description

This course is designed as a “nuts and bolts” course in the sources and methodology of social history appropriate to the nineteenth century and early twentieth century US; it is also one of the options for the research seminar for graduate Download
HIST 711 Syllabus PDF
HIST 711 Reader PDF
Will, Robert Christian PDF
Will, Caroline Carson PDF
Probate Inventory, Samuel Hayes
Will & Probate, Louise Courselle PDF
Inquest, Mamie Grover PDF
State v. Rehberg PDF
Quilting Party PDFstudents completing a master’s degree. Instead of concentrating on a topic, the course looks at different primary sources and examines their problems and prospects for research. In addition to the standard textual sources in US history—newspapers, diaries, letter collections, and so forth—there other, less commonly used but equally rich sources for historical research and analysis: census abstracts and manuscripts, property conveyances, wills and probates, civil and criminal trials (appellate and district), maps, images, and artifacts. These are the focus of the course. How have historians used these materials? Where do historians find them? What can be gleaned from such documents? And how do researchers cope with problems presented by these materials?

books

The following books are required for the course. They are available in the Campus Bookstore or from other vendors far and wide.

These texts, essentially, demonstrate the use the various documents that we will be looking at in class. Read them quickly as examples of what can be done.

blog

You are required to obtain a Plus-level subscription to Typepad, a blog. TypePad is available at: <http://www.typepad.com>. All of your writing assignments will be posted to your Typepad blog. The cost is $8.95 per month or roughly $27.00 for the semester (the cost of a modest textbook). The best thing to do is sign up for a free trial; this will furnish you with a month's free service. At the end of the semester, you can cancel your subscription. Or, you may discover that you like blogging so much that you retain your subscription. Alternatively, you may know someone who can mount a blogging application (WordPress, for example) at your ISP. That’s fine. We will not use Blogger (or any other free service, for that matter) because of the ads, server unreliability, and spam problems.

A word about design. Good design helps your blog visitors find what they are looking for and read it once found. Certain design elements contribute to readability and legibility. For your TypePad blog, you can choose any design in Classic, Bold Colors, Cool Colors, Pale Palettes categories except Folio, Beckett, Sunburned, and Porpoise. These are just plain difficult to read, and I do not want to go blind. You should not choose anything from the Special Interest group. When you choose a layout, choose a two or three column layout. Avoid the mixed media layout; they are not appropriate for history.