Historical and Nobel winners
 | Martin Luther King, Jr. |
| Gandhi (Hindu) |
| Sojourner Truth |
| Albert Schweizer |
| William Booth |
| Oscar Romero |
World War II era
| Franz Jaegerstaetter |
| Martin Niemoeller (or Niemoller) |
| André Trocmé (& village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France) |
| Other Holocaust rescuers |
| Edith Stein |
Still living Nobel winners
| Desmond Tutu° |
| Nelson Mandela° |
| Aung San Suu Kyi (Buddhist)° |
| Bishop Carlos Belo (East Timor)° |
| Rigoberta Menchu°
|
| You are of course free to think of people I haven't listed. Check with
me before final decision.
|
|
(mainly) contemporary people
See below for more ideas
|
| I am putting a book on reserve in each library, Pilgrims and
Seekers: Saints without Pedestals, which has brief biographies of
about two dozen people, most of them contemporaries, but some historical
(like St. Benedict!). Click
here for how
to find books on reserve. (They probably won't be listed as on reserve
until Wednesday, Jan. 21) |
| I suggest you try a couple avenues to find out real basic information
on these or other people in order to decide who you want to report on. I
won't post too much general information on them, so as not to jump the gun
on the reports, but I can respond to individual inquiries. Historical
people you can find brief biographies of in encyclopedias. You can also
type the names as search terms into the "Expanded Academic" index for
magazine and journal articles. General web pages are might help you
decide, but you'll want to check for some authoritative validity to these
sources as you go on. |
| Another source of ideas would be the following web site:
http://www.speaktruthtopower.org/ . many of the people featured on
this site (book & video as well) are not mentioned as operating from
religious motives, although many of them do. However, if you want to do
one of the "humanitarian" motivated people from this site, that could work
too, so long as you can find out something about the person's motives. |
|
The Mennonite Central Committee's "Ask-a-Vet" pages <http://www.mcc.org/ask-a-vet/index.html>
have interesting biographies of conscientious objectors--military people
who left the military because of conflicts of conscience raised by their
military experience. They even include some email contacts with vets. |
| You can also browse religious magazines in the library reading rooms
for ideas. Here are some good magazines to look at: America,
Sojourners, Commonweal, The Christian Century,
Christianity and Crisis, Christianity Today, U.S. Catholic,
The Other Side (on web at
www.theotherside.com), First Things, National Catholic Reporter.... |
Requirements:
- The person chosen as the subject of your report
should ideally be someone about whom contemporary sources from journals,
magazines, newspapers can be gathered. I will expect all students to have
at least one source from such a (recent) magazine, journal, newspaper
source.
- Books can also be used, of course, but learning to
use the indexes to locate articles is part of the exercise.
- Web Sites can be used, but not all web sites are
equal. See the Library guide: “Evaluating
Sites on the Internet - is that site worth citing?”
- When you do your oral report, you will have to turn
in a short essay describing your research process and listing your
sources. I expect this to be a description of how you went about the
research—what search strategies worked and what didn’t, how you had to
narrow or broaden search terms, check related subject headings and
cross-references, etc. This essay about your research process should also
evaluate which sources were most helpful and why.
- You do not need to have a great number of
sources—some will only be able to find two or three. To support your
presentation, such sources will have to be substantial and reliable.
|
