Hi Sherilyn,

Excellent work on the history reference assignment! I’m so impressed with your research and with the variety of reference sources you consulted, including databases, bibliographies, guides, encyclopedias, and more! This was just the well-rounded introduction to history reference sources that I hoped you would get. Your three-pronged approach covering California history, labor history, and film history was ideal for a topic such as yours, and resulted in a thorough, well-rounded bibliography pertaining to the history of film credits in California. I was surprised to see the 1964 labor history bibliography. I didn’t know people were writing about labor history before 1965! In a way this source is an example of reference sources becoming primary sources, since it covers writings during the period you are studying.

Your annotations were insightful and beautifully written, and I enjoyed your thoughtful commentary on each source’s content, organization, subject terms, and relevance to your topic. Your criticisms were especially good, and I was happy that you paid such close attention to the credentials and authority of the sources’ editors and/or publishers. You also did a terrific job with the assignment’s introduction and conclusion, showing what this assignment taught you about your topic and the uses of reference sources generally.

You’ve chosen a great topic and I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with for the upcoming historiography essay. You might need to broaden your topic (as you did for this assignment) to include California labor history, since I’m not sure how much historical treatment your specific topic has received. I’ll be interested in seeing what you can find!

Hi Sherilyn,

I’m so impressed with your historiography essay! You provided an excellent overview of the literature on the history of labor in the film industry, and I’m excited with the many interesting and important studies you were able to locate. I was pleased that you paid such close attention to the historians’ credentials in the essay, as well as with the theoretical underpinnings of their work. Excellent historical thinking and writing there!

You did an excellent job of organizing your essay according to major themes, ably showing how the different books and articles illustrated each theme. I was also pleased with how well you stayed focused on the literature and with the excellent examples and quotes from the different writings you used to illustrate key interpretations and findings. You did a nice job, too, of comparing different authors to show important features of the publications and debates. Finally, I thought your conclusion was especially strong in summarizing the general patterns and continuing gaps in the literature to show the originality and value of your own research topic.

Finally, your footnotes and bibliography formatting looked terrific. The only correction in the footnotes is to put book publisher information and date in parentheses.

Thanks for an enjoyable essay to read. I liked particularly the article about Charlton Heston vs. Ed Asner. I can only imagine what their relationship was like! Your challenge for the next assignment will be to find primary sources. Are Conference of Studio Union archives open to researchers?