By reading letters, newspaper articles, speeches, poems, or by viewing photographs or political cartoons from the time period being studied, historians can interpret the events of the past. For this project, you will work with primary source documents in order to further your understanding of a chosen topic.

1. Choose a topic. from the following;

Colonialism Jacksonian Era
Revolutionary War Civil War
Constitution Reconstruction
Slavery Westward Expansion

The time period of the chosen theme must be between the years 1600-1877.

2. Find FOUR (4) primary source documents. Some types of primary source documents are
speeches, personal letters, political cartoons, poems, songs, photographs, and newspaper
articles. You are not allowed to have more than two of the same type of document.
Written documents should be edited to approximately two paragraphs, but should not be at
least one paragraph. No more than one of these documents can be taken from your textbook.
The remaining three must be found by researching the internet, books, and magazines.

3. You will categorize the documents into a pair of documents that supports the topic and a pair
of documents that opposes the topic. For example: patriots v. loyalists, North v. South, pro-
slavery v. abolitionists, etc.

4. For each document, write a brief summary of approximately one paragraph that
describes what the document is stating or implying.

5. After presenting your documents, you will write an essay that
analyzes the documents you chose and compares the two opposing points of view.
including references .