J3 Prompt
by Dr. H - September 27th, 2016
For Wed 9/28 – bring a rough draft of your topic to class, printed out so we can work with it in a peer review session
For Fri 9/30 – Online journal #3 is due, posted to your site (600-700 words). The prompt is to analyze / dissect one of Blackhawk’s footnotes, of your choice. What’s the context within the text itself? What sources does it use? What does it contain? How many of them can you track down yourself? What further questions does the text-footnote dialogue generate for you? What good is a footnote, anyway? What does this exercise teach you about scholarly production, or the historical profession itself, or about history’s “ways of knowing?” (PS – the fancy word for that is epistemology… i.e. how we know what we know…)
One of the basic tasks of any well-written piece of historical scholarship is to convey the significance of the book/article’s subject. So: briefly summarize Violence Over the Land, and explain in your view — why does Blackhawk’s book matter?