The intent of the assignment is to measure contemporary assessments of an event against later historical analysis, particularly noting how the element of perspective changes over the course of time. Your job is to use digital sources in order to find original press reportage of an historical event in the 1900-1945 period. You also have the option of consulting microfilm versions of various newspapers, which are stored in the basement of the Mearns Centre-McPherson Library. You have the opportunity to pick whatever event you wish to study as long as it falls within the chronological parameters of the course (1900-1945). However, you should choose an event that was relatively compact historicallythat is, it occurred within a period of several days,and it should be something that generated headlines, such as the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, or the Pearl Harbour attack, or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once you have chosen a topic, you should consult with the instructor to make sure that it is appropriate and feasible.
There is an on-going debate about whether newspapers impose the views of their owners and editors, or simply reflect and refract public views about an issue that are already starting to crystallize. For our purposes, however, we can regard newspaper coverage as one of the definitive indicators of contemporary conventional wisdom about a topic. One historian calls newspapers cultural vectors that play a crucial role in the creation of popular memory.
Once you have decided upon the event that will comprise your topic, you will need to use newspaper collections to find original press stories covering your subject and copy one or several of these reports. The Mearns Centre-McPherson Library offers accessthrough ProQuestto The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. The library also provides online access to digitized versions of The Globe and Mail, The Daily Mail Once you have assembled original press coverage of your chosen topic, use the Mearns-McPherson homepage portal to find secondary literature on your topic. You will be looking here for history books or scholarly articles in journals, not more newspaper stories. After reading and digesting this material, you can then proceed to write your paper by providing a brief narrative account of your topic, and comparing the contemporary press accounts with the later historical literature. If you can identify a change in perspective, try to analyze why reporters covering your topic at the time it occurred might have looked at it differently from later historians. If there is a difference in perspective, why does it exist? Does that effect owe to the mere passage of time and the cooling of passions; does it owe to the fact that historians later gained access to fresh sources of information (such as government papers in archives) that were unavailable to journalists writing newspaper stories; or does it owe to the fact that some modern-day historians are from nations or cultures that take a view of your event widely divergent from the conventional wisdom shaped at the time? Some events, such as the Great Salt March or the November 1918 Armistice, have become infused with a commemorative aspect that influences present-day perceptions. Did this process occur with your event? Exploring such differences in perspective should comprise the main bulk of your essay.
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