How do we study a historical event? A good way to learn about a historical event is through good collection of primary sources. Mark Wasserman’s The Mexican Revolution: A Brief History with Documents is just that. It is a good academic representation as well as a good teaching tool; while it has it shortcomings overall, it is a good collection of documents for the time period it covers. To start, this book gives a good academic representation of the Mexican revolution because it uses a variety of sources. Wasserman uses several firsthand accounts from different perspectives, as well as works of fiction, an excerpt from a book, and a song as examples of the culture at the time. It uses a table and a map additionally to further the reader’s
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To start, the book stops at a point that many historians would not consider the end of the revolution. The book only covers up till 1920s where many historians and theorists will say that the revolution did not really end until the 1940s. By stopping short the book misses out on the affects the revolution had after the fighting ended. Another shortcoming of the book is that while it is very good at summarizing it tends to miss out on some details. The book will give overviews of subjects like soldiers’ lives, but use shorter documents with simple introductions to the documents. A good way to remedy this would be to put more information in the introduction to give the reader a better understanding of the document he or she is about to read. One of the positive things about this book is that it uses photographs. However, one of its downfalls is that it does not describe the photos that shown. The reader only has a basic understanding of what he or she is looking at. While this may have been done on purpose to let the reader interpret the photos in their own way, it seems a bit out of place because of how Wasserman introduces all of the other documents. In addition to the lack of descriptions, the book mentions how there are a great deal of photographs from that time period but it only choses to use four. This gives the reader only a glimpse of the time period, while again not going into much detail. The shortcomings of this book are not completely detrimental to the overall structure of the book however; they are noticeable enough to put a damper on the reading. That being said the book is still overall a good
To start, the book stops at a point that many historians would not consider the end of the revolution. The book only covers up till 1920s where many historians and theorists will say that the revolution did not really end until the 1940s. By stopping short the book misses out on the affects the revolution had after the fighting ended. Another shortcoming of the book is that while it is very good at summarizing it tends to miss out on some details. The book will give overviews of subjects like soldiers’ lives, but use shorter documents with simple introductions to the documents. A good way to remedy this would be to put more information in the introduction to give the reader a better understanding of the document he or she is about to read. One of the positive things about this book is that it uses photographs. However, one of its downfalls is that it does not describe the photos that shown. The reader only has a basic understanding of what he or she is looking at. While this may have been done on purpose to let the reader interpret the photos in their own way, it seems a bit out of place because of how Wasserman introduces all of the other documents. In addition to the lack of descriptions, the book mentions how there are a great deal of photographs from that time period but it only choses to use four. This gives the reader only a glimpse of the time period, while again not going into much detail. The shortcomings of this book are not completely detrimental to the overall structure of the book however; they are noticeable enough to put a damper on the reading. That being said the book is still overall a good