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 15th & 16th centuries (which means 1400-1620). Select any topic from the first 2 weeks (Native Americans, Europe’s drive for colonies, the early colonies themselves), 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 course material to which it relates. 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.

• Your source must be about something tied to U.S. History from 1400-1620
• 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.
• 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.

Here is a sample:

Artist: Onondaga Nation

Title: Hiawatha Belt

Date: 1400s

Retrieved fromhttp://www.onondaganation.org/culture/wampum/hiawatha-belt/

Comment: This belt represents the formation of the Iroquois Confederacy in the 15th century. This confederacy would have a major impact on the development of the European colonies (French, English, and Dutch) founded along the northern part of the Atlantic coast because of the large population and territory controlled by the 5 tribes together. The central tree represents the Onondaga nation since it was under a tree on their territory that the confederacy was formed. The other four boxes represent the other 4 nations (tribes) in the confederacy: the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Onieda and the Mohawks.

Please use Reply to this post to add your source. Then afterward reply to someone else’s post when you are going to comment. When commenting please do not just say “good post” or “I never knew that”, etc. Your comment does not need to be real long, a few sentences to a paragraph, but it should add something meaningful to what the original poster wrote about the source.

One of the student’s post

Artist: John Smith(1580-1631) and William Hole (1624)

Title: Virginia

Date: 1624

Retrieved from Virginia’s Early Relations with Native Americans | Colonial Settlement, 1600s – 1763 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress (loc.gov)

Comment: The image shown is a close up image located on a map. In this image Native Confederation Leader Powhatan is shown. The larger image shows the Chesapeake bay and Potomac River in Virginia. Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas, was the leader of the Confederacy of tribes around the Chesapeake Bay. He was responsible for keeping the peace between the Native Americans tribes in the area and the English Settlers that arrived in 1607. The tribes were weary of new Settlers but the Settlers were interested in changing the way of life for Native Americans. Eventually, the tension between the Tribes and Settlers would erupt and fighting would break out between both sides.