Erin L Conlin (editor) - America and Its Sources: A Guided Journey through Key Documents, 1865-present

Introduction

History tells a story. This sourcebook is designed to support student reading comprehension and development while simultaneously introducing students to this story through the words of people who shaped and experienced the nations history. It is a survey of U.S. history since the Civil War, and it intentionally views that history through the lenses of race, gender, and labor since those are facets of life that affect nearly all people in the pastand are thus useful tools of analysis through which to examine contemporary America.

We designed the sourcebook to include fourteen units as opposed to fifteen or sixteen, in order to give instructors greater flexibility over the course of a semester rather than feeling like they need to cover one unit per week. Some units include a variety of topics and themes in order to illustrate major points without getting bogged down in too much detail. For example, the first unit includes primary sources that span more than 200 years. The purpose is to remind students of the nations labor origins as it transitioned from indentured to enslaved labor. The subsequent thirteen units take a thematic and chronological approach, fleshing out important historical moments as well as important concepts like identity, citizenship, and democracy. Some topics, like the civil rights movement, span two units since the events of the 1950s, 60s and 70s caused such a profound shift in American society. This sourcebook is not designed to be a comprehensive account of every facet of U.S. history from the Civil War to the present. Rather, it seeks to introduce students to a nuanced narrative of American history that highlights major themes while also introducing them to new voices and ideas that may be less familiar to them from their previous history courses.

Many students, even at the college level, struggle with reading proficiency and comprehension. This book is intentionally designed to meet the needs of instructors who want their students to work with primary sources but recognize that many college students (especially those in their first year) need more structure and scaffolding than might be found in a traditional textbook or document reader. This structure can help such students understand information from the readings and apply new knowledge they are developing in the course across topics and periods of time. Primary sources can be particularly challenging for students because these sources often use less familiar language and require students to understand the historical context in which the source was produced in order to fully understand its meaning. This sourcebook aims to support student reading and learning in several ways.

Each unit of the sourcebook consists of an introduction, five primary source documents, and a unit review. There are three unit questions posed at the beginning and end of each unit. These questions are designed to guide students reading throughout the unit. They encourage students to think critically about the material by asking them to apply knowledge they learned from previous units in order to establish connections, draw conclusions, and make predictions. They also frequently contain note-taking tips and directions so that students will produce thorough, useful notes to review at the end of a unit.

The five primary source readings in each unit follow a similar, highly structured format. To facilitate improved reading comprehension and strengthen historical understanding, each primary source reading provides historical context as well as guiding questions designed to facilitate students engagement with the material. The Historical Context section is aimed at providing relevant information about the document itself, the author, the period and circumstances in which it was produced, and/or how the source relates to other events, readings, and themes throughout the sourcebook. As with the unit questions, there are three Guiding Questions for each source. These questions are designed to guide and assess basic reading comprehension, help students flesh out the most important information, and critically analyze the source by drawing conclusions based on previous knowledge or making predictions about the future based on what they learned.

The primary sources in each unit have been carefully edited to limit them to an average of 500 words per document, in order to provide students with enough material to work with as they analyze a source but not so much that they get overwhelmed and quit reading. (The 500-word target is for the primary source content only. It does not include material in the Historical Context or Guiding Questions.) Some primary sources exceed 500 words, but no unit exceeds 2,500 words of primary source content in total. Where sources have been edited for length, we have included ellipses to indicate places where the original material has been excised.

We welcome feedback about this sourcebook. If you would like to contact us, please do so via the publisher:

Schlager Group / Milestone Documents

Attn: Erin L. Conlin and Stephan Schaffrath

1111 W. Mockingbird Lane, STE 735

Dallas, TX 75247

info@MilestoneDocuments.com

Erin L. Conlin and Stephan Schaffrath

March, 2019

About the Editors

Erin L. Conlin (PhD, University of Florida, 2014) is an assistant professor of history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). She specializes in public, oral, and 20th-century U.S. History. She regularly teaches courses in these areas and is actively developing the IUP Oral History Program. Her research examines the evolution of Floridas modern farm labor system and its heavy reliance on non-citizen workers.

Stephan Schaffrath (PhD, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2004) is developmental instructor in the Department of Developmental Studies at IUP. For most of the last twenty-some years, he has been working with first-year college students to prepare them in literacy education through composition, language, literature, reading, academic acclimation, learning skills, and career exploration courses. With a Certificate in Developmental Education from the Kellogg Institute and a PhD from IUPs Literature and Criticism program, Stephan is an ardent advocate for making even the most complex texts accessible to all students.

Acknowledgments

John P. Davis: A Black Inventory of the New Deal: Reprinted from The Crisis, May 1935. Reprinted courtesy of the Crisis Publishing Co., Inc., the publisher of the magazine of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People.

Advertisements from the 1950s and 1960s: Magazine advertisement for Hoover Vaccuums from the 1950s and advertisement for Alcoa Aluminum. Both: The Advertising Archives/Bridgeman Images. 1935 advertisement for Elliotts Paint and Varnish: Pictures from History/Bridgeman Images).