Hamilton–Burr duel correspondences

By: Avery Showell

The historical annotation project has been a process and ongoing process. There have been areas where you learn new things about research in general. Most evidently when using different resources to gather information you will be introduced to new material and techniques. Finding new sources and reliable authors have upsides and down sides. One upside being there are many sources and writers with the credentials to be considered reliable, but there is also a downside to where most sources you find will not be as useful as you may think or even be helpful at all.

For my research I chose the historical document I used the Hamilton-Burr Correspondences. These letters are written and conversed by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. This document was published in 1804 and you can find it many places on the internet. When approaching the research to this topic I try to stay as open minded as I can and accept the historical legacy that I am researching. The document seemed like the most intriguing to me to have such a direct document to read. Letters of the past are more like the text messages of today and when you think of it like that and relate it to your present day life you find appreciation for historical context. The conversations through letters are the most important in whole. Simply because it is documented and can be examined for deeper meaning.

To understand the document you need research that includes insight from other peer sources and experts. There are many experts that have diagnosed the document before and they offer many insights to the text broken down. There are challenges with anything, so the challenges that have arose with this assignment is mostly time management and and structure. A simple solution that I have found to this problem is time management schedules for each class and assignments. So then I can see what I need to do and know how much work I have to complete on each assignment.