One task of historians is moving from a diversity of sources to a compelling narrative of historical events. You will frame your primary source collection with a 1000-1250 word contextual essay that presents your synthesis of how the sources you analyze fit together. Taken together, what do these sources reveal, and what is their larger historical significance?
Citations: While most essays written for History classes use Chicago style footnotes, for this digital project you may use the Chicago “Author Date” style where you give credit for ideas (whether quoted or paraphrased) by putting the author’s last name, the publication year, and the page number in parenthesis at the end of your sentence. You will then list the full citations for your sources at the bottom of the page. Here is an example of Chicago Author-Date style citations.
Examples of Contextual Essays
Note: these don’t follow the exact length/content requirements of your project. They’re intended to be models of how other historians writing for a broad audience have approached explaining historical context and interpreting a topic on the web.
- Adams, Ellen, et al. “American Empire” in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).
- Jiménez, Maya. “Early Scientific Exploration in Latin America.” in Smarthistory, January 4, 2018. https://smarthistory.org/exploration-latin-america/
Sources
Full Bibliography citations for your sources go here.