Write a roughly 1,800 word essay, or about seven pages. Please note that the word/page recommendation is a target. You need to know roughly how long will be the essays written by other students, since yours risks looking shallow if you submit a three page essay when everyone else submits an seven page essay. Nor do you wish to “write a book.” If everyone else submits a seven page essay and you submit a twelve page essay, that’s nice and I will read it. But it means you have done A LOT more work than everyone else, and it may or may not be any better than the eight page essays that everyone else has written. Aim for about seven pages. five is very likely too few, and ten is very likely too many. Either way though, I will read and think critically about whatever you choose to submit.
For your exam essay, read the following essays:
Martin Luther King [MLK], “The Other America,” Speech at Stanford University, 14 April 1967 [Available on Canvas, here: Primary Source Documents];
Ronald Reagan, “To Restore America,” Speech 31 March 1976 [Available on Canvas, here: Primary Source Documents];
Write an essay assessing the various ways in which King and Reagan drew upon the liberal political tradition which we have been studying in the second unit of the class, either to affirm or to critique it. Both of them rely on an understanding of history from Reconstruction to the late 20th century.
Remember that this is an EXAM covering the appropriate material we have been reading across the respective units of this course. Use this essay as an opportunity to show off your mastery of the material we have read and studied together. In your essay, show how King and Reagan developed their understanding of the political crisis with which both men were grappling within the ideas of late 19th and 20th century liberalism. Your goal is to connect the arguments that these statesmen made in the 1970s to the earlier themes that we have read and studied together. Use quotations from the documents assigned from Classics of American Political and Constitutional Thought, The American Debate over Slavery, or from the course web site to support your claims, and be sure to provide citations when you do. Since this is an exam, you should develop your essays using the materials assigned for this class. Refer to the Class Lectures or to the secondary sources we read, or resources like the American National Biography, the Encyclopedia Brittanica or the American Yawp. Be sure to cite them, when you do.
A warning: Because this is an exam, and because your overall goal is to display your mastery of the entire body of material that you have read for the course, it is a mistake to focus exclusively on 1970s or 1980s. Review the organization of the class for unit two. Ideally, you want to discuss material from each day’s readings.
Format:
Use 12 point Times Roman type and one inch margins.
Use double spacing.
Use paragraphs as the unit of composition. Your exam should consist of a series of paragraphs, each with a clear topic sentence and each focused on a single main idea. Most of you have taken or are taking a class devoted to written communication—be sure to apply what you are learning in that class to the written work you do for this one.
Paginate your work.
Your essay should have a cover page. The usual elements of a cover page include: your name; the date you completed the assignment; the name of the course for which you are completing this work (ie., HIST 225: United States History); the name of the professor who is teaching the course (Dr. Kevin Hardwick).
Citations: See Citations–why we bother with them, and how to format them
I take citations seriously, when I grade your work. If you want me to give you credit for doing the work, you have to cite it. If you do not cite the quotations you use or the information you provide, you will not receive credit for doing the work.
