Tidewater Community College Oral History of the Second World War Paper Primary sources are sources produced at a particular time in history. You might thin | Course Hero

Tidewater Community College Oral History of the Second World War Paper Primary sources are sources produced at a particular time in history. You might think of them as the historical
“raw materials” used by historians to study and make arguments about the past. They take many forms
including, but not limited to: textual documents (journals, newspapers, treaties, diaries, etc.); visual sources
(film, political cartoons, art, posters, etc.); audio sources (radio addresses, speeches, music, etc.); quantitative
data (census data, trade statistics, ship manifests, etc.); or artifacts—pretty much anything that society has left
behind for us to study! For this short paper, you will be reading oral histories collected by a historian named
Studs Terkel. As primary sources, oral histories provide a unique perspective on the lived experiences of people
in the past. These first-person accounts offer historians evidence of the ways in which everyday people
understand events and shape their values, beliefs, and actions.
Begin your Primary Source Analysis by reading three oral histories from Terkel’s The Good War: An Oral
History of World War II. I have scanned the three documents in .pdf format. That document is titled Terkel
Oral Histories. You may access it here under the folder “Primary Source Analysis: WWII Oral Histories” on in
Module IV. Please note, the oral histories were scanned sideways. Once you open the .pdf, in order to view the
documents right-side up, go to the “View” tab at the upper left-hand side of screen, and choose “Rotate View”
and “Counterclockwise.”
Here are the three oral histories you are reading. You must mention or discuss all three in the paper:
1) Peter Ota, 28-33.
2) Peggy Terry, 108-113.
3) Timuel Black, 277-282.
Your goal for the paper is to make a strong central argument (your thesis statement) about how World War II
affected the individual lives and experiences of Americans, using evidence from the three oral histories to
support your main points. Your central argument should be the controlling idea around which you construct
your entire paper. State your main argument in the introductory paragraph and then use evidence and examples
from the oral histories to illustrate your central point(s). That argument should appear early on in your paper so
that readers can follow and assess your argument throughout the rest of your work.
Consider the following questions as you begin to formulate your main argument. While you are not required to
answer all these questions in the paper, utilize them to help you build and articulate a central argument: In what
specific and various ways did the war change Americans’ lives? How and why did Americans’ experiences
during and after the war differ according to race, gender, and class? How did the war influence Americans’
sense of national identity or perceptions of the U.S.?
Here are additional pointers to help you with your analysis and assist you in crafting a thesis statement:
•Directly engage with the authors/documents to get to the heart of the perspective they are advancing. What
points are they making and how? On what grounds are they justifying their positions?
•Look for connections (or disconnections) between perspectives or themes in the documents. Comparing the
documents will help you make sense of them and their larger significance. You want to move beyond simply
describing the sources to analyzing them for what they tell you about the time period in, and the circumstances
under which, they were written. Sources do not speak for themselves; historians make them speak through their
interpretation and ideas!
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•Be specific in your writing and in your reference to the documents. Introduce your authors and documents
(provide basic context) so that your readers understand your analysis and how you are them as evidence to
support your points. In general, aim for showing rather than telling by using concrete examples from the
sources in your analysis.
Assignment Instructions
Length: 600 to 700 words (This is pretty short, so you’ll have to be concise and precise in your writing and
selective in your evidence—these are all important skills to practice!)
Formatting/Presentation: Organize your paper into paragraphs with an introductory paragraph that includes
your main argument. Please include a cover page with your name, course number, title of the assignment, date,
and the word count of the paper (the word count should not include the information on your cover page). The
paper should be double-spaced, in 12-point font, with one-inch margins.
Citation: Avoid over-quoting from the sources, but if you include a direct quote from one of the oral histories,
provide the number of the page on which the quote appears in parentheses at the end of the sentence. For
example: (Peter Ota, 29). No bibliography is required.