Week 10 — A Told Life and a Reforming Nation: Years, Voices, and the Truth Narrative — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 10 of the term — measure the years inside The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, keep its two dated events apart, explain the reforms of these decades, sort sources, and explain to someone new to history whose words are on the page.

This week you learned how the revivals of the Second Great Awakening swept the country, how benevolent societies built a movement for temperance, common schools, and better asylums, how immediate abolition grew with Black abolitionists among its leading voices, how The Narrative of Sojourner Truth came to the page through a teller and a writer, and how the Seneca Falls Convention demanded women's rights in a declaration modeled on the Declaration of Independence. In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's years and counts, interpret each one, and explain to someone who has never studied it whose words are on the page. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Primary Source Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

Your shared data comes from the week's workshop document, the course chronology, and the source-sorting set:

• 1776 — the Declaration of Independence (the course chronology)
• 1797 and 1800 — the two ends of the birth range The Narrative of Sojourner Truth gives
• 1827 — the year the narrative ties to the free papers her enslaver promised and refused to give
• 1850 — The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a dictated narrative told by Sojourner Truth and written by Olive Gilbert
• 12 illustrative items in the source-sorting set: 7 primary and 5 secondary

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic and citing your evidence:

1. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth says she was born between the years 1797 and 1800. How many years wide is that range?
2. The narrative ties the year 1827 to the free papers Truth's enslaver promised her, and the narrative appeared in 1850. How many years separate the two?
3. The Declaration of Independence is dated 1776, and The Narrative of Sojourner Truth appeared in 1850. How many years separate the two?
4. The illustrative source-sorting set has 7 primary items and 5 secondary items. How many more primary items than secondary items does it hold?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: source the narrative (its teller, its writer, its date, its type, and its host) and quote its pinned fragment word for word, then explain how the word she in the fragment shows whose wording is on the page.
• Problem 2: tie each year to its pinned record — 1850 is the narrative's date, and 1827 is the year in the narrative's own sentence that, in paraphrase, she was to have been free — then close-read that sentence's words "was to have been free": say what they state and what they leave open, and name one source you would check them against. Keeping the promised free papers apart from her emancipation by the State, which the narrative places in 1828, is welcome but optional.
• Problem 3: quote the Declaration of Independence's pinned line "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" word for word and source it (its origin, type, year, and host), then keep the Declaration of 1776 apart from the Constitution of 1787 by what each document did. Naming reforms the Second Great Awakening fed, explaining immediate abolition, or saying how the Declaration of Sentiments used the 1776 text is welcome.
• Problem 4: sort items 11 and 12 of the source-sorting set with a reason for each, and explain why The Narrative of Sojourner Truth is primary for Truth's own experience.

Explain it to a non-expert

A coworker says, "Sojourner Truth wrote her own life story back in 1827, and because someone else wrote it down, it is only a secondary source." Write a 3–5 sentence message that corrects both parts of that claim in everyday words, using this week's evidence about The Narrative of Sojourner Truth and about sorting sources, and names one limit of what you can say after this week (for example, that the narrative shows Truth's account as Gilbert wrote it, not every word Truth spoke). Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend asking whether a famous athlete's "as told to" memoir "shows how the athlete writes." Model answer: "An as-told-to memoir is a life story the athlete told aloud and a professional writer put on paper. It is real evidence of the athlete's memories, but the sentences, the order, and some of the comments are the writer's choices. To learn how the athlete writes, I would look for something the athlete wrote alone, such as a letter or a post, and compare it with the book. Read side by side, the memoir shows the story, and the athlete's own writing shows the voice."

Use that pattern for your message to the coworker, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic and cite your evidence. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report, and check every date and quoted word against Chapter 10, without guessing which values, steps, or sources you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
• your message to the coworker, correcting both parts of the claim in everyday words and naming one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used (the five years and the two counts from the source-sorting set), so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled timeline sketch that places 1776, 1797, 1800, 1827, and 1850 and marks the 23 years from the promised free papers to the narrative, with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Take every date and every quoted word from Chapter 10, and quote only the course's pinned words: the narrative's birth fragment, the words "was to have been free" from its second pinned sentence, and the Declaration of Independence's equality line. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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