Document analysis is a very important part of what historians do in their research.  Your basic objective is to understand what the document says and, importantly, the document’s significance in the context of the time that it was written.  In analyzing a document you should ask yourself the following questions as a starting point:

• Who wrote it?  That is not simply the person’s name, but who was he or she?  What can you tell about that person from the document?
• Who was the intended audience?
• What is the major point(s) or argument(s) of the document?
• Are there assumptions made by the author (ie about the audience, society, ideology, international relations, power, etc.)?
• What does the document tell us about the society at that time which produced such a document?

In writing the document analysis, DO NOT quote from the document.  Instead, paraphrase the content of the document.  In such a short analysis I want to see YOUR writing and not quotations from the document.