Assignments

Students enrolled in the subject write three papers over the course of the term:

Two short (5–6 pp.) papers, the second of which must be revised and resubmitted in accordance with CI-H guidelines, and
One longer (10–12 pp.) final paper on a topic chosen in consultation with instructors. Preparatory writing exercises, including a graded proposal, will help students develop a topic and shape an argument before submitting a final paper.

In addition to these writing assignments, students complete four informal reading reflections (1 pp. in length) over the course of the term (students may choose the weeks in which they submit reflections). These short reflections, submitted in advance of class, will count toward an overall participation grade.

There are no midterm or final examinations in this class.

Guidelines for Reading Responses

Essay #1

Essay #2

Choosing a Topic and Asking a Question

Final Paper Proposal and Guidelines

In choosing a topic for a research project, it is useful to remember that you will be spending a significant amount of time and energy thinking, reading, and writing about it. It seems obvious, but students sometimes forget that research is an activity driven by passion. For this reason, it is vital that you choose a topic that interests you. It is also important to choose a topic that is:

Broad enough that other scholars have said something about it
Specific enough that you can contribute something unique to the scholarly conversation

This can be a challenging task. In smaller research projects (like an undergraduate paper), it is helpful to move from a general idea / area of interest to a specific “case study.” Distinguishing between topics and questions can help you make this move more smoothly.

A topic is the broad subject of your research. Topics provide you with a sense of what secondary literature you will want to look at and which historical conversations you might enter. For instance, these are all topics:

Post-WWII suburbanization
The Boston School Desegregation Crisis of the 1970s
American Imperialism in the Pacific
Japanese Internment

A question is what you want you want to know about your topic. Questions narrow your field of study, guide you towards potential primary sources, and suggest potential arguments. For instance, these are all questions:

How did depictions of back yards in “house and home” magazines reflect popular ideas about gender roles during the 1950s?
How did newspaper coverage of the desegregation of Boston schools during the 1970s differ between the mainstream and the Black press?
How did the Anthropologists depict native Filipinos in their ethnographic research?
How did the accounts of Japanese-American women interned during WWII differ from accounts of Japanese-American men?

As you may have noticed, it is necessary to know something about your topic before you can settle on a good question. Knowing what other scholars have said about a topic can help you figure out which questions have already been asked and answers. It can also help you uncover gaps in the scholarship on your topic that you might want to fill. In your preliminary secondary research on topic number two, for example, you might find two or three important books or articles about the Boston desegregation crisis in the 1970s, but nothing on how the crisis was covered in African-American media. This discovery can lead to a good question, like the one listed above. You might also notice that the questions above follow a particular pattern. They are “why” or “how” questions that are narrowly focused on a particular aspect of a topic. They are NOT questions with “Yes” or “No” answers, or moral questions with a subjective bias.

For our first paper assignment, you will be asked to write a short essay that responds to the following prompt:

The historian Eric Foner argues that Reconstruction should be understood as an “unfinished revolution.” ¹ In what ways, if any, were the American Civil War and the Reconstruction period that followed revolutionary, and for whom? What was left “unfinished” by Reconstruction?

Essays should present an original argument that responds to the above prompt. This argument should be unique (of your own making) and should reflect careful and serious engagement with course materials. It should also be clearly expressed and organized, so a reader would have no problem understanding both the overall argument and its progression through your essay. In crafting your argument, you should draw on lecture, discussion, and secondary source readings (materials assigned for Lecture 2). Evidence in support of this argument should be drawn from at least three primary sources (materials assigned for Lecture 3).

Essays should be approximately 1250 words in length (please include a word count at the end of your essay), double-spaced, and written in a 12 point font. They should include page numbers, properly formatted footnotes with accurate citations, and a title that reflects the paper’s argument. All sources should be cited using the Chicago Manual of Style (see the Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide). For an example of what citations in Chicago format look like, see the footnote at the bottom of this page.

Essays will be evaluated according to:

The quality of the analysis and argument presented
The strength of the evidence marshaled in support of that argument
The clarity and quality of written expression (this includes style, grammar, and proper citation)

Essay #1 is due during Lecture 5.

¹ Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper Collins,1988).

For Essay #2 you will choose from one of three essay prompts, each of which addresses major themes and questions from the period between the 1870s and 1930. The prompts are below - please choose only one, and respond to it as clearly and comprehensively as possible.

Prompt 1

In his book, The Incorporation of America, historian Alan Trachtenberg argues that “the meaning of America” became “the focus of controversy and struggle” during the final decades of the nineteenth century.¹ Drawing on course lectures and readings, craft an argument that responds to Trachtenberg’s claim and its applicability to the period between 1870 and 1930. Questions to consider in your essay include: How did different groups understand the meaning of “America”? What historical contexts led to controversy and struggle? Did one particular vision for the meaning of “America” win out over others?

Prompt 2

Between 1870 and 1930, many communities of color - former slaves, Chinese immigrants, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, among others - found their lives disrupted and transformed by both government policy and changing understandings of ethnic and racial difference in America. Drawing on course lectures and readings, craft an argument about how American ideas about race and ethnicity changed during the period in question. What historical contexts shaped government policies like conquest, exclusion, and assimilation? How did communities of color respond to these policies and transformations?

Prompt 3

The image on the front cover of our course syllabus is one of several panels from the mural “America Today,” painted between 1930 and 1931 by the American artist Thomas Hart Benton. The rest of the panels from the mural can be viewed here. In your essay, place 2–3 of these panels in historical context. How do these paintings reflect key themes and questions from American life at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth? In crafting an argument about the paintings, be sure to place them in conversation with lectures and assigned readings from the course. Avoid statements about artist intent, and focus instead on historical context and what the paintings reflect and reveal from the period in question.

Essay Guidelines

Essays should present an original argument that clearly responds to one of the above prompts. This argument should be unique (of your own making) and should reflect careful engagement with course materials. It should also be clearly expressed and organized, so a reader would have no problem understanding both the overall argument and its progression through your essay. In crafting your argument, you should draw on lectures, discussions, and assigned readings.

Evidence in support of your argument should be drawn entirely from readings assigned in class. This includes recitation handouts and materials from lecture. All essays, regardless of which prompt they respond to, must engage (and cite) a minimum of five assigned readings. At least three of those must be primary source documents.

Essays will be evaluated according to:

The quality of the analysis and argument presented
The strength of the evidence marshaled in support of that argument
The quality of written expression (this includes style, grammar, and proper citation)

Essay #2 is due during Lecture 13.

¹ Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wand, 1982), 7.

For the final assignment of the course you will be asked to write an original research paper on a topic of your choosing. This topic should relate in some way to the major themes we have addressed in class over the course of the semester. There are two graded components related to this assignment:

A Paper Proposal describing your proposed research topic, as well as the primary sources or source collections that you plan to analyze, will be due during Lecture 20.

The Final Paper itself, which will be due during Lecture 26.

1. Requirements for the Paper Proposal

Proposals should be written in prose, and should include three paragraphs that offer the following information:

Paragraph 1: The broad topic you plan to study and initial ideas for ways to narrow, refine, and focus that topic. This paragraph should include some kind of reference to material covered in the course (this can be a direct quote from a lecture or reading, or an indirect reference to an argument / idea / concept).
Paragraph 2: 1–3 historical questions (see Choosing a Topic and Asking a Question) you might consider asking about your topic, and an articulation explaining why this topic matters (to you, and potentially to other historians or scholars).
Paragraph 3: A preliminary plan for how you will approach your topic, and the sources you will draw on. This should include relevant secondary sources (from class or found outside class) and a discussion of specific primary sources or source collections you plan to analyze (for example, “beer advertisements from the 1950s,” “issues of the MIT Technology Review describing student activism in the 1960s”).

2. Requirements for the Final Paper

All papers should present an argument. This argument should be unique (of your own making), compelling (it should communicate an interesting idea), and clearly articulated (a reader should have no problem identifying it). In crafting your argument, you should draw on lectures, discussions, and readings, as well as your own ideas about the topic you have chosen.

The argument in your paper should be supported by ample evidence. Evidence supporting your argument should come from both primary and secondary sources. Secondary sources should be drawn from assigned course materials and secondary research of your own.

All papers must include analysis of at least three primary sources (depending on your topic, you will likely need more). You will be responsible for finding these sources on your own. Primary sources can include newspaper or magazine articles, films, images, advertisements, diaries, memoirs, oral histories, manifestoes, government documents, or any materials produced by historical actors during your period of study. Students experiencing difficulty in locating primary sources should consult an instructor or a librarian.

Papers should no shorter than 2500 words (or approximately 10 pages) in length, double-spaced, and written in a 12 point font (Times New Roman or an equivalent). They should include page numbers, properly formatted footnotes with accurate citations (see the Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide ), and a title that reflects the paper’s argument.

Final Papers will be evaluated according to:

The quality of the analysis and argument presented
The strength of the evidence marshaled in support of that argument
The quality of written expression (this includes style, grammar, and proper citation)

Student Example

“The Power of Female Voters: Why The Eisenhower Campaign’s Use of Television to Target Female Voters in the 1956 Election Matters.” (PDF)

This example appears courtesy of an MIT student and is anonymous by request.

There are two main purposes to these reading responses:

To give you an opportunity to practice writing in a brief, informal way that synthesizes concepts presented in lectures and in readings, and
To help generate ideas for discussion in class.

Your reading responses don’t need to be long! However, they should be detailed and engaging. You should try to develop an argument that engages with the problems and concepts raised by the texts with the goal of demonstrating your command of the assigned readings. You’ll also be able to hone your ideas in these responses to prepare for longer papers.

What to do:

Draw connections between the reading and the themes of the course, or the discussions we’ve had in section or lecture.
Suggest questions for class discussion! What are some of the unresolved issues that the reading suggests? What are the implications of the arguments that the author(s) make?
Point to specific passages in the text to demonstrate close reading, addressing both content and form.

What to avoid:

Descriptive summary of the book or of the historical events it describes.
General opinionating about whether you agreed or disagreed with something in the reading. Specificity is key: provide details from the text to back up assertions you make.

No need for a full bibliography in each paper-we all have the syllabus-name of author, title, and page will suffice. Parenthetical citations or footnotes are both fine. Reading responses for this class should be one page double spaced at minimum, and will be graded on a ✓-, ✓, ✓+ basis as part of your participation grade.

Happy reading!

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American History Since 1865