The Lincoln Letters Project

The Lincoln Letters Project

ASSIGNMENT C: Secondary Source Analysis
Now that you’ve isolated certain lives and events, find out where they fit in historical context. Use secondary sources (books and/or journal articles) on Lincoln and on the Civil War. Have historians overlooked the issues your letters raise? Do your letters have particular historical significance? How does the secondary source literature place these lives and events in context and make them understandable? (**Again, these questions are to help guide you in your quest for a thesis.**) Using the footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies in the secondary sources, try to determine whether any other historians have used these letters.
For this assignment you should use at least THREE sources beyond textbooks or encyclopedias. These sources can be either books and/or journal articles. Please be considerate of your classmates and try not to take out books for more than one night. Treat them as if they were on reserve.
The following databases are all available through the Phillip’s Memorial website:
 HELIN (PC library catalogue; access to books in all RI colleges)
 JSTOR (journal articles)
 Project Muse (journal articles)
 Cambridge Journals Online
 Oxford Journals
**If you would like to use ANY website not expressly mentioned in this assignment, you need approval from the professor BEFORE you turn in the assignment.**
Now draw some conclusions. Write a paper of 2000-3000 words (approximately 8-12 pages) in length. (The initial paper from Assignment B will be incorporated into this larger paper, although it should be revised to reflect both the comments from the professor and what you now have learned from the secondary sources.) What important events in Lincoln’s life or American history do these letters demonstrate? Have historians sufficiently appreciated these letters as sources of information? How does the larger context of Civil War history make these letters more comprehensible? Did the issues raised in these letters seem more important then than it does to historians now? Or perhaps vice versa? Did any of this cross-referencing lead you to spot errors, on the part of a letter-writer or historian? You need not answer all these questions, but one or more may point you in the direction of a conclusion.
Remember, history does not always present an easy or complete picture. Try not to be discouraged if you run into setbacks, pitfalls, or dead ends, and try to avoid wandering too far into irrelevant tangents. Build towards a central argument. Your job as a historian is to be clever as well as careful, imaginative as well as discriminating.
Due date (first draft, uploaded to Sakai): Thursday, March 31st
[This should be a complete draft – your best stab at an A paper. I’ll tell you why it’s not ;-)]
***Include a descriptive title, page #, word count, footnotes (see Rampolla), and full bibliography.
Due date (second draft, uploaded to Sakai): Thursday, April 28th
[This draft MUST incorporate both the specific grammatical/stylistic comments and the more substantive, big-picture comments. Anyone who resubmits their first draft with just grammar corrections will automatically receive a maximum final paper grade of D. Trust me – I’m NOT kidding!]
***Include a descriptive title, page #, word count, footnotes (see Rampolla), and full bibliography.

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