Write a 4-page paper analyzing five related historical documents. Your analysis will
examine not only each document individually, but will also draw connections across the five
primary sources. You will also be expected to explain the historical context of these documents,
drawing on course readings and lectures. This essay will account for 15% of your final grade.
The Document Analysis #1 Essay must be submitted in Times New Roman size 12 font,
double-spaced, with 1-inch page margins. It is to be submitted to Canvas.
Specific Guidelines
For this assignment, I want you to consider 5 documents relative to the relationship between the
Cherokee Nation (or Cherokee peoples) and the United States. These documents also consider
the interrelated question of Cherokee territorial rights. Each of these documents is a window in
time: one is from 1803, another from 1823, one from 1830, another from 1831, and the last from
1838.
In each of these documents, the author(s) made a case for the status of the Cherokee nation and
its territorial rights, addressing whether the Cherokees were an independent nation or, instead,
peoples living within the bounds of the United States. The arguments that these authors offer are,
unsurprisingly, not all the same—some were similar, some overlapped, and some were in direct
opposition.
In the first document analysis, you considered 4 perspectives on one event in order to identify the
causes of a colonial war. In doing so, you took on one task of a historian: explaining the
underlying causes of an event. For Document Analysis #2, your task is different. Historians also
study change over time. In this case, I want you to see how the relationship between the
Cherokee Nation and the U.S. government changed over the first few decades of the Nineteenth
Century. You will also consider how perspectives on Cherokee sovereignty and land rights
changed over this time period.
Your job is to take these five documents and to assemble an account of this change over time:
• Identify the authors, their biases, and their social/political/cultural contexts.
• Identify the author or authors’ argument as to Cherokee sovereignty and territorial rights.
Also explain how these various arguments about Cherokee nationhood related to one
another, contradicted one another, and/or built upon one another. Make sure to consider
these in chronological order.
• Given the perspectives and biases that shaped each document, explain why each author(s)
offered his/her/their specific account of Cherokee nationhood and territorial rights.
• After parsing these documents and their contexts, offer your account as to how these
ideas about Cherokee nationhood and sovereignty changed over time. How did
understandings of Cherokee independence and nationhood change from the 1803 to
1838? How did the ways that American officials viewed or addressed Cherokee
sovereignty change? How did Cherokee understandings of Cherokee sovereignty and/or
land rights shift? (Or did they?)
• Finally, I want you to put on your historian hat to answer the underlying question(s).
Why did US-Cherokee relations change so dramatically? Why did understandings and
legal recognition of Cherokee sovereignty change over time? Why did the United States
government turn its back on earlier understandings of Cherokee territorial rights and
nationhood?
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