As many of you have reflected in your video journals this semester, history from

As many of you have reflected in your video journals this semester, history from the perspective of diverse groups in America is often unknown by many Americans. Yet, understanding the history of major events and developments in our nation’s past from the perspective of diverse Americans can create a different understanding of the past and a clearer conception of how we arrived at the present. The documentary films we have watched this semester are one way that historians can communicate this history to the public, but each documentary has featured the story of only one group at a time and did not have the scope to include the perspectives of all the diverse groups in the United States. In our last two units, we have seen that when we pivot the center of post-war history to emphasize the shared history of non-white Americans, we can better see the connections to the creation of a “wide civil rights movement” that emphasizes cooperation and coalitions between groups fighting for equality in the United States up until the present day.
For the final reflective project, you will reflect on your own experience viewing films about the history of diverse Americans in order to create your own proposal for a new documentary series that will educate the public. Your series should focus on the possibilities opened up in the United States for different people by World War II and the long Civil Rights Movement and how the limitations of these changes are revealed in social issues we face today. Your project can focus on one group in particular (ie African Americans, Latino Americans, women, LGBTQ Americans, Americans with disabilities etc) or combine the experiences of various groups into one series.By creating a documentary proposal you will be able to demonstrate these course learning outcomes:
Topical Essay: “Gay and Lesbian History, 1945 to the present”
Topical Essay: “Immigration in the Postwar Era ”
Task
Your proposal should take the form of a four-episode written overview (4-5 pages) OR a five-minute section of your own documentary video. Your written proposal should include an introduction and conclusion, and an overview or synopsis of four episodes (double-spaced). Your documentary video should include a written introduction and conclusion to the series as a whole, as well as a five-minute section of one episode (mp4). You can mostly rely on course resources for research, but you can conduct additional research in books and articles through the SJSU library catalog. You can use whatever citation style you are most familiar with for citing sources in your proposal.
You can imagine that you are pitching Netflix, the Obama’s Higher Ground production company, or more likely PBS for financial support for your project. To get their support you must reflect on your own experience watching documentaries in the course to explain why this project is important, what purpose it will serve, and what contribution it will make (this is your argument). For documentary filmmakers, a proposal is the closest thing they create to a screenplay, and it is often described as “a space for the filmmaker to express their vision and communicate clearly to others how they intend to achieve it.” You will need to give a short synopsis of each episode in the four-part series, showing what part of the overall vision the episode will communicate, what the argument of the episode will be, and how you will share this with audiences through interviews, visuals, archival footage, etc. You can assume that any historian you would like to work with will be eager to participate!
Academic Honesty
All the ideas and writing in the project are expected to be your own work, without assistance from generative AI tools such as Chat GPT. All work will be submitted through Turnitin, which now provides detection of generative AI text in students’ work. As always, make sure to follow SJSU Academic Honesty standards by including short citations for evidence and examples and caption any images or videos. You can format the citations and bibliography in whichever format you are most familiar with (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc).
Here is a sample.