While I was researching my article for the annotated bibliography I came across a group that the author of my source heads. It is called the 1696 Heritage Group and they are a “historical consulting firm dedicated to helping persons and institutions of color to increase their knowledge and access to the light of truth of their unique American heritage.” I wasn’t able to look at everything that their website had to offer but from what I saw they are very interesting and dedicated to their work, they even have a blog as well on their page. Aside from coming across their page while writing, I did not have any detours/difficulty summarizing and working through my article.
Month: October 2023 Page 7 of 11
I’ve been exploring the topic of the Richmond burial ground, which has been extremely interesting to me (horrible, obviously, but fascinating). The first source I chose was an autobiography of sorts written by Christopher McPherson, a free black clerk who lived in Richmond in the late 18th-early 19th centuries, and there’s a paragraph-long excerpt of his observations about the injustice of the burial ground that was quoted in our book. But it was so interesting to look at the full source and see that the burial ground is not the main focus at all – rather, the focus was on McPherson’s religious zeal and fervor, and how he viewed himself and his work of exposing injustices and remedying them as a proxy for God. He wrote letters to European royalty (English and German) and the Pope, and even met with President Madison once after Thomas Jefferson wrote McPherson a letter of introduction.
For my annotated bibliography, my topic is about the American colonization in Liberia, specifically about Lott Cary a Baptist minister. Summarizing my source was a lot easier than evaluating it, but in the end this source has given me a guideline to the question I am trying to answer but has not fully answered it at all. This has just been a base but I have enjoyed exploring new information and I am excited to find the rest of my sources and summarize them.
I really enjoyed our meeting on Tuesday, it was nice learning from the library and the one search research tools he gave us have been very effective in my research already. I have not tried out zotero yet but I am planning to do that over fall break.
After reading a bit more of my chosen source from Richmond’s Unhealed History, I jotted down some notes that summarized the book and some information that would answer my research question. After doing that, it was much easier to actually write the two paragraphs for this annotated bibliography entry. I found it hard to narrow down this whole book into a brief summary though. Also, since I skimmed it rather than reading the whole thing, I was unsure if my summary was sufficient enough to encapsulate the entire work. It was easier to write the second paragraph though because I was able to find answers to my research question on the pages surrounding Campbell’s citation. In terms of formatting, I am unsure about the indentations for each paragraph and the citation itself. I tried to mimic the example on the website, but I would like some further guidance on that. Also, I don’t know if we have to include our name somewhere on the paper. I know for MLA format there’s a way to do that on an annotated bibliography, but I don’t know what the Chicago format is. Finally, I’m unsure what the title should be, like if it should say Annotated Bibliography or just Bibliography. Overall, I think that an annotated bibliography would be a great project if you were to write a paper or do some other project right after making one.
While doing the draft of my annotated bibliography, I found it easy to summarize the sources’ points and give a brief summary of the excerpt and its authors. Additionally, it helped me organize my thoughts about the assignment and give an idea about how my research question has changed throughout this assignment. At first, I asked, “How did the annexation of counties into Richmond affect the education system in the long term?” But, after analyzing the paragraph more I realized my new question was “How did the annexation of other counties into Richmond affect the city as a whole?” It was interesting to me to learn the history behind the annexation, and that people resisted it because they did not want to have to live in a diverse and economically worse place. The Richmond that I see now was built off this annexation of neighboring suburbs, which is also why there is such a noticeable difference in the city. I’m interested in looking at the other sources that I picked out, one of which was about the history of education after the annexation, and see how it relates to the primary source.
Unfortunately, I was not able to find the book that I wanted to read called Colour of their skin and therefore I found a different source that was an online article. It was still covering the same topic and I wanted to research more to ask my question regarding the extent to which the segregation of races in Virginia affects the educational system, the session that we had with the librarian was extremely helpful. I had previous experience in research but not to that Deb, especially for an annotated bibliography. Therefore I used the information provided and found other two resources that would help me answer my exploring question. The first one is a peer-reviewed journal, while the other man is not using all the information I had, and the article or under the instructions for the assignment, I tried to make a summary and a reflection of the first resource from the book and I applied the same methodology to the other two sources. Overall, through the steps until now I didn’t just explore more in-depth my questions, but it was also a really useful process really significant in the academic world.
intro to library research:
Nick Dease Power Point Presentation
-Nick Dease, film & humanities librarian
-self introduction
-research services & resources
services: interlibrary loan (need to create an account), hold for pick up, chat with a librarian, text them…
resources: books, magazine, journals, films, onesearch (may not always be true), databases (a bucket of contents)
-starting your research
avoid binding decisions
learn the unique language of your topic
evaluate the source you find (currency, reliability, authority, purpose) (stop, investigate, find better coverage, trace claims, quotes and media to the original context)
-citing source
APA(when the research was performed), MLA(easy to read, citing to prevent plagiarism), Chicago
give credit where it’s due and avoid plagiarism
contributes to a scholarly conversation
what may be common knowledge in one culture may not be common knowledge in other groups
-searching library sources
ways to narrow down the search results
research database–>subject
I have never had to do an annotated bibliography before, so I was interested in this assignment because I like that we are getting the opportunity to explore Richmond’s Unhealed History in more detail. I found it hard to find an accessible source to bring to class so that did take longer than expected. I chose an excerpt about annexation because I think that was a significant topic and relates to Richmond now, so my thought is that there will be more secondary sources that relate to this one. The source I’m using is from The Politics of Annexation gives a more in-depth explanation of how the history of the city was affected by divisions.
I’ve never had to do any assignments in Chicago style so I was a little nervous, but after reading the format and example link I’m confident that it will be doable. All of my previous teachers have been extremely strict in terms of MLA format so getting used to Chicago format will be an adjustment. I ended up looking up a few other examples on Google which was very beneficial.
I didn’t have a problem finding something in the book that I wanted to learn about, so picking my source was easy. I wanted to learn more about those who were very vocally opposed to integration in schools. On page 162, the quote “…dedicate our every capacity to preserve segregation in the schools” stuck out to me. I knew that people were against integrating schools but I never read about politicians being so openly against it. The source I’m using is The Color of Their Skin by Richard Pratt. The chapter this quote is included in is titled “A Shameful Legacy”, and this is the perfect way to capture what the pages before and after the quote is about. The source is about Brown v. The Board of Education and the effects it had on politics. It also mentions how adamantly some Southerners fought against integration in schools.
A topic that stuck out to me from the reading came from chapter 7. This chapter goes into depth on the specific restrictions and strategies Richmond politicians placed on African Americans to limit their rights. A specific restriction was on marriage and miscegenation. In this section of the chapter, Campbell reference the influence of the eugenics movement in the 1920’s and the impact it had on African Americans as well as other groups. This section struck out to me before the only other time I’ve heard of eugenics was during readings or discussion of the Nazi’s who believed in eugenics and therefore believed the Aryan race was superior over all other races especially the Jewish race. The fact that there was somewhere in America that had been influenced by this movement really goes to show the amount of hate and divide that was present in the country.
In footnotes 297 and 298 Campbell used information out of the book “Managing White Supremacy”. In one of the chapters of this book, the author discusses the Anglo Saxon Club and their push of eugenics in politics and the media. In this source, I learned about the origin of the eugenics movement, how it started in Amnerica, the extent to which it was favored and proposed as well as the effects that resulted from the eugenics movement.
https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?collection=civil&handle=hein.civil/mwsrp0001&id=100&men_tab=srchresults