Students will write an essay of 7 to 8 typed, double-spaced pages analyzing one of the Historical Foundation's Heritage Minutes. The minutes highlight a particular individual, event or issue in Canadian history in the form of a one-minute vignette. Students will choose one of the heritage minutes and provide an analysis in the following format:
-a narrative description of the minute: the narrative should describe what happens in the minute, and should include whatever details the student views as most important (music, costume, dialogue, etc.)
-a discussion of the individual, event or issue highlighted by the heritage minute: this contextual discussion must be based on research done in peer-reviewed secondary sources ( books)
-your assessment of how effective the heritage minute is:
1. is the heritage minute effective in accurately portraying the issue/person/event in question?
2. What has been disregarded?
3. What choices has the director made in terms of portraying the topic, and
4. how effective are they?
5. Does the minute reflect any tension between historical accuracy and social memory?
Please separate these 5 questions into different paragraphs and put the questions on the top of the paragraphs.
Students may choose any of the heritage minutes that deal with pre-Confederation Canada (the video minutes, not the radio ones), to analyze, all of which are available for viewing online at the Historical Foundation's website (www.histori.ca) By definition, pre-Confederation topics are those which are set prior to 1867.
The heritage minutes must be chosen from the website www.histori.ca, and please put the link below the essay so I can see what video you choose.
The formatting of citations. I have no preference for what style you use (Chicago, APA, MLA). The history department usually uses Chicago, but I don't enforce any sort of insistence on a single style. If you are familiar with one of those styles, go ahead and use it.
Another point I want to quickly raise regards citations. Please be sure to provide citations for your sources of information, and be sure to properly quote material you are drawing from another source. There are various ways to do this (direct quoting, paraphrasing, etc.) - I have attached a style guide that I created showing different scenarios and examples where citations would be appropriate. The style guide also has a few examples of footnotes and bibliography; in case you aren't familiar with any particular style. Again - you can use whatever style you want, but if you need a template, you can use this one.