What is your overall assessment of the primary source and its usefulness/significance for the historical study of your topic?

This is a 2 part homework. I will for the second one separately.

Week Two Assignment – Draft Analytical Essay on Primary Sources

As you may know, a primary source (sometimes called an original source) is an artifact, a document, an image, a recording, or other source of information that was created at the time under study and was more or less contemporaneous with the events, people or places it described or represented. Primary sources can be textual (a memoir, a legal code, etc.), visual (a photograph, a painting, architecture, etc.), auditory (sound recording), audio-visual (movie or video with sound, etc.), or some other contemporaneous record.

SELECTION

In this 2-page draft Analytical Essay on Primary Sources you will analyze one primary source from a series of primary sources housed in one of the Discussion Boards in Weeks 2-4. The topics of those Discussion Boards are: Hammurabi’s Law Code, Zoroastrianism, Classical Greece, and China and Rome (Week 2), the Silk Road, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Song Dynasty, and Medieval European Towns (Week 3), and Empires of Western Africa and the Aztec Empire (Week 4). For your final Analytical Essay on Primary Sources you will deepen and extend your analysis of this single primary source. Although it might be natural to pick one of the primary sources from our first two weeks for your paper, you are free to choose one assigned later in the month. It might be a good idea to peruse the topics and documents assigned in case one really jumps out at you as more interesting than the rest. To help you choose a topic, I’ve created the attached list of eligible primary sources assigned in HIS 233:

Write about “Hammurabi’s Law Code”

ANALYSIS

You begin this assignment by reading or viewing the one primary source you chose and analyze its meaning by making notes on your answers to the questions below:

1. What kind of primary source is it?
2. Who is the author or creator (if known)?
3. Can you tell why was it written or created?
4. What is the primary source’s tone? What words and phrases (and/or scenes and visual perspectives) convey it?
5. What are the author’s or creator’s values and assumptions are? Is there visible bias? Explain your answers.
6. What information does it relate? Did the author or creator have first-hand knowledge of the subject or did s/he report what others saw and heard?
7. What issues does it address?
8. What is your overall assessment of the primary source and its usefulness/significance for the historical study of your topic?