The Chicago Historical Society has created a digital collection of Haymarket Affair primary sources. Many of these historical documents capture the immediate news after the bombing or depicted a specific viewpoint. It is broken into seven subgroups: The Trial Documents, Published Materials, Additional Manuscripts, Artifacts, Broadsides, Photographs & Prints, and Wood Engravings.
The trial documents are by far the most interesting primary source. They are broken down into five subgroups of their own: Outline of Proceedings, Examination of Jurors – Selection, Witness Testimony, Exhibits and Proceedings at the Illinois Supreme Court. An interesting document in the first subgroup is the Petition for Change of Venue. It stresses that the defendants …show more content…
The first strength is that it has over a thousand pages of text relating to the trial. Researchers are able to get a better grasp of what transpired with these primary sources without having to rely on secondary sources from historians, who may have skewed their information to fit their thesis. Second, the collection is organized so that researchers can find the information that they want without having to sift through the information. One of the weaknesses of the collection is that while there are a lot of trial documents for researchers, the other subgroups have very little. For example, there are countless newspaper articles written about the event, but they are not made available in the collection. If the Chicago Historical Society had incorporated these articles in their online collection, researchers would be able to see how journalists approached the tragedy. Did the journalists support the eight anarchists and publish articles in their favor? Or did they publish articles condemning them? A second weakness is that there is no background leading up to the protest. The Chicago Historical Society should add a section regarding the McCormick Protest that occurred the day before the bombing. It would help establish why there was a protest in Haymarket Square and why someone threw a bomb at Chicago police …show more content…
In Box One – Folder One, there are two pieces of the bomb that were extracted from the body of Mathias J. Degan. These fragments were used to bring the eight men to trial for his murder. A photograph would help researchers highlight the evidence used. People’s Exhibit 5 located in folder three, contains two versions of a document in English and German. “Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force,” was a flier Haymarket organizers handed out to laborers to protest police brutality. The title alone suggests that these eight men anticipated violence. People’s Exhibit 6 is another flier with a headline, “Revenge! Workingmen to Arms.” If the protest in Haymarket Square was truly supposed to be a peaceful one, then there should not have been literature encouraging people to bring weapons to
The trial documents are by far the most interesting primary source. They are broken down into five subgroups of their own: Outline of Proceedings, Examination of Jurors – Selection, Witness Testimony, Exhibits and Proceedings at the Illinois Supreme Court. An interesting document in the first subgroup is the Petition for Change of Venue. It stresses that the defendants …show more content…
The first strength is that it has over a thousand pages of text relating to the trial. Researchers are able to get a better grasp of what transpired with these primary sources without having to rely on secondary sources from historians, who may have skewed their information to fit their thesis. Second, the collection is organized so that researchers can find the information that they want without having to sift through the information. One of the weaknesses of the collection is that while there are a lot of trial documents for researchers, the other subgroups have very little. For example, there are countless newspaper articles written about the event, but they are not made available in the collection. If the Chicago Historical Society had incorporated these articles in their online collection, researchers would be able to see how journalists approached the tragedy. Did the journalists support the eight anarchists and publish articles in their favor? Or did they publish articles condemning them? A second weakness is that there is no background leading up to the protest. The Chicago Historical Society should add a section regarding the McCormick Protest that occurred the day before the bombing. It would help establish why there was a protest in Haymarket Square and why someone threw a bomb at Chicago police …show more content…
In Box One – Folder One, there are two pieces of the bomb that were extracted from the body of Mathias J. Degan. These fragments were used to bring the eight men to trial for his murder. A photograph would help researchers highlight the evidence used. People’s Exhibit 5 located in folder three, contains two versions of a document in English and German. “Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force,” was a flier Haymarket organizers handed out to laborers to protest police brutality. The title alone suggests that these eight men anticipated violence. People’s Exhibit 6 is another flier with a headline, “Revenge! Workingmen to Arms.” If the protest in Haymarket Square was truly supposed to be a peaceful one, then there should not have been literature encouraging people to bring weapons to