textbook
http://www.openstax.org/details/us-history
book is available in web view and PDF for free.
Now is your chance to look back over a few hundred years of American history and try to make some sense of it all.
You can think of this as a cross between an essay exam and a short term paper. I’m posting it now so you can be working on it alongside your regular weekly assignments if you wish. Or you can do it all in the short Week X at the end of the class. Up to you!
This isn’t an outside research paper — unless you want it to be. Mostly this is intended for you to review and solidify your mastery of the material we have studied this semester. If you choose to add outside research, that’s okay, but you can write an A paper using just the course materials.
One of the important skills that we can sharpen through the study of history is pattern recognition — learning to sort events into patterns and to filter out the background noise that makes events seem random. There’s simply too much going on in history to focus on all of it at the same time. So I’m going to ask you to find a pattern — or to put it another way, a storyline, and follow it through time.
Huh? Here’s what I mean. Choose a particular topic that’s of interest to you. It might be — to name just a few examples — resistance to slavery, or the economics of slavery, or the impact of changing technology, or opportunities for women, or relations with Native Americans, or the role of the military, or changes in the nature of warfare, or the reform impulse, or religion, or the development of the system of government, or changes in political philosophy or political participation or political parties; or it could be something else. (You’re welcome to use things you wrote about in the discussion forums as a springboard.)
Whatever your chosen topic is, think about it as a storyline in American history. Identify three or four (or more) events/people/turning points where that topic is especially interesting or important. Be sure to space those points out over time (our course spans the colonial period, through the Revolutionary and early National eras to the Civil War / Reconstruction era — your topic may not fit all those eras, but do try to spread out over a century or more). And then write an essay in which you use those events or people to tell a story about how America changed (or didn’t change) during that span of time. Not the whole story, just a story, centered on your chosen topic.
Still confused? Here’s an example of a topic for the essay. Feel free to use it if you want:
You could, for example, do your essay on “troublemaking” women and their impact on America. After a paragraph introducing the theme, stops along the way could be: Anne Hutchinson + the “Daughters of Liberty” + Seneca Falls Conference + Harriet Beecher Stowe. To pull the pieces together, think about:
How did America change over that span of a couple of centuries? Did these women reflect those changes, or help cause those changes? (Or did they do both?) Be sure to include a closing paragraph in which you tie your themes together.
If you find yourself without enough material for 3 or 4 pages, you can add another “stop” or two in your story (or if you’d rather, you can do a little outside research to bulk up your essay).
Again, I’m looking for the equivalent of around 3 to 4 pages, double-spaced. That could work out to around 800 to 1000 words (but don’t focus on word count or page length). Cite pages or sections in our textbook where appropriate, my slides by chapter number, and any outside sources should be cited by title and page number or by web address. (Don’t copy and paste from Wikipedia or anything else; that will get you an F for the paper.) I don’t need any particular scholarly format, just make sure I can see where your material is coming from.
The deadline for submitting this assignment is the official end of the course, Wednesday, May 19. No work will be accepted after 11:59 that night.
