his 101

Tomorrow, you will be completing a Final Exam that focuses on assessing the skills developed over the past five weeks in Analysis, Connections, and Communicating about the past. This assignment is a last chance to review the skills and get feedback on your work to ensure you are well prepared for the exam.

You will complete the entire assignment in a text file (MSWord, Google Docs, or .rtf) and upload it  HERE .

The sources all deal with the same moment in American history: The assassination of PresidentAbraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865. Historians build a deeper understanding of events like this and their influence by finding multiple sources and different types of sources. Sources from different perspectives ensure that the historian gets a sense of how different communities reacted, and reveal differences in how facts were recorded even as they happened. It is the historian's task to assess all these different records and do their best to tell a coherent story that is a truthful reflection of events.

Please read/examine the following documents (some skimming of the newspaper articles is perfectly acceptable)

Document One: (above) Announcement of Assassination from the Nashville Union. Check the facts carefully on this one! The image is linked to a webpage with more information.

Document Two:  Diary of Horatio Nelson Taft, April 14, 1865 . Advance the pages to read what Taft later learned about the event - note the entry dates carefully.

Document Three:  Diary of Emma LeConte, April 21, 1861  . Columbia, South Carolina. Scroll to the bottom of the page for a typescript.

Document Four:  Harper's Weekly, April 29, 1865  . Please read all of the pages linked by thumbnail on this page (8 pages).

Document Five:  Death of Abraham Lincoln  (song), 1865

Document Six:  The National News memorial edition  , 1866

Document Seven:  Lincoln Death Images  , ~1865

You may also want to review the past lesson on  political and editorial cartoons . 

The Assignment

Please complete these answers in a separate text document (MSWord, Google Docs or .rtf) and upload it  HERE  .

Analysis:

1) Select ANY ONE of the assigned documents to analyze with a LOGIC. This can be one newspaper article or one diary entry - don't try to do a logic of the entire issue of Harpers, for example.

2) Complete an analysis of one image (different from what you did above) from the set in Document Seven utilizing the " Cartoon Analysis Checklist " from the earlier assignment.

Connections:

You can answer these questions in any way that's useful for your own understanding: a chart listing facts in the order they were learned, a series of sentences, or whatever you like. It doesn't need to be a paragraph. Each time you list an item, though, record the document it comes from (a citation)

3) What did the American public know immediately about Lincoln's assassination, and what did they learn later? How would the story of the assassination be different on April 14 than it would be on May 14? 

4) What accounts for the differences between different sources?

5) What other events were going on in the same week or so as Lincoln's assassination? 

Communication:

6) Write a SEXXE paragraph using these sources to present an answer to one of these questions (just one).

Remember that your SEXXE paragraph must include specific examples from the documents assigned for this project. Use two different sources and cite them with parenthetical notes like this: (Doc. 1) after the quoted/paraphrased material.

· How did Americans react to the assassination of President Lincoln?

· How did simultaneous events (in the same month as the assassination) affect the way media (news outlets) covered Lincoln's death?

· How was Abraham Lincoln's reputation as a leader enhanced by media, particularly through visual representations?