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Unit 1: Study Guide
Narratives
- List reasons why someone’s memory of an event might be different from yours or someone else:
- Different perspectives
- Different experiences
- Quality of memory
- Age of person
- Timing of event
- Political opinion or bias
- What types of evidence would be helpful in confirming one narrative versus another?
- Photos and videos
- Written texts or descriptions
- Official documents
- Other person testimony or accounts
Reliable sources
- What is the difference between disinformation and misinformation?
- Disinformation is intentionally designed to deceive
- Misinformation is just incorrect information
- How is disinformation used?
- Used to spread false information to convince people of the false message
- Who is it used by?
- Trolls
- People with an agenda to support/spread their opinion
- News or media
- Government actors or politicians
- Why does it spread so quickly?
- Exaggerated targeting a popular topic
- Social acceptance in choosing/believing in a side
- Trusting the people we see spreading disinformation (whether friends or family)
- Social media
- Impersonation
- What are some ways to stop disinformation?
- Fact checking and coronation of information
- Reverse image search
- Checking credentials and qualifications
- Blocking it out
- Education on how to identify it
- Social media algorithms to promote better sources
Who’s behind the information?
- Why does knowing who’s behind the information matter?
- Concern credential,s qualifications, and experience
- Tends to support reliability
- Bias and motives of creator
- Primary v. Secondary Sources
- Define Primary Sources - First hand account
- Examples: journals, data and statistics, interviews of witnesses, photos and videos
- Define Secondary Sources - analysis of a primary source
- Examples: news article about and event, books like textbooks, documentaries
Corroboration
- Define corroboration:
- Two sources that fact check or support each other
- What are the steps to corroborating evidence?
- Analyze two sources,
- Identify similarities
- Check reliability
- Is it necessary that two sources say exactly the same thing in order to corroborate them?
- What if sources provide different or conflicting information?
- Sources are said to contradict each other, which doesn’t necessarily mean they are unreliable sources, just that they offer different perspectives on the event
- Making it more important to understand who is behind the information to better understand why those perspectives/accounts might be so different
- How do historians specifically use corroboration as a skill?
- Compare evidence
- To create an accurate account of historical events
Lateral reading
- Explain the skill of lateral reading:
- Act of verifying what you’re reading
- By checking who wrote it, why they wrote it, what bias they had
- Leaving the main/original source to find a corroborating or conflicting source
- Why is lateral reading a necessary skill?
- Challenging our understanding of what is said
- Are images always trustworthy sources? Why?
- Not always reliable
- Technology like photoshop make images potentially less reliable
- What tools/skills are there to verify the accuracy of images?
Historical application:
- You will be expected to be able to analyze an image and passage for their historical context. You should be able to describe the reliability of the evidence, how useful it might be as evidence, and whether the evidence corroborates each other.
For example:
- Source: The following image was taken in Georgia in 1903:
- Title: “Cabins where slaves were raised for market - Hermitage, Savannah, Georgia
- Photographed by: Underwood & Underwood, publishers
- Date: 1903
How might the photograph be useful as evidence of the living conditions of enslaved people?
- Context of who they are, what they’re doing, why they might be there
- Basic depiction of conditions
- Small uniform homes
- How many people might live in one structure?
What about this source might make it less useful as evidence of the living conditions of enslaved people?
- Might not be an accurate representation of true living or working conditions
- 1903 is after the end of slavery
Summary of historical context:
- Civil War
- 1861 - eleven southern states decide to secede from the United States
- Beginning four years of war
- The northern and southern states had been growing morn unalike
- Economically
- North has industrialized and commercialized
- South remains dependent on agriculture and slave labor
- Socially and politically
- North wants to abolish slavery
- South wants to keep or expand slavery
- Civil War Photography
- First American war to be extensively photographed
- Collodion process (or wet-plate photography)
- Allowed photographers to capture vivid images of battlefields, soldiers, and military hardware
- Battle of Antietam
- After the battle, Alexander Gardner photographed the battlefield and fallen soldiers, creating 95 images.
- Mathew Brady exhibited Gardner's photographs in his New York City gallery and sold prints of the images to the public.
- President Lincoln uses the battle to issue the Emancipation Proclamation
- Emancipation Proclamation
- Freed slaves in rebelling states
- The end of slavery timeline:
- September 22, 1862 - Emancipation Proclamation
- Goes into effect January 1, 1863
- April 9, 1865 - Robert E. Lee surrendered
- June 19, 1865 - Gordon Granger, a Union general, arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved African Americans of their freedom and that the Civil War had ended
- Juneteenth
- More than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation
- More than two months after the end of the war
- December 6, 1865 - 13th Amendment Ratified
- Made slavery unconstitutional
