1. Evaluating sources
2. Education and Expertise 3: Discuss Tompkins
Required reading / viewing / listening:
Tompkins, J. " 'Indians' "
Homework due:
Response paper 6
Tompkins' essay is difficult. It requires some work on the part of us, her readers, to make sense of what she is saying and doing in this essay - to make connections between the pieces of the essay. She begins by telling a story from her childhood - a story that "stands for the relationship most non-Indians have to the people who first populated this continent." She goes on to state that "The present essay ... doesn't have much to do with actual Indians, though its subject matter is the histories of European-Indian relations in seventeeth-century New England. In a sense, my encounter with Indians as an adult doing 'research' replicates the childhood one, for while I started out to learn more about Indians, I ended up preoccupied with a problem of my own."
As a way to start the work of making sense of Tompkins' essay, reread the essay paying attention to how her "encounter with Indians as an adult doing 'research'" could be said to "replicate" her childhood encounter. Write a page (250 to 400 words) describing some of the connections you can make between her childhood story and the work of her essay. Remember to refer to specific examples from the text.
In-class assessment:
Quiz 6
citation format; plagiarism spotting
Below are bibliographic entries for several sources. For each, give the correct in-text cite in APA format.
Rosen, C. (1972). The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. New York: Norton.
David, P.A. (1990). The Dynamo and the Computer: An historical perspective on the modern productivity paradox. The American Economic Review, 80 (2), 355-361.
Blair, J. (2003, March 27). Relatives of missing soldiers dread hearing worse news. The New York Times, p. B13.
Blair, J. (2003, March 27). Relatives of missing soldiers dread hearing worse news. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/27/us/nation-war-military-families-relatives-missing-soldiers-dread-hearing-worse.html?pagewanted=print
Delong, B. (2009, July 25). Education and equal opportunity. Message posted to http://delong.typepad.com/
ElecticGlue. (2008, July 21). A Night at the Opera: Contract scene [Video file]. Video posted to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-zR2pM_S5U
Shines, J. (1975). Too wet to plow. On Too wet to plow [Vinyl disk]. New York: Tomato Records.
Read the following text and the three examples of using the text in an essay. Which uses may be considered plagiarism, and why?
From page 233 of:
Grafton, A. (1999). The Footnote: A curious history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Historians' practice of citation and quotation have rarely lived up to their precepts; footnotes have never supported, and can never support, every statement of fact in a given work. No apparatus can prevent all mistakes or eliminate all disagreements. Wise historians know that their craft resembles Penelope's art of weaving: footnotes and text will come together again and again, in ever-changing combinations of patterns and colors. Stability is not to be reached. [12] Nonetheless, the culturally contingent and eminently fallible footnote offers the only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources. And that is the only ground we have to trust them. [13]
Notes:
12. Cf. N. Z. Davis, "On the Lame," American Historical Review, 93 (1988), 572-603.
13. I agree strongly with the discussion of problems of historical knowledge offered by R. Chartier, "Zeit der Zweifel," Neue Rundshau, 105 (1994), 9-20 at 17-19. Cf. also A. B. Spitzer, Historical Truth and Lies about the Past (Chapel Hill and London, 1996).
Examples using the text:
Footnotes can't support every statement of fact. There will always be errors and disagreements. The best historians know that their stories of the past will be continually written and rewritten. But footnotes give us the only reason to trust what historians say (Grafton, 1999, p. 233).
Footnotes "have never supported, and can never support, every statement of fact in a given work." But, as Grafton argued (1999), the "culturally contingent and eminently fallible footnote offers the only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources" (p. 233).
No amount of footnotes can prevent all mistakes or eliminate all disagreements. But the footnote is the "only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources" (Grafton, 1999, p. 233).
