Sourcing and Corroborating Documents on the Yazoo Land Sales
An eighth-grade Georgia Studies class is preparing a document-based question: 'Were the Yazoo land sales of 1795 a legitimate use of legislative power?' Students receive three sources. Source A is an excerpt from an Augusta newspaper editorial written by a land company investor defending the sale as a way to pay the state's debts. Source B is the 1796 act by a newly elected legislature rescinding the sales and denouncing the 'fraud and corruption' behind them. Source C is a paragraph from a modern scholarly history noting that most legislators who voted for the sale lost their seats in the next election. During pre-writing, several students argue that Source B is the most reliable because it is an official government document, and one student asks why the class cannot simply use Source C, since it is 'written by an expert and has no bias.' The teacher has 90 minutes before the essay is due, and the rubric awards points for sourcing, corroboration, and use of evidence.
1. Respond to the student who says Source C is unbiased. Explain how to source it and what work it should do in the essay.
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Start by rejecting the premise: there is no unbiased source, only sources whose interests are more or less visible. Bias is not a disqualifier, it is information about how to read a document.
Sourcing Source C means asking who wrote it, when, with what access, and for what audience. This author is a professional historian writing after the fact, with access to records the 1795 participants did not have, and with an interpretive position about what the evidence shows. That distance is a strength for a question like 'what happened to the legislators who voted for the sale?' and a weakness for a question like 'what did Georgians believe in 1795?' A modern scholar cannot report what a yeoman farmer thought unless a document shows it.
So Source C should not replace A and B. It should frame them. The most useful move is to let C explain why Source B sounds the way it does: a legislature whose members were swept out of office had strong reason to describe the previous law as fraud. That is not proof the sale was clean; it is a reason to demand corroboration before accepting B's characterization as fact.
2. Several students rank Source B as most reliable because it is official. Give the correction you would offer in two minutes, plus a sentence-level move that pushes them to corroborate.
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Correction: official is not the same as neutral. Source B is authoritative about what the 1796 legislature did and said, which is genuinely valuable, but it was produced by the body that reversed the policy, and its language of fraud comes from the winners of that fight. A document can be authentic and still be a piece of advocacy. Ask students what a law passed by the losing side in 1795 would have said; the contrast makes the point quickly.
Sentence-level move: have each student write one corroboration sentence using the frame 'Source B claims ___, but Source ___ shows ___, which suggests ___.' A workable example: 'Source B claims the sale was riddled with bribery, but Source A, written by an investor, defends the sale as debt relief and never mentions bribery, which is what we would expect from a beneficiary and therefore neither confirms nor refutes the charge.' That sentence earns sourcing and corroboration credit at once, because it uses A's interest as an analytic tool rather than as a reason to discard A.
3. A student's essay cites all three sources but never connects them: each source gets its own paragraph, and the claim is restated at the end. Score this against sourcing, corroboration, and use of evidence, and explain the single revision you would require.
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Sourcing is present but shallow: the student names each document and its type, which shows awareness, but does not use authorship or purpose to adjust how much weight the source carries. Use of evidence is adequate: quotations are relevant and correctly attributed. Corroboration is absent, and since the rubric awards it separately, the essay cannot reach the top band no matter how many sources it lists.
Diagnosis: the student is treating the essay as a source-by-source summary rather than an argument, so the sources never speak to each other. The fix is structural, not cosmetic.
Required revision, one paragraph only: add a paragraph in which the student states where two sources agree, where they conflict, and which one they trust more on the disputed point and why. A usable model: 'A and B agree the sale happened and that the state was in debt; they disagree about motive. Because B was written by the legislature that reversed the sale and A by a beneficiary, I trust neither on motive without C, which shows the political consequences that gave B its reason to emphasize fraud.' That single addition converts a list into corroboration and should be the only revision required before the period ends.