Write a 1250-1500 word research essay about a significant work of United States history written before our time. For this assignment, I have chosen W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935) for my essay topic. You have three main tasks in this essay. You should: 1. Discuss the origins of the book. How does it reflect the historical, intellectual, and/or biographical context in which it was written? What works did it build on, complement, or seek to revise or refute? 2. Discuss the life of the book after publication. How was this work received by other scholars (and possibly the public) in its time, and how have opinions of the book changed in the years since then and now? What historians have responded to it, challenged it, or rejected it? 3. Offer your own judgments as to how the book is, or is not, useful to historical scholarship today. Was the book important? Why or why not? (I want to represent the opinion that the book is useful and relevant to historical scholarship today.) Your job is not to summarize the argument of the book. You will end up doing some summarizing in order to make your points, but this is not a standard book review, which usually summarizes a book and then offers a thumbs up/thumbs down evaluation. To quote Pierre Bayard, in this assignment, “the interior of the book is less important than its exterior.” Your essay is about the “location” of your book, or in other words, how it is situated in relation to other scholarship – in a word, context. That means you will have to read the book selected as well as other scholarship: reviews of your book from as many places as possible, biographical information on its author if available, retrospectives on the book if you can find them, and works that may have influenced, or been influenced by, the book you chose. The short reviews in scholarly history journals like The American Historical Review do not offer very useful models for this assignment. HE 3 is NOT a review of book reviews.
