Week 8 — Readings & Resources

Introduction to Ethnic Studies Free sample edition

Your primary reading is Chapter 8 (in this module). Everything below is the optional, go-deeper layer — pick what helps, skip the rest.

How to use this page

This page has 10 items (4 readings and 6 videos). Allow 52–60 minutes for everything. Each group points back to the matching chapter section and class-session segment, so use the full menu when you want more, or take the quick path below.

Every video here has captions: turn them on with the CC button in the player. The chapter covers the same ideas in text.

Pick-one quick path (18–20 min total)

① Race, ethnicity, and the form

Chapter 8, Section “Tell three look-alike pairs apart: race, ethnicity, nationality, and prejudice” · Session 1, Segment 1, “Three questions on one form” · Remember: race is a social classification, ethnicity is shared ancestry and culture, and nationality is citizenship, so one person can hold all three at once.

Understanding the Difference Between Race and Ethnicity — American Anthropological Association — a one-minute episode of a professional association's short explainer series that sets ethnicity (a shared heritage, worldview, language, culture, or religion) against race, and makes the point that you cannot assume someone's ethnicity by looking at them, whatever a census form or a job application suggests. It also mentions biological populations; in this course, race is read as a social classification with real effects. (video, 1 min) (captions: automatic)

② Tribal sovereignty in the present tense

Chapter 8, Section “Keep tribal sovereignty a political status, not a racial category” · Session 1, Segment 2, “A status, not a race” · Remember: tribal sovereignty is the inherent right of Native nations to govern themselves, and tribal citizenship is a political status.

Tribal Sovereignty, Explained — Washington Tribes — leaders of tribal nations in one state explain sovereignty in their own words: a nation inside a nation that writes its own laws and constitution, and treaties that upheld rights the nations always had rather than granting new ones. Listen for how every speaker uses the present tense, the habit Weeks 4 and 5 asked you to keep. Use it while completing the Week-8 module overview. (video, 3 min) (captions: creator)

③ Reading a voice as evidence

Chapter 8, Section “Read an oral history as evidence: memory, consent, and the primary source” · Session 2, Segment 3, “Oral history as evidence” · Remember: an oral history is read for experience and meaning, and its dates and figures are checked against dated records.

What Is Oral History? — History Matters — the opening page of an archived guide for students and teachers on working with interviews as historical evidence; read how it defines an oral history as a recorded conversation about the past, and how the interviewer's questions shape what a narrator says. (reading, 6–8 min)
Interpreting Oral History — History Matters — the same guide's page on reading an interview critically: it lists the errors interviews often carry, such as wrong names and dates or merged events, explains how later events reshape memory, and recommends comparing an interview with other interviews and with documents. Read it beside this week's E2 and E4 checks. (reading, 4–6 min)
Remembering and Forgetting: Crash Course Psychology #14 — CrashCourse — an animated psychology episode that follows a witness to a small street theft and shows how retelling, emotion, and misleading questions can reshape a memory; listen for the idea that every time we replay a memory we rebuild it a little. Use it to see why an oral history's dates are checked elsewhere, not to treat narrators as unreliable. (video, 10 min) (captions: creator)
Oral History | Animating the Archives — Tate — an art museum's short film on recording oral histories with former miners and artists in a Welsh valley; notice the interviewers' advice to let narrators speak in their own terms, to keep the interviewer's voice small, and to open each recording by saying who is speaking and when, so a listener decades later knows what the source is. (video, 6 min) (captions: creator)

④ Primary source or oral history?

Chapter 8, Section “Read the seven excerpts as sources” · Session 2, Segment 4, “Reading the archive as sources” · Remember: a primary source is made at the time, and an oral history is recorded later by interview about the narrator's own experience.

Primary vs. Secondary Sources: Key Differences in History — David & History for the Ages — a four-minute talk on the difference between a source written at the time and one written after the fact, with the reminder that a primary source can carry its author's bias too. It does not discuss interviews; as you watch, decide where this week's line puts an oral history: an account recorded later, about the narrator's own experience. (video, 4 min) (captions: creator)
Slave Narratives — NCpedia — a state encyclopedia entry on the interviews that a federal writers' program recorded in the 1930s with formerly enslaved people, most of whom were children during the Civil War; the entry's title is the collection's historical name, not the course's own term; read its cautions that most narrators were young during the Civil War and spoke decades later, and that the interviewers were overwhelmingly white, which shaped what people said. This builds on Week 6's reading of slavery and emancipation. (reading, 5–7 min)
The Great Migration Changed America: 1 Reporter Shares Her Family's Story | NBCLX — LX News — a reporter records her aunt's and uncle's memories of a family farm and of relatives who moved north, then sets those memories beside a museum historian's account of the migration's two waves; watch it as an oral history placed beside the dated record, the same move you made with E2. (video, 10 min) (captions: automatic)

Optional one-stop reference (free online reference)

The Great Migration (1910-1970) — National Archives — the National Archives' research page on the migration; read the short introduction on its span from roughly the 1910s to the 1970s and the reasons people moved, which is the dated record this week's E2 check uses, and skip the catalog links unless you want the records themselves. (reading, 3–5 min)

Heads-up (links rot): these point to outside sites that occasionally move or rename pages. If a link ever fails, tell your instructor and use the reference above in the meantime.

Provenance: Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com