“Signage and the Jim Crow Era”
Description: Primary source documents and/or artifacts are important to the study, researching and documenting of African American History. Providing students with an opportunity to access, examine and write about these documents will promote engagement and significant student learning. Working with documents and/or artifacts from a specific historical era, allows students to understand those periods in context and the contributions of human cultural communities.
The Library of Congress’s website in particular and the Digital Archives, specifically, includes a wealth of documents, photographs, and other artifacts from the identified topic areas above, which students my readily access. The history program faculty teaching HIST 210 will decide which of the topic areas above will serve as the target for the Common Assessment for that semester. Each section will utilize that topic in their Common Assessment prompt. The faculty will also decide the specific number of documents and/or artifacts students will work with, as well as when the assessment will be administered during the semester.
Assessment for the 2016-17 year: “Signage and the Jim Crow Era”
Goal: Students will examine 10 designated images from the Library of Congress link: https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/085_disc.html (Links to an external site.)
Students will be provided with a copy of the National Archives and Records Administration’s Document Analysis and/or Photo Analysis Worksheets to use in their examination of the 10 images. [Worksheets will be posted to Canvas]
The analysis of this collection will serve as a basis for response to the following prompt in a Document Analysis Paper:
Prompt: “Analyze these images/signs as visual documentation of the White Supremacy ideology which undergirds Jim Crow society in the United States of America.”
After you have examined the images and completed a Photo-Analysis Worksheet for each of your 10 images, write a 3-4 page paper that responds to the above prompt. This paper must be typed using double-spacing, 12-point Times-Roman font. You must specifically refer back to your images when making your assertions, inferences, or conclusions in your paper. This means you must cite these images within the paper. You must use either FOOTNOTES or ENDNOTES in your paper formatted in the Turabian/Chicago format. You may use other materials from the course: textbook, lectures, etc. However, these sources must be cited correctly as well in your paper.
This paper requires a well-developed thesis statement which is logically supported by referring to the 10 specific images/signs. Students may reflect on the following within their papers: “the messages conveyed in the signs”, “the potential impact of these signs”, and “what these images tells one about the Jim Crow Era”.
