This part of the assignment is designed to help you identify and explain the key themes and arguments that have occupied the attention of historians of residential schooling in Canada and around the globe. It is also an opportunity for you to take stock of current historiography by identifying key themes, ideas, and arguments in the writing of others. This is an important step in the development of your critical analysis skills. The goals here are thus twofold: to begin you on your way to thinking comparatively about the history of residential schooling, and second, to have you analyze and interpret that history in the process.

Two complete this task, you will need to find two secondary source articles that detail the history of residential schooling: one about Canada and another about a different part of the globe. Ideally, you should locate sources that share similar subject and chronological periods. Though finding these sources will be less complicated than it was for you to locate primary sources, it will take you some time and effort to do this. So be sure to manage your time wisely.

To help you locate secondary sources for this assignment, the History Librarian Angela Chikowero, will visit our lecture on Monday of Week 7. She will introduce you to some secondary source databases and show you how to search them so that you can locate and access two articles through the UCSB Library.

Resources for Locating Secondary Sources:

UC Library Search

Academic Search Complete

Project Muse Journals

After reading and taking notes on the two articles you selected, you should begin to write your analysis. You mustn’t discuss one article then the next. Instead, a more effective method is to think, for example: “What do these two articles together teach us about residential schooling? What themes, ideas, or arguments link the articles together? Where do the interpretations agree or disagree?” Ultimately, your answers to these questions (and others) will become the argument of your analysis. You can organize your analytical essay by topical themes, the research questions or the historical problem the authors are addressing, or by conceptual issues discussed in the articles you have read.

As with the primary source analysis, the questions below are a guide, not a template. They are designed to help you develop things to write about or consider if you struggle with where to begin.

• What is the overall picture you got of the subject or topic from these readings?

Are the historians using different or similar approaches in their scholarship? How might this impact their interpretations of the past?

• What is the central argument (thesis) or historiographical contribution of each article?

Are there key concepts, words, and/or ideas that are important to know and understand?

• Is anything or anyone absent from the article that might alter the interpretations presented?

What primary or archival sources were used by the historian?

Can you identify any problems or omissions within these primary sources? How might they have shaped each historian’s argument?