Once again, the good folks at The Junto are running a March Madness tournament. This year the focus is on primary documents from early American history. Here is a taste:
This time around, we’re limiting entrants in the competition to primary sources. We wanted to expand on some of the pedagogical posts we’ve had here at The Junto, and to host a competition that will foster wide discussions about how we as historians go about researching and teaching.
Nominations open today and close on Wednesday at 5 p.m. EST. Check out the rules below and then add your nominations and seconds in the Comments section. Then, by the power of The Junto‘s bracketologists, we’ll put together tournament brackets, announce the brackets, and open it up for your votes starting next Monday.
The Rules
1) Here’s how we’re defining “primary sources” for the purpose of this competition: any primary source that is easily available online, published in an edited collection, or reproduced in a scholarly journal. You should not nominate primary sources that are only available in manuscript form. The point of this limitation is to create a giant list of primary sources for research and teaching that are easily accessible to everyone.
2) All nominations must be made in the Comments section of this post.
3) If would be helpful if, in your nomination, you included one line about each of the sources you’re nominating, given the fact that this will be a broader exercise than usual and some sources won’t (and shouldn’t!) be familiar to everyone (I’m looking at you, non-British-Atlanticists–we need your nominations!).
4) We ask that you nominate a maximum of three primary sources that have not yet been nominated. You may also “second” the nomination of three other primary sources that have already been nominated. If you were going to nominate primary sources already mentioned you may do so and they will be tallied as seconds.
Of course I will be championing the greatest eighteenth-century primary source on the planet: Hunter Dickinson Farish’s edited The Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773-1774: Plantation Tutor on the Old Dominion. Stay tuned, but in the meantime we need someone to head over to The Junto and “second” my nomination. Let’s get this ball rolling! I think Fithian can be this year’s Cinderella and a make run deep into the brackets.
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