Primary Source Exercises

Martin Luther King, "I Have a Dream"
http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1951-1975/mlk/dream.htm

George Wallace, "The Civil Rights Movement: Fraud, Sham and Hoax"
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1964WALLACE.html

Winston Churchill, The Iron Curtain Speech, March 5, 1946
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/churchill-iron.html

Joseph Stalin, Interview with Pravda, March 14, 1946
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/02/1st.draft/pravda.html

Read and critically analyze these two documents using the Guidelines for Historical Documentation (22.0K).

Consider the following claims with respect to the two authors - in what ways can these claims be seen as correct or incorrect?

1		George Wallace expresses the ideals of the founding fathers in his defense of free speech, property, and freedom of the individual.
2		Martin Luther King was incorrect when he predicted that the gains of 1963 were just a beginning and not an end.
3		The Supreme Court of the 1960s had indeed become "arrogant, contemptuous, highhanded, and literal despots."
4		George Wallace's assessment of the response to the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama was more accurate than Martin Luther King's.
5		The Civil Rights Movement could only succeed as long as black and white Americans worked together through non-violent protest.
6		Without Churchill's speech the Cold War might have been avoidable.
7		Stalin is correct in his assertion that Great Britain (and the United States) were motivated by their belief in the superiority of the English-speaking nations.
8		Both men invoke the memory of Hitler's unchecked expansion in the 1930s; both make incorrect comparisons.
9		Stalin's argument in favour of a buffer zone, between the Soviet Union and Central Europe, is completely legitimate.
10		Churchill's argument that the Soviet Union desires the "indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines" cannot be substantiated by Soviet actions before March 1946.