Public History Assignment
For this assignment you need to write a brief (3-4+) page paper
in which you analyze one or more public history sites. Your sources
should be either websites or the pamplets handed out in class. You
should write a clear essay in which you expalin how this site is
related to some of the themes of public history that we talked about.
What you talk about will of course depend on what the site is trying to
do. Here are some possibilities
-Trying to fix a historical event to a place
-Connecting a locality to a bigger story
-Encouraging local pride by emphasizing some unique oddity.
-Cashing in
This essay will require you to do some thinking about organization. All
the writing you have done before for this class was tied pretty closely
to the individual reading. In this one you will have to think a bit
about what the main point of your essay is and make this clear in the
introduction.
You may use as many sites as you want for this assignment. Two usually
works well, since it is easy to do a comparison of two places.