Pick one of your grandparents or great-grandparents. The only requirement is that the person you choose must have been born between the years 1915 and 1948—kind of a sweet spot for the development of “new technologies” such as film, radio and television. Then, for the year of your grandparent’s birth, look through some old magazines and newspapers and find information about current developments in the media. The ideal would be for you to find longer “trend” articles rather than news briefs of a couple paragraphs. The longer pieces would give you more to work with as you write your paper.

I do not want you merely “Googling” these media developments, and I do not want you citing secondary sources. Instead, I want you to actually go to the library and look through old hard-copy publications and (if you need to, although they’re a bit cumbersome to use) microfiche files. I’d

also give you permission to look up no more than half of your articles using the JSTOR and Academic Search Premier databases. But I want you to actually dig into some old publications so that you get a little historical context for your research on the media.

The New York Times Index and the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature will be very helpful as you attempt to identify relevant articles.

Another good option would be to simply thumb through some old general-interest magazines such as Time, Newsweek and the Saturday Evening Post.

You should locate and make an electronic copy of a total of six articles about media developments during the year that you have selected. I’d suggest using a scanner to make a PDF copy of printed articles. You might also be able to use a smartphone to make a copy of an article, but you’d have to be careful about quality and also convert the image to PDF. If you’re working with microfiche, you should be able to save an article as a PDF. I’d definitely prefer scanned images over smartphone photos.

This, then, is what your paper should consist of:

First paragraph: A brief biographical sketch of your grandparent. This should include the individual’s birthdate as well as information about his or her family, vocation, military service, hobbies—whatever seems pertinent to a brief sketch.

The rest of the paper: Describe the “media landscape” of the world into which your grandparent was born, and compare that landscape to the one that surrounds you as a college student. In your paper, provide a snapshot of the times by reviewing and discussing at least four of the historical articles that you located. If your grandparent is still alive, it would be interesting for you to report on a conversation that you had about his or her experiences with media “back in the day.” If such a conversation is not possible, that’s fine—but it would still be interesting to read your conjectures on the topic. Ultimately, I’m looking for about 700 words of clear, concise prose that yields historical insight into the media developments that were taking place in the year of your grandparent’s birth.