Now is your chance to look back over the first 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 very short term paper. I’m posting it now so you can be working on it alongside your regular weekly assignments if you so choose. Or you can wait until the final (shortened) week 8, which is set aside for this essay and for making up earlier assignments you might have missed. However you want to manage your time, plan ahead for this!
This isn’t an outside research paper — unless you want it to be. Mostly this is intended for you to review, solidify, and display 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.
In this introductory survey course, we have tried to cover a little bit of everything — big history and small. You probably found that some parts of the story stood out to you more than others, or were simply more interesting to you. There’s simply too much going on in history to focus on all of it at the same time. So for this assignment I’m going to ask you to narrow your focus to a pattern or storyline of your choice, and follow it through time.
Here’s what I mean. Choose a particular topic that’s of interest to you. It could be the expansion of slavery, or the resistance to slavery, or the various ways Americans have defined freedom, or the impact of changing technology, or opportunities for women, or the role of the military, or the reform impulse, or changes in religious belief, or the development of the system of government, or changes in political philosophy or political participation, or relations with the original inhabitants of the continent; or it could be something else. Think about that particular topic as a storyline in American history. Identify 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 of about 5 to 6 pages 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 of America, 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:
An 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?)
If you find yourself without enough material for 5-6 doublespaced 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).
USE QUOTATIONS TO SUPPORT AND ILLUSTRATE YOUR POINTS. Cite pages or sections in our textbook where appropriate, my slides by chapter number, videos or assignments from the course by title, and any outside sources (not required) should be cited by author/title and page number or 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. I don’t need a works cited page unless you’re using outside sources.
