This project will give you an opportunity to examine and write about the history of some aspect of the public space you have been analyzing for Project #1 and Project #2.

Rationale: As all of the epigraphs above suggest, history is a rhetorical act. History is always written by someone (or social group), for someone (or social group) to serve some purpose. Depending on the subject positions of both the writers and readers, different histories may emerge to explain the same past event. No one history can fully cover or explain any event; it can only select out aspects of it. Thus, as George and Trimbur point out, “the meanings of the past can never be complete. We can never exhaust fully the meanings of the past because reasons and urgencies in the present seem to compel new versions of history, new plots and new interpretations” (p. 417). Such a recognition poses two important issues for readers and writers of history. First, readers need to understand the rhetorical situation of the history they are reading. Who wrote it? For whom? To what end? What aspects of the event are focused on and what are left out? How might a writer with a different subject position (relation to the event) have written a different account? Similarly, history writers need to understand their own subject position in relation to the past event(s) they are telling, and that of their readers. They need to have a clear purpose for this history: i.e., does it fill a gap in the historical understanding? does it challenge past explanations? does is build on or reaffirm past understandings? Which social group would believe that this is an event or set of human actions that are worth understanding in the present?

Historical analysis then helps us to better understand the spaces we live in, the people we live with, and the origins of the beliefs, practices and values that we and those around us subscribe to. We can also better understand why there may be vast differences in beliefs, practices and values among the people we live with, as well as those who are far removed from us in both space and time.

Assignment: Project 3 is the third in a four-part sequence of projects through which you are exploring the representation of American culture of one location through different lens. For the first project, you analyzed a virtual space that is connected to a local physical space. For this second project, you studied the actual physical site that is connected to that virtual website. For this project, you will select one aspect of the space you have been studying to do an historical analysis. There are any number of aspects you might select and a focused selection will be the key. Here are some examples to help you think about an area for historical treatment: history of the company you have been looking at; history of the product (or type of product) promoted by the company; history of an activity related to the space (e.g., a sport for sport sites or treatment of pets through time); history of advertising in relation to the product or space type; role of men or women over time in the ads or in the activity or in the organization (e.g., role of women or men in a particular sport); history of transportation; history of fashion; and so on. This is just a small number of the myriad of possibilities for this assignment. The key will be to identify an aspect related to the social organization (e.g., company, professional organization, etc.) you have been analyzing that you want to learn more about.

The second key will be to set limits on the history. In the brief number of pages you will have to work with, you cannot possibly cover a large time span or large areas. Historians typically limit their examination of activities or phenomena to a particular time period (e.g., twenty or fifty years, etc.) and to a particular place (a country, a state, or a city or a particular private or public building or organization etc.). If the topic is a one-shot deal (say the history of a particular event), the limits are already in place. If, however, the topic covers a phenomenon through time, then you will need to set the limits and have a reason for why you picked a particular time frame and place.

As we have read and discussed in class, there are two major ways of several ways that historians conduct historical research: 1) archival research and 2) oral history research. Some historians combine the two. Clearly, the kind of research you need to do will be contingent on the past action or event or phenomenon you want to study and write about. Oral history requires events from the recent past, since the informants must still be living and have experienced the event(s).thus, you will need to decide which kind or combination of methods you need to use. The invention activities will help you here.

As with the first two assignments, you will complete a series of invention activities (heuristics) to help you conduct and write up your history. These activities are sequenced to help you move through the process of research and writing but you will no doubt find yourself returning to some of them as you write. Writing and research are recursive processes.

Paper: You will write a 3-5 page paper historicizing an event, activities, or phenomenon that is related in some way to the virtual and public spaces you have been studying. Histories typically are chronologically order--or in Hayden White’s term “plotted” like a story. The idea is to recreate the event in ways to help your readers better understand it. As with all writing, however, you will need to develop a clear rhetorical situation (the target audience, the purposes, your role as writer, the context) to help you decide which details to include and what the best organization will be. For examples, see the histories we are reading in Reading Culture (e.g., “More than Just a Shrine” pp. 418-21, “Signs from the Heart” 298-304, and all of the essays in Chapter 9 on History pp. 415-487).
 
 

Hint: Don’t wait till the last minute to do the research and writing for this project. You cannot do the research all in one go. You will need to give yourself time to think about the historical data you are collecting. You need to figure out what holes you may need to fill through further research. And you need to figure out your perspective and position on the past event you are writing about. The invention activities are sequenced to help you pace your work, so don’t circumvent these.
 
 

The great freedom but also great challenge of this assignment is to select some aspect (event(s), human activity(s), phenomenon, etc.) that is related in some way to the socio-cultural spaces you have been studying. The range of possibilities is very wide. (For some ideas, see the assignment sheet under the section “assignment.”) The following heuristics should help you to identify some relevant aspect that you are interested in. (The key to any piece of writing is finding the angle, subject area, and target audience that holds your interest.)

1. What initially drew you to the Website and ultimately to the public space you studied for the last two projects? In what way did they spark a personal, professional or academic interest of yours?

2. Throughout your research and writing about these spaces, what have you found most interesting?

3. What questions have engaging in these projects raised for you about the particular site or similar sites or some aspect of the spaces?

4. What aspect of the spaces you have been studying would you like to know more about?

5. Identify several possible aspects related to the site that would be worth historicizing:

6. Of the possibilities you’ve listed, which, in W. B. Gallie’s words, “set of past human actions must be felt by members of some human group to belong to its past, to be intelligible, and worth understanding from the point of view of its present interests”? Who are those members of some human group? (This response would help you identify a target audience.)

7. What do you already know about the history of one or more of the possibilities you listed in #5?

8. Which of the possibilities are you most interested in?

9. Does your topic need to have time and/or place limits on it? If so, what are some possible time frames and/or places that you could focus on? Why these rather than others? (If you can’t answer this yet, you may need to do background reading and other research first. Then return to this. See Heuristic Two.)

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Once you have decided on a topic to historicize, you will need to do several kinds of research. The following prompts will help guide you through the kinds of research that will be most appropriate for the aspect you have chosen to focus on.

1. Background Reading: Regardless of the type of history you decide to write (archival, oral, or some combo), you will need to do some background reading in the area. Locate two or more sources (books, articles, webpages, etc.) of relevant histories to read.

A. Books: Visit Hayden Library’s web-catalog at www.asu.edu/lib and click on “Catalog” to locate a book in your area. Try a key word search using words from your topic (e.g., history of fashion). Once have identified a book, you can use several tools in the book entry to identify other possibilities. Try scrolling down to the bottom of the page, and click on the blue highlighted Library of Congress Subject Headings for books in the same area. Or click on the highlighted blue “call number” button to find other books within the same subject area. Finally, once you find a book you think is worth looking at, look at the books in the shelves around it.

 B. Articles: You are probably most familiar with the Readers’ Guide to Periodicals, and for this project that should serve you fine. (There are many, many bibliographies and abstracts devoted to specific subject areas. You might also try one of these.) : Visit Hayden Library’s web-catalog at www.asu.edu/lib and click on “Indexes.” You can then search by “subject” or by “name” of the index you want to use. If, for example, you want to use the Readers’ Guide to Periodicals, then type this title into the “name” box. If you don’t know what to use, then you can select a subject with the drop down menu in the “subject” box. All magazines and journals in Hayden are shelved by LOC call numbers. Thus, once you identify an article you want to look at, you will need to go back into the “Catalog” from the Library homepage to identify the call number so you can get hold of the magazine or journal in which the article appears.

C. Web Pages:  You can do a general search for your subject area by using one of the megasearch engines or individual search engines. For descriptions and links, see my site at: www.public.asu.edu/~mdg42/webresources.html. You can also check the virtual site you originally looked at. As some of you noted in your papers, many sites now contain a history. Look over this to see how the site is trying to characterize itself.

Tip: As you read the histories, take note of who wrote them, the target audience, and the purpose. As George and Trimbur point out in your textbook, “the perspectives from which historians and other writers look at the past and how these ways of looking bring certain facts into view while ignoring or suppressing others” leads to very different histories. (Consider, for example, that history of fashion written by someone at Chanel would read very differently than a history of fashion written by a cultural critic. Similarly, a history of Starbucks written by someone, especially a founder, of the company would be very different than a history of Starbucks written by a food critic or a historian of business practices.)

2. Archival Sources: Archival sources can take many forms. These include, for example, diaries, or statistics, or personal, professional or governmental records, newspaper and magazine accounts, photographs, or other artifacts stored in museums or local historical societies. Anything that comes from the past that is related to your topic may be treated as an archival source. At the end of each chapter in your book is a section titled “Mining the Archive” that tackles different kinds of archival materials. Based on your topic, look at one or more of these for suggestions for locating relevant archival material that you may want to look at for your history. These sections are listed below:

 Chapter 1 Mining the Archive: Print Tabloids p. 40
 Chapter 2 Mining the Archive: Life Magazine p. 106
 Chapter 3 Mining the Archive: Textbooks from the Past p. 172
 Chapter 4 Mining the Archive: Advertising Through the Ages p. 229
 Chapter 5 Mining the Archive: Fashion in History p. 270
 Chapter 6 Mining the Archive: Take a Walking Tour p. 313
 Chapter 7 Mining the Archive: Comic Strips and Comic Books p. 367
 Chapter 8 Mining the Archive: Sweatshop Fashion p. 414
 Chapter 9 Mining the Archive: Local Museums and Historical Societies p. 487
 Chapter 10 Mining the Archive: The Old Immigration, 1840-1920 p. 552

Oral History: As George and Trimbur explain in your textbook, oral history “draws on the experience and memory of ordinary people in order to give us new insight into the meaning and texture of historical events” (485). Depending on your topic, you may find it useful to talk to people who lived through the time period and/or event that you are writing about. For suggestions on conducting oral history, see “Oral History” pp. 484-86 in your textbook. One caution: You will need to be sure that you can gain access in person, via phone or email to one or more relevant people. As with your background reading, take note of who is telling you about the experience. What was their subject position in relation to it? (e.g., were they the owner of a place? were they a former sports star? were they a fan? and so on). What do they have to gain and what do they have to lose by telling your their version of the event?

Tip: While everyone will need to do background reading--as all historians must--you will need to decide whether to rely on archival, oral, or some combination of historical data. Your decision needs to be made in relation to the topic, the time period and location covered, the availability of archival data and oral history subjects.

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As you found out in heuristic two, you will need to gather at least two, if not three, different types of notes to generate information that you will use to write your history. Here are suggestions for how to review and analyze the notes you take on your readings or oral interviews.

1. Background Reading: Based on your reading of two or more sources that deal with general background information related to your topic:

A. Briefly summarize what you have learned from these.

B. Discuss the (apparent) subject position of the person who wrote the history (i.e., what is the relation between the historian and the subject).Also identify the target audience for this history (e.g., is this written for a general American audience? for fans? for shoppers? buyers?  what age group? is it academic, that is, meant for a history scholar? or a history class?) . How might these factors have influenced what the historian selected to tell and how the historian told the story?

C. What points from your reading will be important to use in your history?

D. What quotations did you find that might be useful? Where can you use them?

3. Oral History Research: Who did you identify as important sources to interview for your history? Why did you choose these people?

1. Briefly summarize what they told you.
2. Are the accounts similar to each other and to the other reading you have done? If not, how can you account for the differences?
3. What quotations from your interview might be useful in your history? Why?

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By now you should have begun gathering and analyzing your research notes, and as you will see, you may far more information than you can possibly use. As you draft, however, you will no doubt find holes to fill (missing information, or points that need more development); at this point you might need to do a bit more research. Remember, this is a recursive process; you will move back and forth between researching and writing. In the end, however, YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO USE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE UNCOVERED IN YOUR RESEARCH. You will need to find a way to select those relevant pieces that best fit your purpose and your target audience.

1. Developing the Rhetorical Situation
 

 A. List the possible audiences you to whom you might address your history. (Tip: consider W. B. Gallie’s observation that: “To be studied as history, a set of past human actions must be felt by members of some human group to belong to its past, to be intelligible, and worth understanding from the point of view of its present interests. “ For your topic, who is that human group?)

 B. List the possible purposes for writing your history (and in turn reasons audiences would read it)/ Historians write histories for any number of reasons: to provide an explanation for past events that have yet to be written--to leave a record; to challenge and correct past records; to build on and extend past explanations, and so on). People read histories to learn about the past, of course. But consider why some people are drawn to some histories and away from others.

 C. List possible contexts where readers might read your history (e.g., publishing outlets--magazine, newspaper, popular books, scholarly journal or book; glossy brochures, on the web, etc.)

Remember that audiences, purposes and contexts work in tandem with each other. Writing is always written for someone, for some purpose and for a particular outlet. You may have a strong sense why you would write this history, to whom and where it would show up. If not, review the above lists and add to them until you arrive at an appropriate and useful rhetorical situation for your topic.

2. Deciding on a Form for the Paper

As with any writing, the form depends on the rhetorical situation. The one thing that all histories tend to share, however, is that they usually are presented as a chronological narrative--a story of the past, hence, the term his/story (note some have challenged this term, rewriting it to read her/story--however, you view it, it is a story that explains some past event or phenomenon.)

If you have gathered lots of quotes (either from documents or oral interviews) that show the perspectives of those who have lived through the event or phenomenon, it is best to let them speak in their own voice. That is, use the quotes where they will help illustrate what happened and how those who were there felt about it.

You can open in any number of ways: a flashback or flash forward, a discussion of the phenomenon, a reason to read the history, an anecdote, etc. Review the essays in Chapter 9 on History in your textbook and the histories you read for background for some ideas. Whatever you choose to do, your opening should function to give your reader a reason for continuing on to read the history.

The body of a history usually presents the story. The ending should relate to your purpose and the lesson you want your reader to learn. You can do this through an anecdote, a question, a pithy quote, a concluding statement. There is no one way; you’ll need to find the one that works best for you.

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