Week 9 Project Action Plan #2: The Historical Significance of Fiction Works

For my next project I would like to focus on the prompt:

Choose one short story or novel excerpt. Write a piece in which you explore the following:

1. In what ways could this story be considered an artifact of history? 
2. What does this story teach us about history? 
3. How does a story teach us about a time or place differently than a history book? 

For this prompt I decided to focus on the Angel Island and Chinatown Letters and my focus is to argue the importance of incorporating fiction into textbooks as they can be a reflection of the times they were written. I will use the answers to the questions as supporting evidence for my thesis:

1) These letters were physically written on the walls and doors and structures of Angel Island detainment areas. They are physical artifacts on the walls, but even if written on paper, its documentation of the events going on around them. 

2) The letters teach us the Chinese perspective on the immigration practices as well as how it impacted them. Textbooks can tell us what happens, but often they tell us either from a biased opinion, or a third person point of view. We may have learned that the Chinese immigration was disliked by Americans, but were we told how it effected their families? These letters show us their perspective.

\3) Like my answer to #2, textbooks can be one-sided. By reading these letters we can see a viewpoint that is often overlooked. Also we don't just get facts and numbers, we get feelings. From these letters we can see loss of hope and depression, we see people missing their families. We can visualize what its like. Can numbers from a textbook do that? They may say that families are torn apart, but do they say how the Chinese individuals felt about that? Not usually. Textbooks state actions, not thoughts and feelings. *maybe talk about how events can be mentioned indirectly in a story but still talk about the life of that time cite other texts as examples but still draw focus on current text*

Thesis: ? *may change to suit paper* Textbooks should incorporate fiction pieces and writings into their pages as reflections of what it was like from a more personal perspective.

Works Cited:

Anonymous. “1” The Literature of California, edited by Jack Hicks, University of California Press, 2000, pp. 354-355.