| Writing assignment #3, 4 doubled-spaced pages, due at the beginning of class on Thursday, November 18 | |
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• Primary source documents on the course syllabus from Weeks 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13. • Your lecture notes from Weeks 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13. • Web reading by Karp. The first half of the 19th century (1789-1861) saw an American social order and political culture beset by biting contradictions: “democracy” and “aristocracy,” inclusion and exclusion, success and failure, voting and violence, reform and backlash, et cetera. Three generations of Americans lived through an era of broad uncertainties that affected their material and emotional lives: population growth, economic development, and westward expansion, facilitated by a long interval of relative peace between the end of the War of 1812 (in 1815) and the beginning of the Mexican War (in 1846). Even as the United States gained in tested durability as a country in the world, many Americans continued to feel its acute fragility as a social and political experiment which seemed, at home, to contain ever more instability and conflict rather than stability and harmony. In response to so much chronic cultural unsettlement and turbulence, Americans variously either embraced the principle of “equality” as a blessing of the nation, or rejected it as a danger to that nation. Your task is to determine the relative cultural weight of these competing responses. So, the central question for you to explain is: Were more or less “Americans” committed to the principle of equality over the course of the first half of the 19th century (i.e., 1789-1861)? Answering this question will comprise the main thesis of your paper. As usual, you cannot sensibly respond to this question with a monolithic argument focused only on either more or less — you must weigh them against each other. As usual, too, you must account for both historical dynamism (change over time) and social diversity (variation among people). Therefore you must compare the early part of the 19th century to the middle part of the century, and you must be mindful of and specific about social groups within the category of “Americans.” You must also consider the factor of power — i.e., who already possessed versus who sought the power to turn either equality or its opposite from principle into practice. It should be obvious that, as always, there is no single right or wrong answer to this question. Rather, you will be evaluated on your ability to develop a forceful yet nuanced argument in response to the question, to select main themes to organize your analysis, and to provide specific evidence from the primary source documents and your lectures notes to substantiate your argument and analysis throughout the paper. Be sure to endnote/footnote the precise source of any quotations, derivative ideas, or uncommon facts. You should quote from primary documents produced by people in the past (like Thomas Whitney) — this is the most persuasive evidence for any historical interpretation. If you glean ideas from a secondary source (such as your lecture notes), use your own words and simply cite in a footnote or endnote where you found inspiration for a specific idea. See the top of the course syllabus for a link to H105 paper writing guideliness. Sample endnotes: |