This summer and fall marks the 250th anniversary of the protests against the Stamp Act, one of the first major acts of resistance during the imperial crisis that resulted in the American Revolution. During this project, the entire class will jointly produce a Twitter feed to commemorate the protests. The feed will run for the last twelve weeks of the semester, beginning Monday, September 28.
Due date: Fri., Sept. 25 by 8:30am (the start of class)
Assignment Objectives
- Learn how to do primary research using newspapers from the Revolutionary era
- Consider how to develop a voice and narrative for a public history Twitter feed
- Think about how to categorize important/key events in the Stamp Act Crisis
- Practice how to convey complex ideas and information in a succinct form
The Process
- Students will work in groups of 2 or 3. Each group will be responsible for producing tweets for a single week assigned to them. We will begin posting tweets on September 28 and continue through the end of the semester.
- Each group will be responsible for producing 28-35 tweets for their assigned week (that is, 4-5 per calendar day).
- A guide to writing tweets is available here.
- Students will be required to use primary sources to create a list of tweets. They should consult the following databases available through the Boston Public Library:
- America’s Historical Newspapers
- Burney Collection of Newspapers
- Early American Imprints
- With the primary sources, you should do the following:
- Read through several newspapers for the week and determine what were the most important events, the most intriguing, the ones that help advance a narrative of the Stamp Act crisis.
- The dating is more imprecise, but if you are able to, you should located pamphlets, broadsides, almanacs, or other materials linked to the activities of your assigned week.
- Select a set of events that represents some amount of geographic diversity.
- You can choose to include events that happened 250 years ago that day, or events that were reported on 250 years ago that day.
- You may also use other sources, including those listed at the bottom of the assignment, secondary sources via JSTOR or Project Muse, or the Whittemore Library. Sources beyond these should be approved by me before you use them.
- The entire class period on Friday, September 18 will be devoted to research time on the project, so please bring your laptops.
- That day, we will also discuss and decide two items as a class:
- The name of the feed (I will take responsibility for creating the account)
- The voice of the feed. In order to think about what you think might work best, you should consult this list of feeds that have done similar projects before class on Friday.
- That day, we will also discuss and decide two items as a class:
- Each group will turn in the following in a Google (via emailed link) or Excel spreadsheet (via dropitto.me)
- The text of the tweets listed by scheduled date and time, including any links, images, or other references.
- A full citation for each tweet in proper Chicago Manual of Style format, indicating the name of the newspaper, the date, and the page from which the information was taken, as well as citation information for any other sources utilized as part of your research.
- A brief explanation (400-500 words, in a Word/Google doc) of why you selected to highlight the events that you did and how you approached the drafting of the tweets. You should also explain how your group divided the labor as part of this process.
- Each group will be responsible for scheduling its tweets to run at the appropriate times. I will post instructions here for how to do so by Tuesday, September 22.
- Once the feed is underway, we will periodically check during class to see what has gotten retweets and replies. I will determine by the date the feed goes live how we will handle responses, etc., and will post that information here.
- Due December 1, each student must submit a 500-word reflection on the project. For the reflection, you should imagine that the Junto, a blog on early American history, has asked you for your thoughts on the project of publicly commemorating an event from a student’s perspective. Discuss what challenges you found in putting together your tweets, and how you found the reception to the group’s project. What responses came in? Were there any particular tweets or events that drew responses from large groups of people? This is a reflective assignment, so it can be in a narrative form without footnotes, but you should have a public and interested audience in mind as you write. You may link to or embed tweets in your narrative. In addition, keep in mind that depending on the results, two or three students may be offered the opportunity to publish their responses at the Junto. The document should be submitted via dropitto.me by 10:30 am on Tuesday, December 1.
Grading Procedure
Each group’s tweets and narrative will be evaluated in a number of areas from “excellent” (4) to “deficient” (0). The overall grade for the group reflects a holistic appraisal of the tweets and , but the feedback provided below will give you a sense of your progress on these skills for each paper during the semester. Please also keep in mind that any paper that includes plagiarized or uncited material is subject to a grade of 0.
- Required Elements
- All information is historically accurate.
- Tweets are evenly distributed across the seven days with a total of 28 to 35.
- Tweets represent geographic diversity from among the North American colonies and Britain.
- Tweets utilize all of the required primary source research databases.
- The spreadsheet contains Chicago style citations for all tweets.
- All tweets are in standard English with appropriate grammar and style.
- Members created an equitable division of labor.
- Substance/Quality Elements
- Tweets convey a narrative arc or theme in their depiction of historical events through the seven days.
- Tweets effectively attribute historical information to its source(s).
- Tweets capture the voice of someone describing events in 1765.
- Tweets include a range of media elements, including but not limited to hashtags, hyperlinks to relevant sources, and images.
- Tweets engage with the range of arguments, opinions, and events during the assigned week as outlined by the historical participants.
- Tweets are based on a range of primary sources.
- The group report conveys a clear logic and narrative for the tweets.
- Each individual member made a significant contribution to the project.
Under the assumption that all members of the group will do equivalent amounts of work, the grade will be the same for all members of the group. However, I reserve the right to adjust grades for individuals in cases where unequal time and effort were spent.
A Note on Publicness
Twitter is a publicly accessible site. Anything you post using our group username will be visible to anyone who follows the username as well as anyone who looks up the feed. Please keep in mind that you are representing yourself (anonymously), but also the members of the course and the university as a whole. Any inappropriate posts may lead to a 0 on the assignment and further discipline if necessary.
Copyright and Credit
If you choose to use images, quotations, or other materials within your tweets, you must make sure that you have permission to do so. Many images are under some sort of copyright protection. or other reproduction limitation. Some ways to check:
- Search Google Images using the “Usage Rights” filter
- See whether the website you are visiting has a Creative Commons license that permits reuse of materials
- Email the owner of the materials to determine whether re-use is possible
Possible Sites for Research
Boston Public Library Electronic Resources
- 17th & 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers
- 18th Century Collections Online (ECCO)
- America’s Historical Imprints
- America’s Historical Newspapers
- American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I
- Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans (1639-1800)
- Index to Early American Periodicals 1700-1799
Annotated Newspapers of Harbottle Dorr (Massachusetts Historical Society)
Founders Online (National Archives)
Virginia Gazette (Colonial Williamsburg)
GIGI (American Antiquarian Society)
Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog
Getty Images Archival Photos (includes some prints from 18th century)
If you discover any other sites that may be of use, please ask.
You may want to follow the #StampAct250 hashtag on Twitter for other conversation about the commemoration of the crisis. And for another example of how to describe local coverage of the Stamp Act protests in blog rather than Twitter form, see the Boston 1775 blog.
Joseph M. Adelman 