Primary Source Paper
In this assignment, you will write a paper using ONE primary source colection at the Dartmouth library.
Ellis Briggs
Ellis Briggs, Dartmouth Class of 1921 graduate, who was sent to China’s wartime capital of Chongqing in 1945, where he spent six months as Minister-Counselor to Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley, who was sent to China in 1944 as President Roosevelt’s personal representatives to Chiang Kai-shek. After failing to promote a working relationship between Chiang Kai-shek and General Stilwell, Commander of American Forces, in China, Hurley was ultimately appointed to the rank of Ambassador and tasked to mediate between the Kuomintang Government of Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Communist Party.
Educated Youth of Mengding Farm
Between 1968 and 1978, some 16 million Chinese youth between the ages of 15 and 23 – roughly ten percent of the country’s urban population – were relocated to work in the countryside. Known as the Sent-Down Youth Movement, the campaign was a key state policy during the Cultural Revolution. In December 1978, a policy change in China decreed that educated youth working on state-owned farms would be treated as regular employees, losing the preferential treatment and opportunities for returning to cities that were still available to other sent-down youth. This dashed their hopes of urban resettlement, sparking widespread protests among rural sent-down youth who felt unfairly treated compared to their counterparts.
In December 1978, educated youth at Mengding Farm in Yunnan near the China-Laos border, formed strike and petition committees. They requested a central investigation and demanded the opportunity to return to the city. After their requests were rejected, over 3,500 youth gathered on January 6, 1979, escalating their protest to a hunger strike. As part of the movement, they produced “Outcry” (Nahan 呐喊), a street pamphlet of ballads, poems, stories, and cartoons. These actions, part of a larger wave of demonstrations and strikes in January 1979, pressured the CCP to ultimately end the sent-down youth movement later that year.
The Mengding Farm papers are available here.
Photos from Tian’anmen Protests
The Tiananmen Square incident encompasses a series of protests and demonstrations in China during the spring of 1989. These demonstrations culminated on the night of June 3–4 when the government cracked down on protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. While the events in Tiananmen Square have become symbolic of the entire incident, protests and subsequent repression occurred in cities throughout China, echoing earlier movements like the May Fourth Movement of 1919.
Rauner Library holds a collection of 65 color and black-and-white photographs documenting the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, and Hefei in Anhui province. These photographs capture protest marches, groups of protesters, banners, tanks, political posters, and cartoons. Some images document the immediate aftermath of the crackdown in Beijing and explore its national impact. The photographs are attributed to Wang Dan, a prominent leader of the Chinese democracy movement and one of the most visible student leaders during the Tiananmen Square protests.
To access these images, you need to visit the Rauner collection in person and make a request for Iconography 1743.
Your task
All the primary materials are housed at the Dartmouth College library. In this paper, you will produce one short essay or a creative format of your choice, such as podcast, etc. It should:
- use at least two documents from the Ellis Briggs, sent-down youth at Mengding Farm collection, or the Tian’anmen photos;
- range from 1000 to 1200 words (excluding footnotes), or of equivalent length in audio or visual contents.
Some tips:
- Do not only focus on the question: what happened to these people? Instead, focus on: what do these documents reveal about: what happened, or why it happened, or the effects of what happened, and many other angles. Choose a tight focus, instead of broad coverage.
- While these collections are personal papers of individuals (or groups of individuals), you are not limited to writing a biography. You should feel free to use these primary sources to write on a variety of subjects, such as political history of sent-down youth movement, everyday life in Chongqing, etc.
- When analyzing primary sources, be sure to contextualize them: when, who, where, etc., before you launch into deeper analytical observations. Do not just cite your sources; interrogate them.
| Biography subject | Due date |
|---|---|
| Ellis Briggs | 2026-08-02 |
| Educated Youth of Mengding Farm | 2026-08-16 |
| Tian’anmen Photos | 2026-08-23 |