Synthesis Essay Body Paragraph(1/3): AP Lang 2016

Everyday writings do provide the academia field a certain degree of historical significance. History not only needs to be comprised of national leaders winning major battles or rare prodigies like Einstein achieving high scientific accomplishments, but it also needs to be comprised of ordinary, average individual’s experiences; the rational behind this is that most of the people in a society are commoners, and since history reflects societies, it should reflect commoners’ interests. In a commoner’s letter, M.F. Stafford, the sender of a letter describes the family members’ well-being to the cousin Martha (Source B), which is fully reflective of a general feeling of what 19th century life looks like for the ordinary. It is true that an individual among millions might not be reflective of an entire society; however, the modern world has a high capacity to gather a high majority of all personal writings. This is proven by the U.S. program “Documenting the American South” (DAS) that captured many personal narrative works from enslaved people from 1860s to 1920s and many other genres (Source A). Other public programs can help preserve a wide scope of personal writings as well, as seen by how the Library of Congress employed more than 300 terabytes of storage room to preserve personal Twitter posts (Source D). Based on such premises in which our modern world has the capacity to store personal works that otherwise might be seen as redundant in size, historians can, similar to analyzing massive data in the STEM fields, process these massive amount of pieces to get a comprehensive picture of what the society looked like in the past. As long as they do not limit their perspective to few of those every day writings, preserving and studying them do possess high historical value.