The Artifact Paper: Getting Started

The First Step: Artifacts  Begin your search for artifacts (primary sources) on the Humanities Website, the link for which you’ll also find on my moodle page.Humanities Website  Click on the historical time period that most interests you. Here you’ll find hundreds of artifacts organized in columns: history artifacts on the left, art artifacts in the middle, and literature artifacts on the right. Music is further to the right, but you are not required to use a music artifact.

Secondary Sources  Below these primary sources on the Humanities Website, you will find links to secondary sources.  You should also search JSTOR, ProQuest, the New York Review of Books, etc. for secondary sources.  You must use three secondary sources in your final paper. They will help you to frame and refine your ideas on your general topic and/or specific artifacts, and then you’ll figure out how to analyze your artifacts to best prove that idea.

Artifact Outline Presentation The first checkpoint in the writing process will be your Artifact Outline Presentation, the details of which follow: Artifact Outline Presentation 4 Slides, 3-5 minutes 1 st Slide) Your topic and main idea. 2 nd Slide) History Artifact: Title, Author, Passage, date. - 3 ideas or points on flashcard. 3 rd Slide) Art Artifact: Title, Artist, Image, date. - 3 ideas or points on flashcard. 4 th Slide) Literature Artifact: Title, Author, Passage, date. - 3 ideas or points on flashcard.

The Industrial Revolution Artifacts from the era of the Industrial Revolution portray the misery of the working class.

“The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes of Manchester in 1832,” by Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth Prolonged and exhausting labour, continued from day to day, and from year to year, is not calculated to develop the intellectual or moral faculties of man. The dull routine of a ceaseless drudgery, in which the same mechanical process is incessantly repeated, resembles the torment of Sisyphus - the toil, like the rock, recoils perpetually on the wearied operative. The mind gathers neither stores not strength from the constant extension and retraction of the same muscles. The intellect slumbers in supine inertness; but the grosser parts of our nature attain a rank development. To condemn man to such monotonous toil is, in some measure, to cultivate in him the habits of an animal. He becomes reckless. He disregards the distinguishing appetites and habits of his species. He neglects the comforts and delicacies of life. He lives in squalid wretchedness, on meagre food, and expends his superfluous gains in debauchery.

“Third Class Carriage” by Daumier, 1862

Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, 1854 It was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.