Humanities Homework Help

A number of weeks over the course of the semester we’ll be posting primary sources (especially visual sources) from the web on the Primary Sources Board. The post is always due Sunday by midnight. (30 points). We’ll be using these sources for a few writing assignments in the class, including the final 2 page essay.

This week, we focus our primary sources from the later 18th century (1763-1800). Select any topic from this week (from the events leading up to the Revolutionary War to the writing of the Constitution), then look on the web to find a visual primary source (a painting, statue, building, printed book) from these centuries that you find interesting. Post it here and tell us something about it, and which part of the material it relates to. Give us artist/author, title, date, a live link to where you found it (the web page with information, not the image itself), plus your comment on how it could provide evidence for this era.

General Guidelines:

• Your source must be about something tied to U.S. History from 1763-1800
• It must be a primary source and not a secondary source, see the learning unit, so it must have been painted/made/written within at most 20-30 or maybe 50 years at most of the event it is depicting. It CANNOT be from hundreds of years after the event.
• The date you provide MUST be from when the object/painting/document is produced, not when the subject of the image takes place.
• You must provide a live (clickable) link to the site where you retrieved the image and the image must be visible on the page, if I click on the link and cannot see your image your grade will be marked down.
• The commentary cannot just describe the source, it MUST explain how the source relates to the course material, please see the Learning Unit for this week.
• It cannot be the same/very similar to any image I have used in the course, such as the sample below, images used in the powerpoint presentation or the course video clips.
• This assignment is primarily about posting visual sources, if you decide to post a written source you MUST post an image of the original document (which needs to come from the assigned era, and you also MUST provided an extended excerpt (at least one paragraph if not several) from the document.
• You may NOT upload your image to canvas and then link from it there since that can cause issues where some people cannot view the image, you need to embed the image using a link to the original site where you found it. If you are uncertain about how to do this please see the course help page.

Artist: John Trumbull

Title: The Declaration of Independence

Date: 1818 (planning began in 1786)

Retrieved from https://www.aoc.gov/art/historic-rotunda-paintings/declaration-independence (Links to an external site.)

Comment: This painting was planned about a decade after Revolutionary War ended, but was not completed until the Capitol Rotunda was redone in the 1820s. It shows a number of things about the founding fathers.

• One was their elite status, it was an all white male grouping of rich men, most of whom came from prominent families and were often well educated. Although this saying “The Well-Bred, the Well-Read, the Well-Fed, and the Well-Wed” was said about the Constitutional Convention, it applies to this gathering as well, no common men were in attendence.
• Also, this document shows these men binding themselves together in a act of defiance (treason from the British perspective) which meant they had thrown themselves all in on the success of the revolution.