Assignments

Assignments
Spring 2003

Thought pieces

For each class you must submit a thought piece both via email to me and posted on the WebBoard by Monday at 4 pm (DON'T be late!). Thought pieces are informal but substantive pieces of writing. Each thought piece must begin with roughly one page of critical summary, and then followed with at least one page of interpretation and analysis. Students are required to both post their own thought pieces and read their classmates' postings, responding to at least three of them each week. All thought pieces must be written first in a word processing document and then sent to me and posted. I'll offer questions in class that you can (but do not have to) use. In the analytic part of the thought piece you may address any issue that the text raises for you: a passage that confuses, and assumption that moves or angers you, a connection to a past text. As always, use ample documentation from the text to make your points. Nota Bene: You have two flakes, but use them wisely. Also: No flakes for Week Twelve, when students give collective lectures!

Essay 1
Due Friday, Feb. 14th, 2 pm

"Political Work": For this assignment please choose a memoir, autobiography, or novel from the timeperiod 1890-1960 (I can give you some suggestions), that speaks in some way to the readings of the course. Your essay should explore the way(s) the text--both implicitly and explicitly--works to move the reader to action, and what the author's rhetorical and political choices reveal about the timeperiod generally. As always, offer a swift contextualization of the text, and an equally swift critical summary. (5 to 7 pages) Please email me your choice by Feb. 3rd!

Conference Proposal or Sketch
Due Friday, March 7th, 2 pm

This should be a short discursive essay, explaining what your chosen subject is, why it matters (what's at stake), and illustrating that point with a close reading of a primary document you intend to use. 5 pages. [This should be posted.]

Essay 2
Due Friday, Apr. 4th, 2 pm

Collective Action: This assignment should be explicitly linked with your preparation for the lecture April 22. For this essay read either a primary source (set of related documents, book of cultural criticism from the time, novel, autobiography), or a secondary source on the movement you are presenting. Analyze the ways the author or authors, actor or actors work to gather a community of like-minded activists. What challenges do they face? What choices--positive and negative--do they make? How does the political, cultural, and social climate inhibit or sustain them? Do not replicate the work of your classmates: each essay should be on a different text or texts. 5 to 8 pages. [This should be posted.] (While you may use the content of your essay in your lecture or presentation, you may not read from it verbatim.)

Conference Draft
Due Friday, April 18th, 2 pm

This should be as complete as you can make it, proof-read and paginated. When you have questions about the text or the content, ask me them in brackets, or note them in pen in the margins. Nota Bene: This should be delivered to my office, not sent via attachment.

Lecture, April 22nd

Each group (of 3 or 4) will have NO MORE THAN 20 minutes to present (hopefully there will be time for comments and questions in the end). For this assignment, you must:

-Choose a reading for the class, no more than 20-25 pages, to provide context, act as a teaser, spur interest. These must be delivered to me no later than class on the 15th.
-Plan and execute a presentation, dynamic conversation, or collective lecture on the subject at hand, in some way using the talents of all members.
-Write a memo to me, signed by all, describing the work allocated and done.

Topics (to be modified by each group): Labor movement, Immigration post-WWII, Youth movement, Lesbian/Gay movement.

Final
Due Friday, May 2nd, 2 pm

Make sure to do that final run-through to polish prose and catch last mistakes. Footnotes should be proof-read as well. Paginate, collate, staple, and deliver with the draft that has my comments. Please also note where I can send the essay if I can't read it before you leave for the summer. [Seniors can pick their essays up during senior week.]

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Fall 2002

Thought pieces

For each class you must submit a thought piece both via email to me and posted on the WebBoard by Monday at 4 pm (DON'T be late!). Thought pieces are informal but substantive pieces of writing. Each thought piece must begin with roughly one page of critical summary, and then followed with at least one page of interpretation and analysis. Students are required to both post their own thought pieces and read their classmates' postings, responding to at least three of them each week. All thought pieces must be written first in a word processing document and then sent to me (in its' entirety) and posted. I'll offer questions in class that you can (but do not have to) use. In the analytic part of the thought piece you may address any issue that the text raises for you: a passage that confuses, and assumption that moves or angers you, a connection to a past text. As always, use ample documentation from the text to make your points.

This assignment asks you to make sense of a document or illustration (from the handout) given the context in which it was produced. The question for you to ponder is both historical (what does this document reveal about the moment in which it was produced?) and political (what's at stake in recovering those meanings now? Why does it matter?)

Try to find out everything you can about the author or illustrator, the historical moment, and the possible relevance to that moment. After determining all that you can factually, speculate carefully on what else you might be able to glean from the inferences-in the language, the shading, the rhetoric (what comes first, how things are put, hidden agendas).

Your essay should be polished: proofread, spell-checked, if possible read out loud to a friend. It should be double-spaced in 12 point type in a traditional font. It should not exceed the page length by more than a page at most (or be shorter by more than a page). You will rewrite (as with all essays this semester), but this should be as good as you can get it for right now. Please do not ask for extensions, and do not be late with your work. Just don't ask.

1. This essay takes as its central question - What is Social History? -- with its implied corollary (Why is it, or Is it-and categories like it-important?). In order to answer this question you need to do some further research, in any direction you choose. Look on line for essays on social history; look in the library at encyclopedias of social history; ask your friends; interview scholars-you choose.

2. An additional question along the same lines: What is 'a social movement', exactly? Have we (to date) been studying them? In order to answer this question you need to add other scholarly voices on the subject as well as construct your own working definition of social movement.

After spending now a number of weeks on the histories of slavery and the early industrial revolution, use this moment to ask yourself: What is the relationship of North and South? What do these economic systems, and the patterns of life of the people working within them, have in common? Was it inevitable that they would come into conflict? Try to use at least three of the books we have read this semester; you may also want to read ahead in Reid Mitchell's The Civil War.

Take one of the above and analyze its relevance in ante-bellum history to the economy, social relations, gender, and culture. What can, for example, the numbers of hogs on southern farms and plantations tell us about the way people understood the world and their place in it? Why should historians care about hogs? Shoes?

As you develop your argument, think hard about how you will make it persuasive. What examples will you use, and how will you develop them? What elements make an example persuasive? What knowledge must you gather or arguments must you make to articulate your position fully?

Again: respect the deadline, respect your work. Present it in as careful and polished a package as you are capable of given the time constraints.

A] Either take an event-one that occurs in a limited span of days, or at most weeks-or a trend or shift in daily life, and narrate it here. (For example: the beating of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate; Antietam; the Railroad Strike of 1877; the presidential candidacy of Victoria Woodhull; the emergence of dance halls in turn-of-the-century NY; the beginning of Ellis Island as an immigrant destination). You may choose a fictional voice, a traditionally scholarly voice, or some useful (and defensible) middle ground between the two, but you must rigorously research this moment, gleaning details and interpretations from as many directions as possible (at LEAST 3 or 4). Start with one of the class texts (if you wish), or use texts from your conference work, but then do buttress with other perspectives or interpretations.

B] Narrate a story from one of the primary documents we have used in class or you have used in conference, and explain its significance to the writing of social history--is it a distortion of everyday life? A reflection of it? Something in between? Can the interpretation of this document that you offer serve as a model--or does each document require its own interpretive strategy?

Nota Bene: Footnotes, even with fictional retellings, are required. After the narration, drop a line and explain how you did it. In a paragraph or two explore the significance of the event, and how you chose to reveal that in the manner of your telling: i.e. what subtle and overt ways did you telegraph your understanding of the significance of the event.

Conference Proposal (3 pages--or so--plus 1 page briefly annotated bibliography) (Oct. 11)

Tell the story of your project, briefly. Map out the questions that lead you to this topic, your initial findings, and your plan for the rest of the semester. Meant to be posted.