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Panorama tour of the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, 2015

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Remains of Asante Civilization/Kumasi, Ghana

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Remains of Asante Civilization/Kumasi, Ghana

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The Ejisu Besease Shrine in Ghana was spatially documented by the Zamani project in 2006. - 3D Heritage Documentation - Laser Scanning - 3D Modelling - GIS

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by SUNY Binghamton
See: keywords

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Subject Guides: How To Do Library Research: Search Strategies

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Web pages and other resources for research assistance.

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via University of California, Santa Barbara. When searching for pictures from Gold Coast, remember to click "Ghana" twice on left-hand search bar.

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Arthur London / Gold Coast [Ghana] photograph collection 92

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-Creative commons license/how do we use pictures responsibly?

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In-class and make a video.

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-To give credit where credit is due--again, why?
-To insert ourselves into an intellectual lineage--we can trace our ideas back, and we know where our ideas come from.

Citing sources is for the person/work we are referencing, for our reader (so they may understand our origin of ideas/thought process), and for US!

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Review skill: generating MLA citations via NoodleTools

New skill: Understanding and successfully using in-text citation

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And what counts as plagiarism?

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See: types of information

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Subject Guides: How To Do Library Research: Search Strategies

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Web pages and other resources for research assistance.

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See also: home page for fun facts + video.

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Armstrong, Meg. "A Jumble of Foreignness': The Sublime Musayums of Nineteenth-Century Fairs and Expositions." Cultural Critique, No. 23 (Winter 1992-1993): 199-250. Accessed March 20, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354195.

Graff, Rebecca S. "Dream City, Plaster City: World's Fairs and the Gilding of American Material Culture." International Journal of Historical Archeology 16, No. 4 (December 2012): 696-716. Accessed March 15, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23355814.

Marling, Karal Ann. "Writing History with Artifacts: Columbus at the 1893 Chicago Fair." The Public Historian 14, No. 4 (Autumn 1992): 13-30. Accessed March 15, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3377858.

Miller, Kiri. "Americanism Musically: Nation, Evolution, and Public Education at the Columbian Exhibition, 1893." 19th-Century Music 16, No. 2 (Fall 2003): 137-155. Accessed March 15, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2003.27.2.137.

Sandweiss, Eric. "Around the World in a Day: International Participation in the World's Columbian Exposition." Illinois Historical Journal 84, No. 1 (Spring 1991): 2-14. Accessed March 20, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40192500.

Trennert Jr., Robert A. "Selling Indian Education at World's Fairs and Expositions." American Indian Quarterly 11, No. 3 (Summer 1987): 203-220. Accessed March 15, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1184042.

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LibGuides: The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition: Academic Resources

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Armstrong, Meg. "A Jumble of Foreignness': The Sublime Musayums of Nineteenth-Century Fairs and Expositions." Cultural Critique, No. 23 (Winter 1992-1993): 199-250. Accessed March 20, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354195. Graff, Rebecca S. "Dream City, Plaster City: World's Fairs and the Gilding of American Material Culture." International Journal of Historical Archeology 16, No.

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Outstanding Universal Value
Brief synthesis
These fortified trading posts, founded between 1482 and 1786, and spanning a distance of approximately 500 km along the coast of Ghana between Keta in the east and Beyin in the west, were links in the trading routes established by the Portuguese in many areas of the world during their era of great maritime exploration. The castles and forts were built and occupied at different times by traders from Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Germany and Britain. They served the gold trade of European chartered companies. Latterly they played a significant part in the developing slave trade, and therefore in the history of the Americas, and, subsequently, in the 19th century, in the suppression of that trade.

The property consists of three Castles (Cape Coast, St. George's d'Elmina and Christiansborg at Osu, Accra), 15 Forts (Good Hope at Senya Beraku; Patience at Apam; Amsterdam at Abandzi; St. Jago at Elmina; San Sebastian at Shama; Metal Cross at Dixcove; St. Anthony at Axim; Orange at Sekondi; Groot Fredericksborg at Princesstown; William (Lighthouse) at Cape Coast; William at Anomabu; Victoria at Cape Coast; Ussher at Usshertown, Accra; James at Jamestown, Accra and Apollonia at Beyin), four Forts partially in ruins (Amsterdam at Abandzi; English Fort at British Komenda; Batenstein at Butre; Prinzensten at Keta), four ruins with visible structures (Nassau at Mouri; Fredensborg at Old Ningo; Vredenburg at Dutch Komenda; Vernon at Prampram and Dorothea at Akwida) and two sites with traces of former fortifications (Frederiksborg at Amanful, Cape Coast and Augustaborg at Teshie, Accra).

The basic architectural design of the Forts was in the form of a large square or rectangle. The outer components consisted of four bastions/batteries or towers located at the corners, while the inner components consisted of buildings of two or three storeys with or without towers, in addition to an enclosure, courtyard or a spur. Many have been altered, during their use by successive European powers, and some survive only as ruins.

St. George's d'Elmina Castle, built in 1482, is one of the oldest European buildings outside Europe, and the historic town of Elmina is believed to be the location of the first point of contact between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans.

The castles and forts constituted for more than four centuries a kind of 'shopping street' of West Africa to which traders of Europe's most important maritime nations came to exchange their goods for those of African traders, some of whom came from very far in the interior.

They can be seen as a unique "collective historical monument": a monument not only to the evils of the slave trade, but also to nearly four centuries of pre-colonial Afro-European commerce on the basis of equality rather than on that of the colonial basis of inequality. They represent, significantly and emotively, the continuing history of European-African encounter over five centuries and the starting point of the African Diaspora.

Criterion (vi): The Castles and Forts of Ghana shaped not only Ghana's history but that of the world over four centuries as the focus of first the gold trade and then the slave trade. They are a significant and emotive symbol of European-African encounters and of the starting point of the African Diaspora.
Integrity
The property contains all the significant remains of forts and castles along the coast.

Some of the ruins are susceptible to wave action. The sea has attacked a major part of Fort Prinzenstein but its protection has been enhanced by the construction of a sea defence wall, and efforts are being made to stabilise the remaining parts.

The sites overall remains vulnerable to environmental pressures, development pressure including localized quarrying, and lack of adequate funding for the regular maintenance and conservation of the sites. There are also no buffer zones.
Authenticity
The forts and castles were periodically altered, extended and modified to suit changing circumstances and new needs. In their present conditions, they demonstrate that history of change. As symbols of trade, and particularly the slave trade, they need to continue to reflect the way they were used.
Protection and management requirements
The Castles and Forts have been respectively established and protected as National Monuments under the National Liberation Council Decree (N.L.C.D) 387 of 1969 and Executive Instrument (E.I.) 29 of 1973. All sites are in the custody of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB). Also James Fort, Accra, and Fort William, Anomabu, are no longer in use as prisons and have been handed over to the GMMB.

The Monuments Division of the GMMB provides technical advice and management. Regular state-of-conservation inspections are undertaken. Priority programmes are established to help ensure that appropriate interventions are carried out

The existing legislative framework is to be reviewed, and it is expected that a new legal framework will enhance the existence of the heritage resources, the socio-economic developments and improve the quality of life of the local inhabitants.

A management plan still needs to be prepared. There is an on-going need to ensure adequate resources and training for staff, and to demarcate the boundaries of the sites and establish buffer zones.

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Forts and Castles, Volta, Greater Accra, Central and Western Regions

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Outstanding Universal Value Brief synthesis These fortified trading posts, founded between 1482 and 1786, and spanning a distance of approximately 500 km along the coast of Ghana between Keta in the east and Beyin in the west, were links in the trading routes established by the Portuguese in many areas of the world during their era of great maritime exploration.

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via Met Museum. I just thought this was interesting.

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The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

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Ghana | Keyword | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Nothing in Charles Lane's 15 years of journalism, not the bitter blood of Latin America, nor war in Bosnia, nor the difficult early days of his editorship of the fractious New Republic, could compare with this surreal episode. On the second Friday in May in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel in the Maryland suburb of Bethesda, near Washington, nothing less than the most sustained fraud in the history of modern journalism was unraveling.

No one in Lane's experience, no one, had affected him in the eerie manner of Stephen Glass, a 25-year-old associate editor at The New Republic and a white-hot rising star in Washington journalism. It wasn't just the relentlessness of the young reporter. Or the utter conviction with which Glass had presented work that Lane now feared was completely fabricated. It was the ingenuity of the con, the daring with which Glass had concocted his attention-getting creations, the subtle ease with which even now, as he attempted to clear himself, the strangely gifted kid created an impromptu illusion using makeshift details he had spied in the lobby just seconds earlier-a chair, a cocktail table, smoke from a cigarette.

It all seemed increasingly bizarre to Lane, who had brought Glass to the Hyatt, the supposed setting for one of those bogus stories, to see if the young man could explain it all away somehow. What was behind Glass's behavior? Why did he do it? Lane didn't know then that Stephen Glass had always been good at such risky business. Exceptionally good.

He didn't know that, in 1990, as a high-school senior in the North Shore Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Stephen Glass-a theater-lover-had served as a technical director of Stunts, a group of talented students who produced their own work. (One production involved a Washington journalist caught up in a web of conspiracy and corruption.) The yearbook pictured Glass, directing the movements of the cast through a headset. "Stephen Glass," read the caption, "peruses the script, ready to call the scenes, sets, and props." Not that many years later, Glass would present other elaborate orchestrations of made-up scenes and characters, this time passing them off as journalism.

During his last year in high school, Glass also participated in an activity designed to encourage rapid and inventive thinking called Adventures of the Mind. At Highland Park High-a rigorous, competitive school where it wasn't unusual for 5 percent of the senior class to be National Merit semifinalists-Adventures of the Mind drew the "mental giants" who loved the game of designing scenarios with creative flair. They were asked to prepare a musical in 15 minutes. Or come up, rapid-fire, with clever commercial slogans. Or act out raising a chair off the ground to see if it would float. It was the perfect fodder for smart kids. "You start with an idea," said Glass in the yearbook, "expand on that idea until it's a reality. It makes you more aware of not only your own capabilities, but also exposes you to the different types of careers that are waiting for us after we graduate."

Beneath the inventions of Stephen Glass there is his own story. People try to explain it now by citing the pressure he faced to perform, and it is true that he came from an environment in which there was brutal pressure to excel. Some stress the fact that Glass was working too much. And he was illogically, and even crazily, overextended. More tempting is the idea of seeing each of Glass's articles, each act of manipulative, aggressive trickery, as a grander and more precariously improvised adventure of the mind.

The crisis had begun to escalate on that second Friday in May. Already, Lane was virtually certain that Glass was lying about the veracity of "Hack Heaven," a story written for the May 18 issue that dealt with the phenomenon of a teenage computer hacker seeking to extort thousands of dollars from a vulnerable corporation. During the previous day, Lane had seen Glass, when confronted with questions about his story, respond not only with a barrage of faked material to support his piece but also with his own psychological weaponry. (Lane reconstructed his interactions with Glass during a six-hour taped interview for Vanity Fair in which he frequently referred to a memo that he privately kept of what took place.)

"Look, you're not backing me up," Glass had told Lane the night before. He had appeared wounded, almost outraged. But Glass was acting; he knew exactly what he had done. Every name, every company, virtually every single solitary detail-except Glass's own byline-had been a product of the young man's imagination. But there wasn't the slightest acknowledgment. "I really feel hurt," Lane remembers Glass telling him. "You know, Chuck, I just feel really attacked. And you're my editor and you should be backing me up."

He threw the 36-year-old Lane onto the defensive. Because this, after all, was Stephen Glass, the compelling wunderkind who had seeped inside the skins of editors not only at The New Republic but also at Harper's, George, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones. This was the Stephen Glass who had so many different writing contracts that his income this year might well have reached $150,000 (including his $45,000 New Republic salary). This was the Stephen Glass whose stories had attracted the attention not just of Random House-his agent was trying to score a book deal-but of several screenwriters.

When unmasked, Stephen Glass was revealed as Washington journalism's variation on Six Degrees of Separation. But before the revelation, this talented, smooth-cheeked, and painfully insecure boy had won over the world of magazines with the vigor of his youth and his equally alluring vulnerability. He had appeared, amid the self-centeredness of the capital city, as refreshingly flexible. "There are so many assholes in journalism, so many braggarts and arrogant jerks," said Margaret Talbot, a senior editor at The New Republic who worked with Glass. "Someone comes along who appears to have talent, is self-effacing to a fault, and is sweet and solicitous."

He was hardly the first to make up stories. Janet Cooke had done it in 1980 in a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece for The Washington Post. Nik Cohn, 21 years after the fact, blithely admitted to having made up most of the New York story that inspired the film Saturday Night Fever. More recently, Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith was fired for making up parts of her columns. But none of these journalists approached the sheer calculation of Glass's deceptions. He is the perfect expression of his time and place: an era is cresting in Washington; it is a time when fact and fiction are blurred not only by writers eager to score but also by presidents and their attorneys, spinmeisters and special prosecutors. From one perspective, Stephen Glass was a master parodist of his city's shifting truths.

T he New Republic, after an investigation involving a substantial portion of its editorial staff, would ultimately acknowledge fabrications in 27 of the 41 bylined pieces that Glass had written for the magazine in the two-and-a-half-year period between December 1995 and May 1998. In Manhattan, John F. Kennedy Jr., editor of George, would write a personal letter to Vernon Jordan apologizing for Glass's conjuring up two sources who had made juicy and emphatic remarks about the sexual proclivities of the presidential adviser and his boss. At Harper's, Glass would be dismissed from his contract after a story he had written about phone psychics, which contained 13 first-name sources, could not be verified.

For those two and a half years, the Stephen Glass show played to a captivated audience; then the curtain abruptly fell. He got away with his mind games because of the remarkable industry he applied to the production of the false backup materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact checkers. Glass created fake letterheads, memos, faxes, and phone numbers; he presented fake handwritten notes, fake typed notes from imaginary events written with intentional misspellings, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings that never transpired, fake voice mails from fake sources. He even inserted fake mistakes into his fake stories so fact checkers would catch them and feel as if they were doing their jobs. He wasn't, obviously, too lazy to report. He apparently wanted to present something better, more colorful and provocative, than mere truth offered.

It all worked because of his skill at creating incredibly complex scenes and also because of that accommodating personality. Glass was the guy always ready to lend a sympathetic ear to colleagues going through divorces or trying to juggle kids and careers. He was almost brutally self-flagellating about his own work and abilities-so much so that his co-workers felt protective. But Glass's seeming insecurity hid guts of steel. He reacted to warning shots from his possible doubters with audacity; he simply enlarged his fictions. Glass stealthily warded off a Fortune reporter who couldn't find a listing for an imaginary company Glass had written about. He avoided an intern from Harper's who wanted the name of a software company that didn't exist. He never responded to E-mail from a former New Republic colleague who asked for the name of the Las Vegas casino that took bets on whether a space shuttle would malfunction. (The casino existed only in Glass's mind.) He even held his own during an embarrassing moment at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 1997 when a Wall Street Journal reporter asked him how long it had taken to make up one controversial article.

It worked because Michael Kelly, Chuck Lane's predecessor at The New Republic, never wavered in his support for the cub reporter he had helped catapult into the big leagues. When confronted with two different accusations of fabrication in Glass's work during a three-month period in 1997, Kelly responded not with a soul-searching interrogation of his protégé but, in one of the incidents, by dashing off angry and vitriolic letters to the offended parties. Kelly called one of them dishonest and labeled his complaint meritless, and told another that he owed Glass an apology.

Stephen Glass rode the fast curve of instant ordainment that encircles the celebrity age of the 90s; his reputation in the incestuous world of Washington magazine journalism exploded so exponentially after a few of his better-than-true stories that he could basically write anything and get away with it, regardless of the fact that his reporting almost always uncovered the near incredible and was laden with shoddy sourcing. His reports described events which occurred at nebulous locations, and included quotes from idiosyncratic characters (with no last names mentioned) whose language suggested the street poetry of Kerouac and the psychological acuity of Freud. He had an odd, prurient eye for a department-store Santa with an erection and evangelists who liked getting naked in the woods. And nobody called his bluff. What finally brought Stephen Glass down was himself.

He kept upping the risk, enlarging the dimensions of his performance, going beyond his production of fake notes, a fake Web site, a fake business card, and memos by pulling his own brother into his fading act for a guest appearance. Clearly, he would have done anything to save himself.

"He wanted desperately to save his ass at the expense of anything," said Chuck Lane. "He would have destroyed the magazine."

The saga of Stephen Glass is wrenching, shameful, and sad. His actions are both destructive and self-destructive, and if there is an explanation for them, his family has chosen not to offer it. Repeated attempts to interview Stephen were rebuffed, and all his father, Jeffrey Glass, said in a phone conversation was this: "There's a lot unsaid. You can do whatever you want to do. There's no comment."

'I do trust you," Chuck Lane said on that Thursday night when Stephen Glass had accused his editor of desertion. But by the next morning, on that second Friday in May, Lane was wavering.

Around nine a.m., Glass was questioned on a speaker phone by Lane and by two outsiders, editor Adam Penenberg and executive editor Kambiz Foroohar, from the on-line publication Forbes Digital Tool. Doing exhaustive research of his own, Penenberg had discovered the gaping holes in Glass's hacker piece, and Forbes Digital Tool was planning to do some type of story about the errors. The three men interrogated Glass, and it became apparent that nothing checked out. The conversation, portions of which were taped, is chilling because of Glass's psychological dexterity.

"We called some of the numbers that you gave us, and we got voice mails," Foroohar said to Glass. "We tried E-mailing people and we have our E-mails returned back to us. Three of the E-mail addresses that we used came back saying no address or the account was closed-whatever."

"Who are the people?," Glass replied, still upbeat. " 'Cause I've E-mailed them." (In fact, he hadn't. They didn't exist.)

Gradually a quiet exasperation crept into Glass's voice; he seemed to imply that the problem was the incompetents at Forbes Digital Tool who were questioning him.

The conversation turned to Jukt Micronics, the company featured in "Hack Heaven." Jukt, according to Glass's account, had offered a teenage hacker named Ian Restil tens of thousands in cash and goods not to destroy its computer system.

"We still can't get anything from Jukt," said Foroohar. Jukt had been identified in the story as a big-time California software company. But Penenberg, after combing dozens of different databases as well as corporate records in an attempt to locate the company, could not find a single mention of it.

Glass didn't flinch. "Did they call you back?" he asked.

"No."

"Ever?"

Glass sounded surprised, as if there had been some breakdown in communication, and maybe there was. Realizing that Forbes Digital Tool was onto him, he had cast his younger brother, Michael, a senior studying psychology at Stanford and an accomplished actor in high school, in the role of a Jukt Micronics executive named George Sims. The night before, Michael had left a voice mail for Forbes Digital Tool. He had also spoken directly to Lane. Their conversation had been relatively short, but Michael acted his part with the aplomb that had earned him kudos for his portrayal of Tom in The Grapes of Wrath at Highland Park High School. He sounded young, but all principals of software companies sound young, and he snappily told Lane that he had no comment on the story and then hung up.

They moved on to the Jukt Micronics Web site on America Online (which Glass had created on the computer in his New Republic office).

"We looked at the Web site and it looks very suspicious to us," said Foroohar.

"Why?" asked Lane.

"It doesn't look like a real Web site. It looks like a Web site that was created for purposes different from what it proclaims to be."

Glass began speaking a bit more rapidly, but there was no indication that he was nervous. Instead, he added a new wrinkle to his repertoire: deference.

"I don't have a Web site, so I don't know how easy or hard it is. I trust you guys know better than me."

The gambit worked. Foroohar suggested that Glass had been the unwitting victim of clever hackers, and Glass seized upon the role.

"I feel really bad about doing this," said Foroohar.

"I'm very sorry, too," said Glass in a tone of complete understanding. "Um," he added, as if to suggest he was about to make some type of painful confession. "Um," he said again, and again. Then finally, finally, it came out.

"I'm increasingly beginning to think I was duped."

Foroohar, bending over backward to be fair and honorable, was sympathetic. So was Penenberg. Like so many others, they became Glass's protectors. "Look," said Penenberg, trying to make Glass feel a little bit better about it all. "Covering hackers is very difficult."

There are three houses on the cul-de-sac, curved in the shape of a clamshell, where Stephen Glass lived before he went to college. One is a faux château, but the Glasses' house is of drab brown brick and has a pool out back. There is no sidewalk, and on a weekday in June the only sound comes from a lawn mower.

Highland Park has the feel of a gated community without the actual gates. Nestled in a cluster of affluent North Shore Chicago suburbs, it has a population of approximately 31,000, a median household income of $77,905, and a median house value of $257,000. Central Avenue, the shopping area, would look familiar to the creators of The Truman Show.

Two qualities particularly distinguish Highland Park, and both made an impression on Stephen Glass. The first is its theatrical tradition. Highland Park is a town of boys with very clever minds who left to strike gold in Hollywood. The creators of the Revenge of the Nerds movies grew up here. So did the director of Beethoven and The Flintstones. And so did Paul Brickman, the writer and director of Risky Business, which captured one of Highland Park's key characteristics, namely the way many parents here push their kids to succeed. Harvard educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot spent a good deal of time at Highland Park High School researching her 1983 book, The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture. She was impressed with the school's stunning academic programs but noted that values such as character and morality were sometimes little more than brushstrokes against the relentlessness of achievement. Highland Park parents, she found, expected children to be reading before kindergarten and were critical of teachers who stressed social-psychological development. Parents lived vicariously through their children and saw Ivy League admissions as emblems of their own success. It was a place, Lawrence-Lightfoot noted, where an average kid was seen as slow.

Everyone in the Glass household worked hard to succeed. Jeffrey Glass was a gastroenterologist, and Stephen's mother, Michele, was in nursing. Their two boys, Stephen and Michael, cut an impressive path through Highland Park High.

In addition to his extracurricular theatrical activities, Stephen was vice president of the National Honor Society his senior year and president of the Student Congress. Academically he did extremely well, gaining acceptance to the University of Pennsylvania as a special scholar.

These distinctions were apparently crucial for him. According to more than a dozen people who knew Glass in high school, college, and later on, pleasing his parents and bettering their expectations with even more prodigious attainments was essential to him. In 1997, despite his flourishing journalism career, he told colleagues that, at the behest of his parents, he had decided to go to law school while continuing his work full-time as a reporter.

Glass also had to surmount another obstacle: a younger brother whose accomplishments in high school made his own look utterly unremarkable. Michael Glass was a National Merit scholarship semifinalist at Highland Park High. He was a star of a school play presented by the nationally recognized theater department. Michael Glass was cute, cool, and popular with girls. In a senior class composed of some of the nation's best and brightest, he was voted Most Likely to Succeed.

Stephen, on the other hand, had a squeaky voice, wore ultra-preppy clothes, and sometimes seemed effeminate. And he had to grapple with something else: his parents had wanted him to be a doctor. Glass began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990 on a pre-medical curriculum. According to various accounts, he held his own at the beginning. But then his grades nose-dived. He apparently flunked one course and barely passed another, suggesting that he had simply lost interest in being on a pre-med track, or had done poorly on purpose to shut the door to any future career in medicine. Glass ultimately majored in anthropology. He reportedly did well in this area of study, but given his inconsistent performance in pre-med courses, his overall grade-point average at Penn was hardly distinguished-slightly less than a B.

"His shit wasn't always as together as everyone thought it was," said Matthew Klein, who roomed with Glass at Penn when he was a senior and Glass a junior. There were indicators to Klein that Glass was not doing particularly well academically, but Glass never acknowledged it. "He always said he was doing fine, doing fine," said Klein.

Almost as soon as Glass had gotten to Penn, he started working for The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper. By all accounts, he loved it, but quit at the insistence of his parents, apparently because of his inconsistent grades. Glass subsequently returned to the newspaper. He worked tirelessly and with ambition. Socially, he seemed to fashion himself as a kind of proud androgyne. "Steve Glass doesn't drink and doesn't smoke," said The Daily Pennsylvanian when Glass became executive editor in January of 1993. "And sex is definitely out."

Those who worked at the paper had no idea of Glass's sexuality, and there was speculation that he was gay, or at least sexually confused. When he started to date a girl, the rumors didn't dissipate. Glass himself was aware of them, and in some ways seemed to promote them, describing encounters with men who assumed he was gay. Later on, at The New Republic, he wrote a story which was never published depicting his life as an "effeminate heterosexual." Those who read it recall it vividly: Glass wrote about his knowledge of lipstick shades and his habit of reading women's magazines. He mentioned a social outing with a man who attempted to kiss him after dinner.

Chuck Lane, although quiet during the call with Forbes Digital Tool, was not convinced that Stephen Glass had been duped by hackers.

He insisted that Glass show him the location of the conference that he had written about in "Hack Heaven." So off they went in Glass's Honda, leaving the New Republic offices in Washington and making their way on Wisconsin Avenue toward Bethesda. Glass drove slowly, 20 miles an hour, maybe 25.

They turned off Wisconsin Avenue and drove up to the entrance of the Hyatt. They went into the lobby, and Lane felt certain that Stephen Glass was lying. In fact, he wasn't even sure that Glass had ever set foot in the lobby. And yet ...
I was in this chair. And Ian was sitting there across from me, and Hiert was in that chair, and we sat here for a little while, and then somebody came along who was smoking too close to us, so we had to move, and we moved over here in these chairs. After about 45 minutes we got up and I had to go to the bathroom.
For a moment Lane thought about just telling Glass to knock it off. But on another level, the whole thing was too fascinating to interrupt-the very image, as he would later recall, of this 25-year-old boy "retracing these imaginary steps of these imaginary people in a calm, matter-of-fact voice."

Glass led Lane down an escalator, through a hallway, out of the Hyatt, and into a next-door office building. The lobby was horseshoe-shaped, utterly implausible as the setting for the conference Glass had reported. But, in a matter of seconds, Glass sized up the place and started pointing out the tables where the participants had been set up. He mentioned that he had watched from a table in the far corner of the lobby. He hadn't ever been seated at that table, but he described it in a way that corresponded perfectly to the diagram he had presented to fact checkers.

Lane found a building engineer, and then a security guard, both of whom said they had never heard of such a conference taking place in the lobby. And, as it happened, the building had been closed on the day Glass said the conference occurred.

"All I know is they let me in," Glass told Lane. "I was let into the building." He kept insisting, looking Lane straight in the eye. "I don't understand what is going on here, but I was here. They let me into the building."

And he was so good, so convincing, that Chuck Lane almost believed him.

Glass graduated from Penn in 1994, and went to work for the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review. After about a year he became an intern at The New Republic, working as an assistant to Andrew Sullivan, who preceded Michael Kelly as the editor. It was not a particularly stimulating job, involving administrative tasks such as answering the phone, answering correspondence, and an occasional personal errand for Sullivan.

Glass did little actual writing under Sullivan, but did complete assignments on disputes over governmental subsidies for cheese and on presidential candidate Bob Dole's handlers. They were straightforward, with none of his later trademarks. At a magazine filled with precocious kids, he was far from the top.

But Glass's personality endeared him to everyone. Among his friends, there is debate as to how much of Glass's warmth was cultivated, but there is no doubt that it helped further his rise. In every way, he seemed above reproach. He appeared to work around the clock and was always asking others if they needed anything when he went out for coffee.

"The nickname for Steve was Hub," said Michael Crowley, who worked at The New Republic with Glass when they were interns. "He was constantly on the make. Constantly needing this steady supply of dish. [He] needed to have relationships with everyone. He just knew all the office gossip. He knew everything. That's why, to some extent, his reporting was credible-he knew everything inside the magazine, so why wouldn't he figure out what was going on in the world of his stories?"

If there was one aspect of Glass's personality that seemed indisputably genuine, it was this nonstop yearning to please. He had a near-masochistic inability to say no to anyone in authority.

"That was the weirdest thing about him," said a former colleague. "That held back my ability to respect him and like him a lot. It was really preposterous and cartoonish. It also made him impossible to deal with on the same level that you deal with other people. There was some sort of a core that was missing, that core sense of confidence and security."

" Are you mad at me? " That was something Glass said incessantly. The slightest look or gesture could send him into a panic of self-doubt. Certain friends advised him to stop asking the question; others found that it called forth their protective instincts. Glass's would-be parent surrogates wanted only to help make this terribly insecure boy, who would describe a story he wrote as a "piece of shit," feel better about himself.

Those familiar with his early work said he struggled with his writing. His original drafts were rough, the prose clunky and imprecise. The idea for Glass's breakthrough piece, "Taxis and the Meaning of Work" (published in August of 1996), came from New Republic owner Martin Peretz himself. Peretz had spoken frequently about how black taxi drivers in Washington were being replaced by cabbies from other immigrant groups; he thought it revealed something important about the attitudes of blacks toward certain kinds of work.

The piece was a kind of audition for Peretz-a chance for Glass to shine-and he spent months on it. Early drafts were ragged, but from the outset it revealed a talent that Glass had not previously shown: a remarkable ability to weave in anecdotes and colorful detail. "The color saved his ass," said the former colleague. "People were in wonderment about his ability to find these crazy characters."

In November 1996, Michael Kelly, then a respected political columnist working for The New Yorker, took over as editor of The New Republic. Roughly a month later, Glass delivered his first lengthy story under the new regime-a 2,795-word article on the Center for Science in the Public Interest (C.S.P.I.), headed by Michael Jacobson. The article depicted the center as doing little more than selling hysteria with its diatribes against Chinese food, movie-theater popcorn, and the fat substitute olestra. Glass's biting attitude toward Jacobson seemed perfectly pitched for Kelly and the tone he seemingly wanted to establish for the magazine. Jacobson was presented as arrogant and manipulative, and in the story's opening paragraph was portrayed obsessively grilling a waitress in a Chinese restaurant on the ingredients of various dishes.

According to the story, the description was drawn from the anonymous account of someone who had eaten with Jacobson. But the chairperson of the board of C.S.P.I., in a detailed response, challenged virtually every aspect of Glass's story. "The sheer quantity of errors in the article not only calls into question whether minimum standards of objective journalism were consciously disregarded, but makes an adequate response in limited space impossible," the letter said. It referred specifically to the opening paragraph about Jacobson, describing it as a "fictionalized account."

In a recent interview, Kelly said that questions about the scene had been discussed during the editing process, and that Glass gave convincing assurances that he had talked to friends who had witnessed Jacobson eating. "You either trust the writer or you don't," said Kelly, calling the complaints "nitpicks."

Kelly went beyond an editor's ordinary defense of a writer. When pointed criticism of the article also came from Jacobson, Kelly fired off a private letter that Jacobson later described as one of the nastiest he had ever received. "Mr. Jacobson, you lied, and you lied because lying supported your thesis, and you attempted to cover up your lie," Kelly wrote. "You have shown that you are willing to smear someone's professional reputation without any concern for truth ... I await your apology to Stephen Glass and to this magazine."

Jim Naureckas, editor of the magazine Extra! (published by the group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), also wrote Kelly questioning Glass's piece. "The whole article," he claimed, "is so dishonest in approach that one can't help but suspect that Glass knew he was fudging."

Kelly also privately replied to Naureckas, writing: "I regard your assessment of Mr. Glass's work as meritless: dishonest, wrong-headed and clearly motivated by devotion to ideology, rather than by any concern for truth or accuracy....

"I take criticism of TNR seriously, when it comes from a credible source. That doesn't include you. If you want to make it your occupation to do hackwork and hatchet jobs on behalf of the left's party line, that's up to you, but don't expect me to accept you as the arbitrer [ sic] of what constitutes shoddy."

The New Republic investigation concluded that Glass's first unequivocal use of fabrications was in the piece about C.S.P.I. and Michael Jacobson. The complaints had been on target. Glass had invented the anonymous people who had seen Jacobson eating, as well as an enormously inflammatory quote from an unnamed and nonexistent Food and Drug Administration official.

When Jacobson first saw an article exposing Glass's fabrications, he did feel a certain vindication. But, he said, "it doesn't negate ... holding me up to ridicule. That's the kind of thing you cannot erase."

When interviewed, Kelly said that he would gladly apologize to Jacobson for the opening anecdote-as long as he was given definitive proof of its embellishment. As for his support of Glass, he offers this: "I know a lot of people who are dishonest as journalists, but they're dishonest in pretty conventional ways.... [Glass] would make it up with a level of specificity that was so rich that to suspect him you had to wrap yourself around the idea that this reporter was making up things entirely.... In hindsight I wish I had been smarter or more skeptical. I wish I had caught him."

After leaving the Hyatt, Lane and Glass headed back down Wisconsin Avenue. "Look," said Lane, "if there's anything you need to tell me, tell me now."

"I didn't do anything wrong," said Glass over and over. "I didn't do anything wrong." It went on like this for about 15 minutes, with Lane gently prodding. Then, following a long silence, Glass said, "All right, Chuck, I lied. I wasn't at the conference."

It seemed to be the dénouement, the final coming clean. But it was just Stephen Glass grasping for another act.

He insisted that he had spoken with all the people named in the story, and that they had reconstructed the conference for him. He was admitting a transgression, but one not nearly as serious as making up the event.

"If it will help you to say I made it up, I will," Glass added. Lane believed that the comment was a trap, a way for Glass to claim he had been forced to confess something untrue.

"I want you to tell the truth," Lane said.

The C.S.P.I. article was the first of 31 that Glass wrote for The New Republic, 27 of which were later determined to contain fabrications.

At first the made-up parts were relatively small. Fictional details were melded with mostly factual stories. Quotes and vignettes were constructed to add the edge Kelly seemed to adore. But in the March 31, 1997, issue of The New Republic, Glass raised the stakes with a report about the Conservative Political Action Conference. Eight young men, Glass claimed, men with names such as Jason and Michael, were drinking beer and smoking pot. They went looking for "the ugliest and loneliest" woman they could find, lured her to their hotel room, and sexually humiliated her. The piece, almost entirely an invention, was spoken of with reverence. Subsequent to it, Glass's work began to appear in George, Rolling Stone, and Harper's.

But challenges to Glass's veracity followed. David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, called Glass "quite a fiction writer" and noted that the description of the Omni Shoreham room littered with empty bottles from the mini-bar had a problem. There were no mini-bars in any of the Omni's rooms.

After hearing the complaints, Kelly asked Glass to explain the apparent discrepancy. After Glass called the hotel, he reported that, while the hotel did not have mini-bars, it did supply mini-refrigerators to guests. Kelly privately called the hotel and found out the same thing. This added to Kelly's level of comfort about the story. But the existence of some mini-refrigerators didn't explain the presence of the mini-bottles of liquor that Glass had described. Did the young conservatives purposely buy mini-bottles of liquor? A dainty purchase, it would seem, for would-be sexual predators. Yet Kelly focused his attention elsewhere. "I believe that young men, when they're drinking, are capable of anything."

One of the first steps Kelly had taken as The New Republic's editor had been to hire a research specialist from The New Yorker to revamp the fact-checking system. Glass, however, had actually worked as a fact checker at The New Republic; he even continued to do checking during some of the period when he reported. He had a sophisticated knowledge of the department's methods. He also ingratiated himself with the new fact checkers, staying around late while they worked and marking his stories with Post-Its to assist them in quickly finding his backup materials.

When fact-checking the stories of others, Glass established himself as the Darth Vader of Detail. No inaccuracy, however small, escaped him, and he wasn't above warning editors of certain writers' sloppiness. He took advantage of the vulnerability of Ruth Shalit, who had previously been forced to admit plagiarism in two New Republic pieces. "He was known as the best fact checker," said a staffer. "He was always ratting [people] out. He was always pissing on Ruth. He was always seen as the stickler, and he used that, and the fact checkers came to trust him."

Kelly left the magazine in September of 1997. Without Kelly's editing, said Hanna Rosin, a former staffer, Glass's pieces lost some protective padding. Around this time, a piece Glass wrote for Rolling Stone not only contained apparent fabrications, but the few concrete details in the article appeared to have been lifted from another source. The article, entitled "The College Rankings Scam," ran in the magazine's October 16, 1997, edition. It told of the ways in which colleges and universities supplied suspect data to U.S. News & World Report for the magazine's annual college rankings. The most gripping part of the story involved Glass's description of a meeting at a college in which admissions officers spoke openly of supplying misleading data to U.S. News. The location of the meeting was never given, nor was anyone named. Beyond the meeting, Glass cited eight specific examples of colleges and universities supplying questionable data to U.S. News. What he did not say in the piece is that seven of those examples had been published two and a half years earlier by The Wall Street Journal in its own groundbreaking story on the U.S. News rankings.

Still, Glass grew more emboldened. By the beginning of 1998, he had begun to routinely invent stories almost in their entirety. A possible explanation is that now, in addition to his many magazine assignments, he was attending Georgetown University Law Center. In January, he wrote a largely concocted piece about HDT, a fictional New York-based company that for $25,000 each would drop travelers in the wilderness and supervise them unobtrusively. Fortune's Ed Brown, a writer-reporter, called Glass afterward to say that he had been unable to locate the company. He wondered aloud if the piece had been intended as a joke. It should have been a warning to Glass.

Glass and Lane were in the Honda at the corner of Abermarle and Wisconsin, near a Hechinger retail store, when Glass burst into tears. Concerned that the kid might have an accident, Lane took the wheel. Sobbing on Lane's shoulder, Glass told the editor how his life was falling apart, and explained how his parents had pressured him to attend law school and how he thought Lane would fire him if he didn't keep up his productivity at the magazine.

They returned to the office about noon, and Lane started looking through the story that Glass had written prior to "Hack Heaven." The subject was a memorabilia convention featuring trinkets relating to Monica Lewinsky.

After making several calls, Lane became convinced that this piece had also been manufactured. He questioned Glass, who improvised another series of lies.

Lane fired Glass. But it was not an easy decision, given the reporter's youth and the fact that the news of his faked stories would completely destroy his career. There was another consideration, too. All that Lane could prove was that the hackers' conference had not taken place in Bethesda. It was the only offense that Glass had actually admitted to.

After listening to others, Lane decided to give Glass a two-year suspension. To Lane that was tantamount to firing; he doubted that Glass would ever return. It was also an act of decency, a testament to the feelings of so many at The New Republic for Glass. His colleagues didn't know, at this point, that Glass had fictionalized all or parts of 26 other stories he had written for their magazine.

While Lane was trying to be fair, Glass was busy attempting to sabotage the editor and to divide further an already fractured magazine.

Lane had become editor of The New Republic after Kelly was fired when his differences with Peretz had grown unresolvable. Kelly was enormously popular among the staff; he was known as a writer's editor. The firing had not been handled with any degree of grace, and from the very beginning Lane had found himself in a tender position as he attempted to gain the confidence of the staff. Now Glass, in an effort to minimize damage to himself, was trying to destroy what inroads Lane had made.

According to several colleagues, Glass told them that Lane was out to get him because he had been a Kelly disciple. "Have you heard what happened?" he asked a colleague, and then wove his tale of persecution. "Chuck's being such an asshole." Several of Glass's listeners judged the assessment to be correct: he was being punished unfairly if all he had done was say he had been someplace he wasn't.

That Friday night, Glass called Kelly, and he and his girlfriend went to the former editor's house. Kelly cooked salmon and listened as Glass unfurled his saga of lies, including how Lane was out to get him because of his allegiance to Kelly.

As Stephen Glass spun feverishly, Lane anguished. He received advice from his father, a lawyer, whom he had visited for dinner at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He had no doubt the hacker story was trash, but he was still bugged by the calls from George Sims of Jukt Micronics.

At about 11 p.m., Lane spoke on the phone with senior editor Talbot. He filled her in on what had happened, and by chance, Talbot mentioned that Glass had a brother who lived in Palo Alto, California.

The second she uttered it, Lane knew.

The next day, Saturday, Lane went in to work to get some papers. He arrived at 9:25 a.m., and because the offices were closed, he had to sign in. Scrawling his signature, he noticed that someone had signed in three minutes earlier-at 9:22.

Stephen Glass.

He was sitting in his office at his computer, and was clearly surprised to see Lane, who became convinced that Glass was trying to erase incriminating evidence off his hard drive.

Lane was angry and confrontational.

"Your brother is George Sims, isn't he?"

Glass's eyes shifted and there was an audible gulp.

"No, no, that's a real guy," he insisted to Lane.

"I know your brother lives in Palo Alto and that's a Palo Alto cell-phone number. You faked all those voice mails."

"No, no. They're real."

Lane ordered Glass to leave his office. Glass pleaded to be allowed to take his Rolodex and some files from the hard drive of his computer, but Lane refused to let him. Instead, the only thing that Stephen Glass carried out of The New Republic -after Lane had searched his pockets-was a blue blazer.

"If your brother is involved in this, it's a very bad business and a very serious matter," said Lane, easing his tone. "If you've gotten him involved, you need to tell me."

Glass continued to deny it, and finally Lane told him, "I'm going to find out who George Sims is. Don't make me do it myself."

Glass said he was on his way to Washington Dulles International Airport to fly to Chicago to be with his parents, and he begged Lane to go with him to the airport. But Lane, thinking Glass was attempting to come up with yet another explanation, said he could not. In fact, he escorted him to the door of the office and watched him leave.

Ten to 15 minutes later, the office's doorbell rang.

"Chuck, I lied to you," said Glass. "It was my brother."

And then Stephen Glass did what he always did, what he had done for so long that maybe he no longer realized what he was doing.

He lied some more, inventing a new adventure of the mind, both pathetic and incomprehensible, of how Sims really did exist, how he had been under such pressure from Forbes Digital Tool to find him, but couldn't, not in the time they had given him. So he said that he had asked his brother to pose as George Sims, just until he could find the real one.

"You've lost your job," Lane told him, completely severing his ties to the magazine. And then, the former golden boy, "everybody's brother, everybody's protégé," as Michael Kelly would describe him, left the offices of The New Republic.

Glass never actually returned, but in spirit he did, about a month later, when the magazine ran an unparalleled note to readers. It was meant as an explanation, but might well have been an epitaph for the sweet and nice boy, the hardworking boy who could never be what he wanted to be, the boy who couldn't live up to the expectations he had inherited and then perpetuated in order to elevate himself into someone who did not have to repeat, over and over, "Are you mad at me?"

T he New Republic's note read in part: We believe that each of the following articles by Glass contains at least some fabricated material: "All Wet" (February 16, 1998), "Clutch Situation" (February 16, 1998), "Gift of the Magnate" (January 26, 1998), "State of Nature" (January 19, 1998), "Ratted Out" (December 22, 1997), "Anatomy of a Policy Fraud" (November 17, 1997), "No Free Launch" (November 3, 1997), "Kicked Out" (October 20, 1997), "Cheap Suits" (October 6, 1997), "The Young and the Feckless" (September 8 & 15, 1997), "Deja Coup" (August 11 & 18, 1997), "Low Blows" (August 4, 1997), "Peddling Poppy" (June 9, 1997), "After the Fall" (May 26, 1997), "A Fine Mess" (April 21, 1997), "The Jungle" (April 7, 1997), "Spring Breakdown" (March 31, 1997), "Writing on the Wall" (March 24, 1997), "Don't You D.A.R.E." (March 3, 1997), "Rock the Morons" (February 10, 1997), "Holy Trinity" (January 27, 1997), "Probable Claus" (January 6 & 13, 1997), "Hazardous to Your Mental Health" (December 30, 1996).
The magazine published a postscript to this article in the October 2007 issue.
Buzz Bissinger is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

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At 25, Stephen Glass was the most sought-after young reporter in the nation's capital, producing knockout articles for magazines ranging from The New Republic to Rolling Stone. Trouble was, he made things up-sources, quotes, whole stories-in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern journalism.

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via Illinois Digital Archives

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The Photographic Archive contains more than 60,000 images documenting the history of the University of Chicago.

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Selection of spatially documented heritage sites by Zamani Project - - 3D Heritage Documentation - Laser Scanning - 3D Modelling - GIS

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Cite hard copy book--> NoodleTools review ---> Quick cite (creating own citation)

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-Examine scope
-Aggregate vs. independent
-Keyword searching

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-Examine scope
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Slam poet and educator Elizabeth Acevedo arrives on the YA scene with her debut novel in verse. Acevedo pulls from her experience working with teens and her own high school journals to tell the story of Xiomara Batista, twin and daughter of Dominican immigrants, as she finds her voice amid overwhelming expectations set by her religious mother and by society. Acevedo spoke with PW about writing a narrative arc across a series of poems, tapping into the unique experience of adolescence, and how her own teen years inspired Xiomara's story.
What motivated you to write for the young adult audience?

I was an eighth grade English teacher for several years in Prince George's County, Maryland. There was this realization that I write a lot of poems that exist on YouTube and exist when I'm there in person, but very little that young people could take with them. Right? That what I was creating wasn't tangible in that way. That was the kernel, wanting to give something to my students that they could carry.

Are you interested in writing fiction or verse for other audiences?

I think I have a couple projects up my sleeve. I've been working on a poetry manuscript for a long time, a full-length [one]. What I have now is a chapbook, which is not quite as long. I have a fiction project for adults that I've been toying with for years, so we'll see if I can pull that off anytime soon.

Does your writing process differ depending on your audience and whether you are writing verse or prose?

It depends whether I am writing poetry or fiction. My second book is prose but also young adult. It feels similar to The Poet X. I have to sit every day, hang out with the characters, and get my word count. Poetry is different in that I will have an idea, experience, or emotional truth that I'm trying to get across. I can putter a bit and play with the language. Fiction manuscripts have to be done with focus. With poetry I'm more patient, I'm working, figuring things out, even if I'm not actively writing.

A large part of Xiomara's story focuses on her conflicted feelings about her physical presence, sexuality, and religious faith. From where did her story begin?

The first poem I wrote for this novel was the one about ants, which I think is one of the most climactic points in the story. It was about this conflict with [Xiomara's mother] and religion and what it means to want to make yourself so small that you could fit between the floorboards. This is a story about taking up space and being a young woman who takes up space with both her body and her voice. The weight of the story is in that moment.

Are aspects of Xiomara or her story inspired by your own teen years or your experience as the child of Dominican immigrants?

[Laughs]

If my mother were asking, we're gonna say no. But, yeah, being a young woman who was a poet informed how much I know about slam poetry and those initial moments on stage. There are a lot of the cultural things that inspired aspects of Xiomara, like the ways in which who you are outside of your house is a little bit different than who you must be inside because of the cultural norms that exist. That push and pull that Xiomara carries of being first-generation is something I share. Our family structure and how our parents behaved are different, though. I may have also lifted a poem or two from my high school journal. I plagiarized myself, but it was a good way to keep me grounded.

How did having access to your high school journal impact your writing or perspective?

The journal reminded me of how teens talk and communicate, and [was] a reminder to be authentic. To remember how emotional things felt at that time. And that it was okay to allow that, particularly as someone who has gone to so many poetry programs. We are taught to pull back on sentiment and sentimentality, to strip a lot of that out and let the reader do the work. Going back to my journals, I was able to calibrate and remember that how a teen writes isn't the same.

Do you still work with young writers and teens regularly?

I do a lot of poetry workshops. I do 40-50 shows a year, mostly at colleges and universities, but also at high schools. I'm a visiting instructor at an adjudicated youth center in D.C., so I do workshops with young women who are incarcerated. I have the privilege of being around many young people who are finding their voice. I also attend a lot of slams as a host or judge and I used to be a coach as well.

The way I think about my teen years is very particular to where I am now. But being around teenagers all the time makes me aware of the emotional scale that they're on and how they're responding to things. If nothing else, it's a reminder of how brilliant they are. Some adults write down to young people, but, if you listen to them, they'll tell you what they need. Oftentimes, I think they're more able to handle difficult subjects than we give them credit for.

Xiomara plays the role of protector for her twin brother; can you expand on your decision to give Xiomara a fraternal twin, rather than a younger sibling or a sister?

I wanted a character who was going to be a foil to Xiomara. Both siblings are trying to reach this idea of perfection. For me, the fact that their parents are significantly older meant a lot; there's a huge generational gap and the twins are considered miracles. If it were just Xiomara alone, she wouldn't have anyone to bounce off, but she and her brother are two seeds that bore fruit. Their mother just can't let go and that pressure affects them in different ways. Xiomara's mother has certain expectations for her because she is a girl. And having a mirror who is the same age and has been raised in the same household was a perfect way to show the gender and personality differences at play.

When working on The Poet X, did you read your writing aloud to gauge flow and word choice?

I did, which was difficult when I was revising because it's a lot of pages to read. But I read every revision out loud to get a sense of the music, the language, and the rhythm, how things were bumping against each other. On the page, I think you can get caught up in the line breaks and how things look-the aesthetic-but if you're not hearing it, you're losing so much. Even when I was recording the audiobook I was noticing things my eye couldn't catch that needed to be changed.

How did your background in spoken word poetry prepare you to record the audio version of The Poet X?

I think I have a sense of how things need to sound, how to pull an audience in with tone, timing, and pacing. That affects a lot of my writing, too, being hyper aware of how an audience might read something. I want what's happening on the page to mimic what my body would do on stage. A lot of that came out in the audiobook. I think I would have struggled to record the audiobook without having stage experience because it's a lot of work to maintain that kind of performance voice.

Was writing a narrative arc across a series of poems difficult?

It was one of the hardest things I've ever done! I started this novel in 2012 and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I'm an avid reader of all kinds of things and was a teacher at the time, so I was reading every verse novel and poetry books with extended character arcs. But when you're doing it yourself it's so hard to figure out how much interiority is enough, how much should this character show up, what does dialogue look like between multiple characters? It was hard to figure out what it should look like. I would complain to my husband that I couldn't see it. I can't hold the whole story in my head because it's so many pieces. I had to write two other novels before I could come back and finish this one. I had to process other things and have a sense of arc and plot to impose onto this story.

Can you share any details about your next young adult project?

I'm not sure how much I'm able to share. It's called With the Fire on High and it will be out around this time in 2019. It's about a teen chef and mother in Philadelphia during her senior year in high school. She's trying to figure out how what it means when all her classmates are being told to follow their dreams, but, for her, it's a little bit different because she has someone depending on her. She can't make the wrong choice of what to do with her life.

How does your background as an ELA teacher, speaker, and performer impact your writing process and the way you approach storytelling?

I'm aware of how young people are going to read. I'm also aware of the many ways you can enter a story; I try to be cognizant of not writing the same kind of story in the same kind of way. For example, having Xiomara's draft assignments be in poetry in her journal, then being too afraid to show that in her final draft. As a teacher, having a sense of what a rough draft looks like and how much is sometimes not revealed impacted those sections of The Poet X.

I do q&as after every show. What people ask me during these q&as shows me a lot about what folks are processing that they don't always know how to find answers for. That's kind of an interesting thing to keep track of: what is it that people are trying to talk about that they ask me specifically? What is it that I can offer in a story that might answer some of those questions?

Which writers or performers do you feel have had the most impact on your journey to finding your writing style or voice?

It's different depending on what I'm writing, though it crosses a little bit. I'm a big fan of Lucille Clifton and how sparingly she wrote. She had such short lines, she didn't overuse words, and was super powerful. I love Natalie Diaz and how much she reveals, but also that she is more interested in what the poem is asking, rather than what it is solving. I think allowing that kind of soft closure is something to adopt and think about. Jason Reynolds's work was big when I was working through The Poet X. I'm lucky that he and I lived in D.C. at the same time and I was able to chat with him and get to know him. When his first book came out it was one of my first indications that I could actually do this, that I could tell this kind of story. Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming had a lot of impact on this story. Junot Díaz was the first writer to really give me permission to create a fully Dominican character and bring all our languages and vernaculars onto the page, to not be apologetic and to see it as an asset.
by Elizabeth Acevedo. HarperTeen, $17.99 Mar. ISBN 978-0-06-266280-4

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Debut Author Elizabeth Acevedo on 'The Poet X'

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Slam poet and educator Elizabeth Acevedo arrives on the YA scene with her debut novel in verse. Acevedo pulls from her experience working with teens and her own high school journals to tell the story of Xiomara Batista, twin and daughter of Dominican immigrants, as she finds her voice amid overwhelming expectations set by her religious mother and by society.

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MLA format follows the author-page method of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the page number(s) from which the quotation or paraphrase is taken must appear in the text, and a complete reference should appear on your Works Cited page.

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Comparison Chart

Primary research means the collection of data for the first time or the transformation of raw data into new forms as a precursor of analysis.

Original report of research direct from the researchers that did the work.

Primary research includes qualitative and quantitative research and can include surveys, focus groups, questionnaires, and interviews.

Secondary research does not generate new data. It comments on and analyzes the primary research of other research projects.

Secondary research accesses primary source research that are in libraries, databases, and archives.

Written materials which fall between primary and secondary sources

Refers to research that is either unpublished or has been published in non-commercial form.

Sources which summarize but do not provide new information or analyze other sources of information.

Tertiary sources revisits or references primary and secondary research.

Examples of common source formats

Journal articles reporting original (NEW) research, empirical data, and statistics.

Experiments, clinical trials, case studies

Government documents

Manuscripts

Maps

Laws and court decisions

Letters and correspondence

Diaries

Census and demographic records

Creative works such as poetry, music, drama, fiction, art

Journal or magazine articles that interpret or discuss previous research findings.

Reviews of books, movies, art, plays

Books that discuss or analyze a topic

Biographies

Government reports

White papers

Policy statements and issues papers

Conference proceedings

Theses and dissertations

Private sector research reports

Geological and geophysical surveys

Technical reports

Newsletters and bulletins

Encyclopedias

Indexes and abstracts

Bibliographies

Textbooks

Fact sheets

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LibGuides: Identifying Information Sources: Primary, Secondary, & Tertiary Sources

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This lesson introduces students to lateral reading, a strategy for investigating who's behind an unfamiliar online source by leaving the webpage and opening a new browser tab to see what trusted websites say about the unknown source. Students watch the teacher model lateral reading and then have a chance to practice the strategy to determine who is behind a website and, ultimately, whether that website is trustworthy.

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Intro to Lateral Reading | Civic Online Reasoning

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This lesson introduces students to lateral reading, a strategy for investigating who's behind an unfamiliar online source by leaving the webpage and opening a new browser tab to see what trusted websites say about the unknown source.

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Keyword Search provides a single search box to find words and phrases anywhere in the LC Catalog record or in title, author/creator, or subject fields. Search results are returned by relevance. An Expert option is available from the Keyword Search menu for searchers who prefer command-driven queries.

The Keyword Search shortcut URL is: https://catalog.loc.gov/keyword

Keyword Search can be helpful if you're looking for specific items but are unsure, for example, of the complete name of an author/creator or the first words of a title. Drop-down menu options let you filter your keywords by title, author/creator, and subject. More specific keyword filtering is available with Advanced Search. You can also toggle open context-sensitive search tips or click Search/Browse Help from either the menu at the top of your screen or the Help link at the bottom of your screen.

Finds all words in any order or exact phrases located anywhere in the record. Use Keyword (ALL) when you're not sure what fields contain the words or phrases you need or when your searches return no results using other search types.

Search terms ...

Retrieves records containing ...

washington history

both words anywhere in the record
washington and history could be part of a name, title, note, or subject heading

"eating and drinking"

the exact phrase (including the word "and")
Search results will change if you search: " eating drinking" or " eating & drinking"

"history of analog comput?"

the exact phrase, with ? used as a wild card for multiple characters or truncation
" history of analog computer, computers, computing, computation"

col%r photography

both words in any order, with % used as a wild card for one character
photography and color, colur, coler

jo?nson catalog?

both words in any order, with ? used as a wild card for multiple characters or truncation
joynson, johnson, johannson and catalog, catalogue, cataloger

Finds all words or phrases in title areas of the record. Title areas include main titles, uniform titles, alternate titles, titles in links, and titles in tables of contents. Use Keyword (TITLE) when you know several words from the title but are unsure in what order the words appear.

Search terms ...

Finds records with titles containing ...

dummies photoshop

both words " dummies" and " photoshop" anywhere in any title

fraser photoshop

both words " fraser" and " photoshop" anywhere in any title; for example, "fraser" can be the last name of an author who writes Photoshop books

"camera raw"

the exact phrase " camera raw" in any title

源氏目案

all characters treated as separate words

Finds all words or phrases in the names of people or groups responsible for creating or collecting a work:

Personal authors and creators, including individuals and families who serve as editors, performers, photographers, artists, etc.

Non-personal authors and creators, including corporations, government bodies, conferences, jurisdictions, projects, events, and entities like ships and musical groups.

Enter one or more parts of the name in any order. Results will be displayed as a Titles List, sorted by relevance. Entering more parts of the name should make your search more precise (each result will contain ALL of the words you enter).

Note that if you are looking for materials about an author or creator (real or fictional), search by Keyword (SUBJECT).

Search terms ...

Name type ...

Finds records with names containing ...

john steinbeck

personal name

both words (in any order) as an author/creator

"congressional budget office"

government agency

the exact phrase as an author/creator

battelle institut?

company or organization

both words (in any order) as an author/creator, with institut truncated

creative writing conference

conference

all words (in any order) as an author/creator

Finds all words or phrases in subject areas of the record. Subjects include topical subjects, geographical place names, occupations, and genres/forms of material. Subjects are selected from controlled lists of words or phrases used by the Library of Congress.

Search terms ...

Finds records with subjects containing ...

italian composers

Composers, Italian or
Composers--Italy--Biography--Dictionaries--Italian

exhibitions african art

Art, African--Exhibitions or
African American art--19th century-- Exhibitions

eugene oneill
O'Neill, Eugene, 1888-1953

berenstain bears
Berenstain Bears (Fictitious character)

"san joaquin estuary"
Sacramento-San Joaquin Estuary (Calif.)

new england railroads

Railroads--New England or
Railroads--Freight--New England

A Keyword (ALL) Quick Search box, located at the top of every LC Catalog page, finds all words in any order or exact phrases located anywhere in catalog records.

Keyword Search results are displayed as a Titles List in ranked order using a special relevancy algorithm. Relevancy ranking is commonly used for most web searches, but web search engines rely on different formulas to determine relevancy. The LC Catalog uses the following ranking factors:

Uniqueness of search terms within the LC Catalog

Proximity of search terms to each other within the LC Catalog record

Number of times a search word is present in LC Catalog record fields (e.g., in a subject heading field, author field, title field)

Most marks of punctuation in your search query are converted to spaces. Most diacritics and some punctuation marks are removed (including apostrophes, alifs, ayns, middle dots, primes and double primes). A few special characters, however, are retained in searches: ampersands (&), plus signs (+), at signs (@), number signs (#), and musical flat (♭) and natural (♮) signs (musical sharps are converted to spaces). Special characters are generally converted to their nearest alphabetic equivalent (for example: an æ diagraph to ae or a þ thorn to th).

Records in the LC Catalog use Unicode opens in a new window (UTF-8 encoding) for searching and displaying data. In addition to Latin scripts, the catalog contains records in the following languages/scripts: Chinese, Japanese, Korean; Cyrillic-based scripts; Greek; Hebrew, Yiddish; and Perso-Arabic script (e.g., Arabic, Persian, Pushto, Sindhi, Urdu). For more information, see Searching/Displaying Non-Latin Characters.

In general, your preferred web browser settings will not need to be changed to correctly view records that contain diacritics, special characters, or non-Latin characters. If you have problems, however, you may need to reconfigure your browser opens in a new window . Best results occur if you have Unicode fonts and use Unicode character encoding with automatic character encoding activated.

To filter your search, toggle open Add Limits and select:

Year Published/Created of the material

Language of the material

Type of material (e.g., book, periodical, music score)

Location of the collection within the Library of Congress

Place of Publication (e.g., country, state, province)

Searches in the LC Catalog can return thousands of results. Search limits can be useful to refine your results, but should be used with caution. Many older records do not contain the data that is used to set limits, and so these records will not appear in search results. Similarly, some formats of material (such a images) may not contain data such as language information; limiting by language will exclude these records from your results. In addition, when multiple values (e.g., several languages) are encoded in a single field of a catalog record, limits can only retrieve the first language. If relevant material is not retrieved with limits set, clear the limits and modify the search.

Enter words or phrases in any order. Search results will match all words (including articles and conjunctions in all languages, such as: and, or, not, the, a, la, das, al-, etc.).

Search results are ranked using a relevancy algorithm. To improve the relevancy of your results, try including more words or phrases in your search.

Try quotation marks (" ") when searching words you want treated as a phrase (e.g., "tax reform"). These four Keyword Search options find phrases across subfields.

Use a percent sign (%) as a single character wildcard, either inside or at the end of a search term (e.g., col%r retrieves color, coler, and colur, but not colour). If your search terms contain a percent sign, remove the %. For example, to find the title: 100% solution enter 100 solution.

Use a question mark (?) for truncation (different forms of a root word) and as a multiple character wildcard, either inside or at the end of a search term (e.g., ecumen? retrieves ecumenical and ecumenism). Truncated search terms must be two or more characters long (e.g., KF? not K?).

Most punctuation marks (hyphens, slashes, periods, etc.) are replaced by spaces. Because spaces are used to divide words, use quotation marks to treat your search term as a phrase when punctuation occurs in the middle of your term (e.g., "U.S.A." or "part-time"). Keyword number searches are especially tricky. Treat punctuation in numbers as word separators and enclose numbers with punctuation in quotation marks in your search query.

Capitalization does not matter.

Add limits to filter your search.

Select the number of items you want to display in your search results Titles List. You can increase the default of 25 results to 50, 75, or 100.

Search results return up to 10,000 entries for each query.

Keyword (EXPERT) offers a powerful, command-driven search method for finding words or phrases located anywhere in the record. Expert search allows for greater precision by supporting Boolean operators, user-specified nesting, and special index codes. Expert searches also allow more complex combination of multiple terms from one or more fields in a record. Boolean operators ( AND, OR, NOT) may be used with or without parentheses. Many number searches can be entered as either keyword searches (where parts of a number may cross subfields and punctuation marks are treated as word separators) or as left-match searches (where punctuation and subfielding are taken into account).

Search terms ...

Finds records containing ...

(mars OR venus) AND mission

materials on missions to Mars or Venus

knam "aldiss brian"

materials by and about Brian Aldiss

kisn "1094-1304"

ISSN 1094-1304 (Journal of health care marketing)

kisn 0553377833

ISBN 0-553-37783-3 (Amazing Colossal Episode Guide); enter the ISBN without hyphens

knam chaucer and 260b "oxford university"

the name Chaucer anywhere in a record that also contains the publisher Oxford University Press

k100 shakespeare and ktut spanish

works by Shakespeare translated into Spanish

kcla gv946 AND 260a london

materials with an LC classification of GV946 published in London

ksub olympic? AND ksub songs limiting search by: Type of Material: Music Score

printed music of songs used at Olympic Games

(skey canoes OR skey kayaks) and skey design not skey fiberglass

information about building canoes or kayaks with materials other than fiberglass

k010 2003556443

record for LCCN "2003556443" (keyword search)

010A 980000?

records with LCCNs beginning with "980000" (left-match search)

Combine several terms using the Boolean operators AND, OR, or NOT (entered in upper or lower case).

AND - narrows your search by combining multiple concepts (e.g., mars AND mission)

OR - broadens your search with related terms for each concept (e.g., ten OR 10)

NOT - excludes terms from your search (e.g., marketing NOT sales)
Note: use caution when selecting the BooleanNOT operator so you do not inadvertently exclude desired records (e.g., NOT Mexico will remove records containing both Mexico and New Mexico).

If you want to include the words AND, OR, or NOT as search words, you must include them, along with other words, in quotes as a phrase.

Combine several Boolean operators in a single search statement, using parentheses to group concepts together. For example: (wood? OR forest) AND "resource manage?"

Restrict search words or phrases to a particular index (or area of the record), by first specifying the appropriate index code followed by your search word or phrase (e.g., ktil five AND kpnc lewis).

Use quotation marks around queries that contain multiple search terms (for example: KNAM "washington george" and KSUB diaries).

Search terms, including quoted phrases, are not searched across subfields. Instead index codes/search terms need to be combined using Boolean operators (e.g., KCLA "E169.1" and KCLA "N3745 1975").

Boolean OR expressions are executed first, followed by expressions using AND or NOT (which are considered equivalent). Processing of equivalent expressions takes place in a left-to-right sequence.

Use a percent sign (%) as a single character wildcard, either inside or at the end of a search term (e.g., col%r retrieves color, coler, and colur, but not colour). If your search terms contain a percent sign, remove the %. For example, to find the title: 100% solution enter 100 solution.

Use a question mark (?) for truncation (different forms of a root word) and as a multiple character wildcard, either inside or at the end of a search term (e.g., ecumen? retrieves ecumenical and ecumenism). Truncated search terms must be two or more characters long (e.g., KF? not K?).

You can use both keyword and left-match index codes in Keyword (EXPERT) searches. Note, however, that while multiple keyword index codes can be combined using Boolean operators, only a single left-match index code can be used in each search. In addition, truncation in Keyword (EXPERT) left-match queries is not automatic.

Add limits to filter your keyword and left-match searches.

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help keyword search library congress online catalog

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Keyword Search provides a single search box to find words and phrases anywhere in the LC Catalog record or in title, author/creator, or subject fields. Search results are returned by relevance. An Expert option is available from the Keyword Search menu for searchers who prefer command-driven queries.

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Introduction to MLA 8th Edition Citation

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This site is a repository of resources created by and for teachers. The G-Suite items here are free to use, modify, and expand upon. If you would like to share a resource, please find the contact information at the bottom of this page.

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What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?

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Explore Folger Teaching's vast collection of classroom resources, including lesson plans, professional development, primary sources, podcasts, and more from the wide world of the Folger. Learn how to use the Folger Method to teach any text, and connect with the best scholarship and performances from the Folger.

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Introduction

The cornucopia can be a bit of an attention hog: proudly spilling its bounty across the dining room in a way that borders on needy. As harvest-time icons go, we much prefer the simple beauty of corn husk dolls: They're understated, easy to make children's crafts, and truly ingenious, requiring not much more than some husks, twine, glue, and felt. Square-cut corn husks (the ones used for tamales and sold at international grocers) are the main supply for making these dolls. Basic twine is used to create body parts.

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The cornucopia can be a bit of an attention hog: proudly spilling its bounty across the dining room in a way that borders on needy. As harvest-time icons go, we much prefer the simple beauty of corn husk dolls: They're understated, easy to make children's crafts, and truly ingenious, requiring not much more than some husks, twine, glue, and felt.

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In some ways, what you need to teach poetry well is a lot like what you need to write poetry well: You have to care a lot about your subject matter, and it's important to foster conditions that inspire creativity. When these conditions are in place, teaching students to write poetry becomes much more fun, imaginative, and productive.

When introducing a poetry unit, I've found that it's helpful to first share with students that most people, both kids and adults, already enjoy poetry-in the form of song lyrics. Then I tell them that part of what makes poetry so amazing is that it has the ability to create its own kind of music when read aloud, which is the ideal way to experience it. This helps frame poetry as its own unique genre while also connecting it to something most students already care about.

When students learn to write poetry, they gain the ability to illuminate those parts of the human experience that are otherwise difficult to define or describe. The following tips are centered around the fact that poetry is a revelatory form of self-expression. Your job becomes showing them how and why that is.

6 Strategies to Get Students Started Writing Poetry

1. Write your own poems. You can do this before or during the unit-or both. Share your process-drafts, failures, and successes-with your students. Even if you haven't written poetry before, you may surprise yourself with what you come up with.

Also, when you share your words and your process with your students, they see that poetry is something that genuinely matters to you, and you'll be better equipped to address their questions about the writing process because you've gone through it yourself. It's a win-win.

2. Teach diverse poets and poems you love. When you're passionate about the poetry you teach, your passion becomes contagious. It's crucial, though, to make sure that, on the whole, the poets you teach are diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, age, and background. All students should be able to see some part of who they are reflected in the poems they read.

The types of poems you teach should be diverse, too-and I would argue there should be a bias toward contemporary poems. Teaching old, classic forms can be fun and worthwhile, but most poetry today doesn't look or sound like poems written hundreds of years ago. This has to be a factor if we want students to appreciate poetry as a relevant genre.

3. Help students identify specific characteristics of poems they like. When you give them the vocabulary for certain techniques-such as slant rhyme, repetition, and consonance-they begin to read poems like poets, rather than examining them as if they were extraterrestrial artifacts.

Even after learning these techniques, students still need reminders to include them in their own poems. You might require that each student use a certain number of techniques when drafting a poem, while the actual techniques they use can be up to them. This gives them some control while still challenging them. Some of these techniques will eventually stick, helping students develop their unique voice on the page.

4. Encourage students-constantly-to be specific. Many students tend to want to write broadly, and we have to communicate to them that readers and listeners need very specific descriptions and commentary in order to feel connected to a poem. It's worth taking the extra time to help students revise for specificity in each poem they write.

5. Encourage students to put themselves into their poems. In her now-classic book In The Middle, Nancie Atwell stresses the importance of having students share their thoughts and feelings in their writing. This advice has proven invaluable to my teaching over the years.

When students communicate their emotions, unique ideas, and radical opinions in their poems, their writing suddenly becomes more unique and compelling. Their poems become representative of who they really are, and as a result, readers and listeners understandably will be much more interested in what they have to say.

6. Help students learn how to understand the "thing behind the thing." This is a concept I borrow from writer and podcaster Rob Bell. Bell uses it to talk about spirituality, but the idea applies to writing as well. Students should be able to articulate the answers to these questions:

Why are they interested in the subject or topic they're writing about?

What does this say about who they are and the way they see the world?

When students start to do a little digging-which takes time and authentic reflection-they find there's a lot more happening just beneath the surface of their thoughts than they may have realized. And with a little encouragement, what they discover beneath the surface often becomes the heart of the poem they're trying to write.

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6 Tips for Teaching Poetry Writing to Teens

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In some ways, what you need to teach poetry well is a lot like what you need to write poetry well: You have to care a lot about your subject matter, and it's important to foster conditions that inspire creativity. When these conditions are in place, teaching students to write poetry becomes much more fun, imaginative, and productive.

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Too much information? Make your results list more manageable. Less, but more relevant, information is key. Here are some options to consider when narrowing the scope of your paper:

Theoretical approach: Limit your topic to a particular approach to the issue. For example, if your topic concerns cloning, examine the theories surrounding of the high rate of failures in animal cloning.

Aspect or sub-area: Consider only one piece of the subject. For example, if your topic is human cloning, investigate government regulation of cloning.

Time: Limit the time span you examine. For example, on a topic in genetics, contrast public attitudes in the 1950's versus the 1990's.

Population group: Limit by age, sex, race, occupation, species or ethnic group. For example, on a topic in genetics, examine specific traits as they affect women over 40 years of age.

Geographical location: A geographic analysis can provide a useful means to examine an issue. For example, if your topic concerns cloning, investigate cloning practices in Europe or the Middle East.

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LibGuides: Selecting a Research Topic: Refine your topic

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Too much information? Make your results list more manageable. Less, but more relevant, information is key. Here are some options to consider when narrowing the scope of your paper: Theoretical approach: Limit your topic to a particular approach to the issue.

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Make a list of words that describe your topic. In addition to words for broad concepts (e.g. poverty, feminism) consider brainstorming more specific keywords, such as:

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How do you decide what to write about when confronted with a research paper? You want a focused topic that will make a good paper.

Here are some things to consider:

Make sure your topic meets the assignment requirements. Read it closely. Ask your professor for feedback if you are unsure.

Choose a topic that is interesting to you. It may seem obvious, but this will make the research process more fun and engaging for you.

Choose a topic others have written about. You will find far more resources this way.

Consider the scope of your topic. If your topic is too broad it may be hard to find information that is focused and relevant; if your topic is too narrow it may be hard to find any information at all.

Here's one strategy for developing a research topic once you have a broad topic in mind:

Background research can help you develop your topic. This will help you learn more about your topic and may also help you hone or change it in more appropriate ways. Though this seems like extra work, it is actually a vital, time-saving step. Knowing more about your topic's background can only help you develop a more effective topic, and therefore, research paper.

Brainstorm concepts. Once you think of a broad topic that interests you, try to brainstorm all of the words or concepts you can that might be related to that topic. For example, if your topic is "polar bears," you might think of the following words and topics in association: ice, cubs, pollution, hunting, diet, and environmental icon. It may help to write this process down.

Develop a research question. Once you have come up with a broad research topic and done some background research, you may want to develop a research question or a question you're going to answer in your research paper by doing in-depth research.

What's your general approach to the topic? Think about some general approaches that may help you further develop your topic: your research could use a historical angle, focusing on a particular time period; a geographical angle, focusing on a particular part of the world; or a sociological angle, focusing on a particular group of people.

Start doing some exploratory, in-depth research. As you do more in-depth research (like looking for scholarly articles, books, and other sources to include in your paper), you can and probably will modify or refine your topic based on what you find.

Research is a dynamic process. Don't be afraid to discover new things and modify or refine your topic.

The topic development process will help you to develop your thesis, which is essentially your proposed answer to your research question. You will then be ready to use the sources you've found and find more sources in order to support that thesis or to answer your research question.

Here's an example of how the topic development process above can lead you to a thesis:

Resources that can help you develop your topic:

Your instructor, SJSU librarians, course readings, class notes, Wikipedia, and Google can all be helpful in terms of getting ideas for broad topics for further, in-depth research using more scholarly resources.

Research Guides created by subject librarians are great for helping you choose where to begin your research. These online guides can help you identify encyclopedias, books, databases, and other materials that will help you get started with research in your chosen academic field.

Library resources like CQ Researcher and subject-specific encyclopedias can help you come up with topic ideas because they provide great overviews and introductions to topics. You can find links to these kinds of resources in the Research Guides mentioned above. These will probably not be scholarly sources you can use in your paper, but they may lead you to more in-depth, scholarly resources that you will want to use in your paper.

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How do you decide what to write about when confronted with a research paper? You want a focused topic that will make a good paper.Here are some things to consider:Make sure your topic meets the assignment requirements. Read it closely. Ask your professor for feedback if you are unsure.