Analytic Essay
Guidance
U.S. History since 1877
- Purpose
This assignment gives you the opportunity to explore a question in U.S. history since 1877 in greater depth, exercising your analytic skills in using course sources and in identifying and using additional historical scholarship to address that question.
Instructions
Develop a 2500-word essay on a question you propose and clear with me exploring in greater depth an issue raised in course sessions and readings.
Your essay will make energetic use of at least 1 relevant course source and a minimum of 3 additional scholarly essays. These scholarly sources may be drawn from and may also include chapters from relevant scholarly works.
Use parenthetical citation and provide a complete list of works cited ( you may use our syllabus as a format model for your Works Cited list ).
Use the Chicago style
Working with Your Course Sources and Selected Sources
This assignment asks that you evaluate a ( small ) set of scholarly articles that address the question you have proposed. Bear in mind that your small sample won’t allow you to provide a definitive answer to your question.
What the assignment asks that you do instead is provide a critical evaluation of the scholarship you identify concerning the question you have formulated.
You will be identifying and evaluating the approaches taken by other students to the question you have asked. For example, if you choose to compare the careers to two activists, say Victoria Woodhull and Frances Willard, evaluate how the essays you have selected measure their successes and failures: e.g., do different scholars have different ideas about what counts as success ? If you are seeking to understand how the Homestead Act affected different settler constituencies ( European immigrants, single women, African American families ) you might consider what kinds of evidence different scholars consider and what perhaps gets overlooked. To the extent that your scholars reach different conclusions, what accounts for the differences ?
