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=Welcome to our American Journeys Weekee!=

=**The Assignment:**= =Wiki Rules:=
 * [|American Journeys: An AP US History Research Project]
 * There are few; do whatever you think will be helpful to move this project along. Create pages, begin discussions, edit pages, etc. This is OUR wiki. Feel free even to edit the home page, if there are things you like to add, or if you think you can make it look better.
 * Don't for get you can use the editor bar when you are in edit mode to add links, embed things, create tables, etc.
 * You should monitor AT LEAST your character's page and the city page for which you are responsible, and probably the common pages (i.e. home pages, technical tips, links for everybody, etc).

General Comment from dk (Feb 28):

 * You guys are doing GREAT, GREAT, GREAT! I love how creative this is, but also how much good research you are doing. A few quick thoughts:
 * I just had the notion, after looking at all the character pages, that in many cases we don't really know what these characters look like! In fact, this is something that professional historians are starting to think about themselves, that we often write detailed stories about people, but hardly tell readers how the people looked. I heard Jill Lepore talk about this very thing last winter at the American Historical Association conference in New York. If we end up "performing" our story, we'll have to consider this.
 * I found this website, made by students, for the National History Day contest (not surprisingly, it was a winner). You might get some ideas from this. And, by the way, the bibliography here is excellent. It is rich, well organized, and the formatting is perfect! If we enter the contest, our bibliography will have to be annotated like this one. []
 * Great work on the cities pages by in large; thanks for jumping on those so quickly after we made the cities assignments.
 * Gabe gets kudos for the initiative in setting up a common resources page. I made a post there this morning. I suggest you all monitor this page, you get alerted when posts are made there. In theory, anything that gets posted here has a benefit to a lot of the characters. Among other things, we should put the best world's fair sites there.
 * A few of you need to get on the stick--your character development, and your interactions with other characters, is, shall we say, a bit lagging.

What you should be doing now (Feb 24):

 * Continuing to develop your characters and the historical contexts for what they are doing
 * Making contacts with other characters and developing meeting scenarios
 * Working on the "rough draft" of your "research essay;"--we are turning these in sometime next week
 * Remember that we are looking for a combination of secondary sources and primary sources
 * Working on cities pages, and linking to characters (and linking characters to cities) where appropriate

What you should be doing now (Feb 6):

 * By now your character page should be fairly well developed. At this point, you should be making the story line of your character more rich and making your characters plausible historical characters. This means you should be doing some solid research now, not simple dreaming up situations for your characters. Although we are having fun with this and its is admittedly historical fiction, we are also trying to do a research project here that develops plausible stories given what we know about history.
 * You should also be looking at the characters of some of your classmates, and thinking about circumstances by which your characters might meet. Similarly, you might give your classmates some advice; my advise is given in the discussion section titled "comment from dk (date)." There is no reason you can't ask a question of your classmate or make a suggestion in the same way. Remember, this is OUR project together.
 * Don't forget that to help make all of this legitimate, there a things called books that would probably be useful, found in our library, as well as bookstores, public libraries, and even on google.books. Also don't forget our rich databases including JSTOR, ARTSTOR, and others.
 * By Feb 16, I would like each character page to have begun a works cites / bibliography section, either at the bottom of the character page, or if you want it look a bit cleaner, creating a "Character Name Bibliography" page, and just put a link to that page at the very bottom of the character page. For the time being, let's set up a few requirements for the bibliography
 * include at least two sources that were made from print distribution (i.e. a book or journal article)
 * include at least two sources that were created for the web (i.e. websites)
 * include at least two non-text sources (i.e. graph, artwork, song, etc)

What should you be doing now (Jan 22)

 * Creating your character page. Click "New Page" top left, use your character name as the page title, create the page, etc. Then, make sure you put a link your your character page on the main "Character Pages" page.