Schrag, Chapter 10: Interpreting Sources
- Pattern recognition // Duck, Duck, Goose
- Worldview
- Barbara Welter, Cult of True Womanhood
- Joanne Freeman, grammar of politics
- Russell Weigley, American way of war (precursor to Wayne Lee)
- Critical Reading (vs. Close Reading)
- “What is the text doing?” (via Sam Wineburg)
- Text // Context // Subtext
- Credibility, nuance, and “bias”
- Change & Causation
- Post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this)
CASE STUDY: Reading King and the FBI
In 2019, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow published an explosive article about potential revelations regarding Martin Luther King, Jr. that were still being kept secret in classified FBI records. The allegations had been culled from notes about FBI surveillance of the civil rights leader during the 1960s. Now, in 2025, the Trump administration is preparing to release those files.
- Read Garrow’s article
- See coverage from the New York Times
- 2025 coverage of the potential release by CNN
“I think any journalist and any historian has to deal with the public record that the government puts out there.” –David Garrow (University of Pittsburgh Law School)
“It is deeply irresponsible for a historian to cast such F.B.I. sources, which can be deeply unreliable, as fact. Most scholars I know would penalize their graduate students for doing this.” –Jeanne Theoharis (Brooklyn College / CUNY)
[Garrow’s article is] “potentially important research for rounding out King as a complicated person, and for giving new perspectives on women’s experiences in the civil rights movement.” –Beverly Gage (Yale)
1964 “Suicide letter” sent by FBI to blackmail Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (National Archives)
CASE STUDY: Lincoln’s Secret Memo: August 23, 1864
