Workshop Assignment #3: Sourcing
For Workshop on 1950s Society & Culture:
1. Find a quiet place and read through the documents fairly quickly. Now, if you were going to write a history of the 1950s from these documents, what would your question be? Write out your best idea for a question.
2. Now it’s time to look for connections between the documents that might help answer your question. If you find it helpful, use a concept map like in last week’s exercise. When you’ve given this some thought (a half-hour would be just about right), get up and stretch, and then look for more. In a few sentences, explain a connection you think others are likely to miss.
3. Recalling the examples given in class, provide an example of each of the following:
- A sentence demonstrating a naïve attitude toward sources of information;
- A sentence demonstrating a simple attitude toward sources of information;
- A sentence demonstrating a good understanding of “sourcing”;
- A sentence demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of “sourcing.”
4. One of the documents in the Shi & Mayer chapter on the 1950s is not what it purports to be. Which one do you think? What makes you suspicious about it?
Written answers to these questions will be your ticket to class for the Workshop.
Levels of Skill at Sourcing
NAÏVE: “As stated in the book, the Truman doctrine threatened the credibility and power of the United Nations. . . ”
SIMPLE: “But Lippmann points out an important point, that the real threat to the U.S. wasn’t Soviet ideology, but Soviet tanks. . .”
GOOD: “Sen. McCarthy was a liar, an alcoholic, uninformed on political philosophy, and an opportunist. His views on the communist threat carry little weight now.”
SOPHISTICATED: “As a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who had written extensively on both diplomatic and political affairs, Walter Lippmann took a somewhat wider view than Kennan the diplomat.”
A really, really fine example of a student who “sourced” her document:
“Walter Lippmann, the prize-winning journalist, argued that the Truman Doctrine would undermine the United Nations. This was a serious charge. But George Kennan knew things about the nature of the Soviet threat that Lippmann did not know. It was Kennan the diplomat who worked with the Soviet leaders on a daily basis for years, not Lippmann. Lippmann wrote from behind a desk at a newspaper office. Kennan wrote from Moscow. Kennan understood that the U.S. needed to act fast to contain Soviet aggression. Kennan recognized that free peoples of the world could not afford to wait for the United Nations.”
What about these examples of student writing? How would you rate them for “sourcing”?
- It was said that women resented being cooped up in the home.
- In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan told of how American housewives were frustrated by a sense of dissatisfaction with their lives.
- Marynia Farnham’s views seem crazy, but she was a highly educated woman—a psychiatrist. At the least, she shows that it’s hard to make generalizations about what “American women” think.
- The idea that women’s highest role was in the home was widespread in the 1950s. Just how widespread can be seen from a speech given by Adlai Stevenson to a graduating class at Smith College in 1956. Keep in mind that Stevenson, as a Democratic candidate for president, represented a liberal American male. . . .