Enduring Voices 2. [antikvár]

PREFACE Enduring Voices: Document Sets to Accompany The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, Second Edition, has been prepared with the objectives of exploiting students' latent interest in history, stimulating critical thinking, and immersing students in the historian's process—evaluating the kinds of evidence from which the historian builds interpretations of past events and developments. By plunging into documentary analysis, students not only become familiar with the tools of the historian's trade but experience firsthand the excitement and satisfaction of "doing history" and of unlocking the "secrets" of the past in a systematic way. Yet using documents can be complicated, and the history instructor must instill in students a healthy skepticism. As students engage in the analytical process, they will discover on their own, often with some unease, that it is an oversimplification to "let the documents speak for themselves." They will realize that multiple readings of the evidence are frequently possible. An equally important goal in using Enduring Voices, then, becomes sensitizing students to interpretive complexity—making them comfortable with uncertainty. For every chapter of The Enduring Vision, Enduring Voices presents several sets of documents, each built around a "problem" closely related to a major theme in the corresponding textbook chapter. In all, over four hundred individual pieces of historical evidence—comprising tradirional forms such as letters, petitions, speech excerpts, and testimony, as well as less standard kinds of evidence like patent applications and product advertisements—are represented in the two-volume Enduring Voices anthology. Each Document Set is introduced by a brief essay establishing background and textual linkage and sporiighting a central analytical question, and by a series of questions for students' consideration. The instructor is free to photocopy any and all Docu- ment Sets for classroom use with The Enduring Vision-, D. C. Heath has obtained all the necessary permissions. Other relevant aspects of the format and objectives of Enduring Voices include the following. • Each Document Set focuses on a limited body of evidence. Instructors will want to select the specific issues that will be emphasized in their own classroom discussions. • Each set also provides maximum opportunity for instructors to set students free to make their own sense of the evidence. It is assumed that instructors will encourage students to think creatively—to exercise historical imagination by taking the final intuitive leap. By engaging in the historian's process, the student should develop the ability to frame and test hypotheses and to arrive at informed conclusions. • Part and parcel of this process is the matter of defining basic terms such as primary source and document. By incorporating nontraditional evidence, Enduring Voices aims to stimulate students to consider the nature of documentation itself. A broadened definition of admissable evidence should result. In the last analysis, the Document Sets are based on the belief that history can be a discipline second to none in its potential appeal to students. It is my hope that Enduring Voices will demonstrate how stimulating and rewarding is the pursuit of historical knowledge. By providing small windows into the past, these documents confirm our oneness with the people of generations long gone. As students use the historical record to understand their world, they will themselves become part of a new and distinguished group, the society of educated people. Exposure to the historian's craft can ease the way. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A comprehensive project such as Enduring Voices: Document Sets to Accompany The Enduring Vision, Second Edition, must necessarily reflect the ideas and insights of teacher-scholars throughout the his- torical profession. The preparation of this collection has been especially influenced by the creative work of William Bruce Wheeler, Susan D. Becker, James West Davidson, Mark Hamilton Lytle, Robert Kel-