Weeks Two to Three: SHD Teams Assigned

You and your classmates will be assigned to your particular SHD team, region, and dates in section by your TA. Dive into the resources on the SHD website, look at the lists of primary sources listed online, survey the newspapers and plantation records in order to begin familiarizing yourself with your assigned place and time.

You may want to begin by looking at:

• SHD Guide: How to Get Started and Research Your Episodes
• Southern History Database Team Assignments. This map shows where the different teams will concentrate, and how they will be divided up geographically among the class.
• Primary Sources by Geography: Resources on the South Available at UVA Libraries. This map shows how the primary sources available at the University of Virginia libraries divide up geographically across the nineteenth-century South.

Week Two: Begin researching and writing your SHD episodes

Your main task this semester will be the research, composition, and interpretation of "episodes" for the Southern History Database (SHD). An episode is a brief narrative of a specific event or experience, public or private, that reflects larger themes, patterns, or processes. You will need to set the context for each episode by identifying its time, place, and characters, narrate the story or describe the experience, and tell your readers what this episode reveals about the American South in the nineteenth century. Each episode must be thoroughly grounded in secondary sources, found on reserve in Clemons library, and will be based on a close reading of primary documents, found in the Small Special Collections Library, Alderman Library's periodicals room, and online.

You may do this in any order or way that seems effective to you and your teaching assistant; writing style and imagination are important, as are accuracy and sensitivity to the multiple contexts of every action. Your readings have been especially chosen this term to show episodes in action; leaf through the books and you will see many examples, usually two or three paragraphs long, and how historians use them.

Each episode should be roughly a page long, single spaced. Its sources should be clearly defined and correctly cited.

Each episode must be accompanied by an array of information for input and organization in the SHD. Click here for directions on what sort of information you will need to have for each episode, and here for examples of successful episodes. All necessary information should be collected as you do your initial research, so keep the episode database structure in mind as you visit the libraries.

Weeks Seven and Eight: Rough drafts of episodes due

Students in Group A should give rough drafts of all ten episodes to their TAs by Friday, October 6. Students in Group B should give rough drafts of all ten episodes to their TAs by Friday, October 13. These drafts should be submitted as printed documents; submissions by email are not acceptable. The rough drafts will not be graded, but strong rough drafts are essential to producing adequate final drafts of the episodes.

Week Eight: Continue researching and revising your SHD episodes

Use your TA's comments to revise, rewrite, and strengthen your episodes. Go back to primary and secondary sources in order to give greater context and specificity to your narratives. Be sure to pay close attention to the crafting of your episodes as well as citation format.

Week Nine, Reading: The Valley of the Shadow Project, 1863-65

Trace a character from Presence through the second half of the Civil War and be prepared to tell what happened to him or her. The character need not be one of the major people in the book, but should be someone for whom there is a significant amount of information in the Valley Project. What does the experience of that person tell us about the evolution of the North and the South over the last two years of the war? Print out and bring in three examples of evidence you would like to discuss.

Weeks Nine and Ten, Research: Final drafts of 10 episodes due in section

Students in Group A must turn in final drafts of their episodes by Friday, Oct. 20. Students in Group B must turn in final drafts of their episodes by Friday, Oct. 27. Your SHD episodes, rewritten based on your TA's suggestions and your own further research, are due in a hard copy. Be prepared to discuss your episodes, patterns you've noticed, and themes you think are important in class and section. Be especially prepared to discuss which episodes you chose to narrate and why you selected them.

Week Eleven, Reading: The Valley of the Shadow Project, Reconstruction

Judging from the Valley Project, how did the purposes, nature, and prospects for Reconstruction change between 1865 and 1870? Look at the Northern responses as well as the experiences on the ground in Augusta. Print out and bring in three examples of revealing episodes.

Week Eleven, Research: Upload your revised episodes into the SHD database

Once your TA has graded your final drafts of episodes and you have edited them, paste them into the Database. We will discuss the details of this in class. Click here for information about what sort of information you will need to have for each event. Remember to give proper credit to the sources you used.

Week Twelve: Five-page paper due in section, synthesizing your episodes into the larger context of your region (using the work of your teammates in the SHD)

This paper is your best effort to relate the patterns you have discovered in your series of episodes. You should also place your patterns in relation to those found by your research teammates in order to contextualize your time period within the entire nineteenth century. Those patterns may not always be obvious and they may not fit together in a straightforward way; they may even contradict one another. The paper is a reflection on the process you have followed as well as the particular results you describe.

Week Fourteen: The Valley of the Shadow Project, Memory of the Civil War

Surveying the materials on the memory of the war in the Valley Project, describe how the war was remembered in Augusta and Franklin. How "accurate" were those memories? What did they emphasize and what did they leave out? Did the North have more accurate memories than the South? Print out and bring in three examples of revealing episodes.

Week Fifteen: Five-page paper due in section on an important overall pattern in the SHD

In this five-page paper, you will distill what you have learned over the semester. It will be more a reflection than a report, a reflection about the ways we touch the past and make meaning from it. You should focus on one of the patterns over time and space you have dealt with more recently, or on something entirely new that you have discovered over the course of the semester, especially as your individual research relates to the course lectures and readings. Whatever you choose, you will need to be able to describe it quickly in discussion section, connecting it to the themes of the class and to the work of your fellow students. As always, your TAs will be happy to help you in your efforts.