Journal 1 Prompt: Textbook Critique
by Dr. H - September 9th, 2014
Reading for Thursday, Sept 11 = Scott McLemee, “Is It History Yet?” (a review of the Potter & Romano book, Doing Recent History).
We will be discussing pages 1-44 of Potter & Romano’s book on Tuesday the 16th so you might want to begin that reading this week. Also make sure you’ve completed the Research Self-Assessment, posted on Blackboard, by Thursday. BRING LAPTOPS TO CLASS.
For your first research journal entry for the semester, tackle a textbook with coverage past 1980. In our class workshop, we examined the books themselves, their authorship and historical context, and then we documented elements of our collection’s coverage of recent history. In our discussion we explored differences and similarities among the books, and we identified interpretive statements. You can either continue with the same event(s) we talked about in class, or choose a new one from your textbook to analyze for this journal entry.
Due Thursday, Sept 11 by the START of class – email me the link, and/or add me as a viewer if the blog is private
Total word count: 600-700
Start your entry with a FULL Chicago-Style citation of the book, as if in a bibliography.
Discuss Author, Publisher, Edition – give some context, who/what/when – look these people up (in the book itself, online, or in a scholarly database), who are they?
Critique / analyze your textbook’s coverage of ONE event or topic. Use quotations (cited, of course, with relevant page numbers) to provide evidence for your critique. Discuss strengths, weaknesses, any obvious gaps or omissions.
This should be a narrow, targeted review of a clearly delineated section or chapter, i.e. not a review of the whole book.
Offer the author some recommendations, or assess the utility of this version of the event for its intended classroom use.
The tone should be similar to an academic book review & less like a personal response paper (if you’re unfamiliar with the genre, try a few of the reviews in the back of any issue of the Journal of American History). Practice writing with your best “scholarly voice.”