effective Notes

Lectures and reading assignments present large amounts of information that can be overwhelming. Here are a few tips for taking effective notes.

Establish Shortcuts to Facilitate Taking Legible Notes

To speed up your note-taking and yet still have notes you can read, use abbreviations and symbols to indicate commonly used words and ideas. Text-messaging conventions are transferrable to note-takingfor example, use w/o for without and b/c for because. In your history class, you can use c. for century and establish other shortcuts for commonly used historical terminology.

Organize Your Notes and Be Selective Every time you begin a new set of notes, include the date and subject at the top of the page. Focus on the big ideas and include the concrete examples and details needed to illustrate and support those ideas. Your goal is to create notes that are brief yet understandable.

Working with Primary Sources

A primary source is a document, object, or image created during the time period under study. Sometimes, historical documents can be difficult to understand because of their form or language. Here are questions you can ask when analyzing primary sources.

Who produced this document, when, and where?

Identifying the author of a primary source is important because it helps expose the authors point of view. We need to know something about how the author or artist viewed the world and how he or she came to produce the document or visual source.

Who was the intended audience of the document?

There is often a close connection between a document and its intended audience. The historical importance of a document is partly determined by who read it.

What are the main points of the document?

While reading, start to make connections between the main points of the document and the specific choices the author made in style, organization, content, and emphasis.

What does this document reveal about the time and place in which it was written?

Often there is no single right answer to this question because readers bring their own goals and purposes to their analyses and use the evidence found in the document to draw their own conclusions about the documents historical meaning. (Continued on the inside back cover)

Front of St. Pauls Cathedral, Tremont St., c.1936 (oil on board), Crite, Allan Rohan (19102007)

In dignified and graceful attires, the guests dance and converse with one another. A couple in vibrant white attire, in contrast with the other guests, dance at the center of the painting. Various kitchen objects and food items adorn the shelves and in different parts of the kitchen.

Allan Rohan Crite was born in New Jersey in 1910, the son of an African-American physician and engineer. He grew up and attended art school in Boston. In 1940, Crite was hired by the Federal Arts Project, one of President Franklin Roosevelts New Deal agencies, to help the unemployed get jobs. The oil painting featured on the cover, Front of St. Pauls Cathedral, Tremont St., created around 1936, features two of Crites themes. First, it depicts middle-class African Americans in ordinary activities and as normal human beings, rather than portraying blacks in what he considered the stereotypical images of musicians and poor farmers. Second, he was devoted to Christianity. This painting, rich in vibrant colors, combines the two as African Americans.

In their search for an improved understanding of the past, historians look for a variety of evidencewritten sources, visual sources, and material artifacts. When they encounter any of these primary sources, historians ask certain key questions. You should ask these questions too. Sometimes historians cannot be certain about the answers, but they always ask the questions. Indeed, asking questions is the first step in writing history. Moreover, facts do not speak for themselves. It is the task of the historian to organize and interpret the facts in a reasoned and verifiable manner. The books and articles that they publish are secondary sources, which are created after the events or conditions they are studying. These secondary sources then become the basis for teaching and for other historians to use in researching and writing their own studies. Because they are interpretative and open for debate, secondary sources allow historians to move forward by modifying explanations of the past. Thus, historical interpretations are constantly being revised, and Exploring American Histories, 3e offers students opportunities to appreciate this dynamic quality.