Academic Writing

Upload to Seminar Shell in Canvas due by 17:00 on 30 Sept 2015 Objectives: Students will • interpret and analyze primary texts and evidence • synthesize multiple texts to create an original, coherent argument about a major theme from Gilded Age & Progressive Era America Instructions: • Choose one (1) of the following essay prompts. Read each topic carefully before choosing. Choose the topic that is most interesting to you and for which you think you can give the most thorough answer. Note: These are Topics, not arguments. You will need to create your own unique thesis and argument. • Compose a formal, university-level essay, with thesis, reasoning, and evidence. • Direct citation of at least three of the assigned primary texts is required. Use parenthetical citations for quotes, paraphrases, and borrowings of ideas; and include a Works Cited or Bibliography. Use MLA, APA, or Chicago style for citations. See Writer’s Help (left-hand column of Canvas for the link, make sure Pop-up blocking is OFF): MLA Ch. 49-52; APA Ch. 53; Chicago, Ch. 54. • Your answer should reflect your grasp of historical context and key concepts from Lectures, from the Foner readings, and from Voices of Freedom primary source readings. • Essays should be approximately 3 pages long, 10-12 point font, 1 inch margins; use standard university-level English Choose at least three (3) of the following to analyze in your essay: Riis from How the Other Half Lives; Chopin, The Awakening; Martí, “Nuestra America”; Du Bois, Souls of Black Folks; Hughes, selected poems. Topic Prompts: 1) Freedom, as we have seen in our lectures, can be conceived in positive and negative terms; and both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution theoretically guarantee both positive and negative freedom. And yet in practice, a wide range of Americans were continuously denied basic freedoms on an everyday basis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In your essay, compare and contrast at least three authors’ conceptions of freedom; how each illustrates that for many Americans of the period, the dream of freedom was systematically deferred (to borrow Langston Hughes’ phrase); and how they expressed the hope and willingness to struggle for justice and liberty for all Americans. 2) Recall the lecture-discussions and Foner readings that criticize the ideology of progress in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In your essay, explore how three of our Seminar authors show how different understandings of progress can lead to quite different kinds of progressive reform. Include an analysis of the relationship between progress and reform in American society at the turn of the twentieth century. 3) Against the backdrop of growing U.S. and European domination of the newly independent Latin American countries, José Martí theorized a new kind of American. The idea of an American spans the entire hemisphere and differs radically from place to place and among different groups. Compare and contrast at least three different authors’ understandings of what it means to be an American, explaining why they differed so greatly from each other. What conclusions would you draw about American identities, americannes, from these authors’ differences? 4) Sometimes in our discussions of society and culture, we have a tendency to speak in large scale abstractions, about structures, and laws, and institutions that we talk about as if they are separate from people’s every day lives and as if they function fairly for everyone. In different ways, each of our authors, however, force us to look hard at the individual costs, the personal, emotional impacts of larger social and cultural forces. In your essay, use three of our Seminar authors to explore and explain the relationship between the individual (the personal, intimate, internal) and American society (the cultural, the institutional, the legal, etc.).