Required Reading/Watching
Prior to completing this assignment, you should have:
BEFORE YOU START I WILL PROVIDE FEEDBACK FROM MY PROFESSOR ON MY LAST ASSIGNMENT!!!
- Read Chapters 8 through 11 of your textbook, The American Yawp, Volume I
- Watched Video Lectures 8 through 11
Purpose
Essentially, every college student is a reformer, reforming themselves into a skilled technician, scientist, teacher, artist, researcher, or engineer. This assignment addresses your career goals, and how you would have fit into (or not fit into) a series of reform movements that evolved throughout the United States from around 1800 to 1860.
Learning Outcomes Addressed:
- Analyze historical facts and interpretations
- Analyze and compare political, geographic, economic, social, cultural, religious, and intellectual institutions, structures, and processes across a range of historical periods and cultures
- Recognize and articulate the diversity of human experience across a range of historical periods and the complexities of a global culture and society
- Draw on a historical perspective to evaluate contemporary problems/issues
- Analyze the contributions of past cultures/societies to the contemporary world
- Recognize the impact of geography, environment, and the natural world on the course of history and how choices are often limited by physical factors beyond the control of human beings.
Tasks
Step 1: Gather evidence (statistics, examples, events) from the readings and lectures above concerning the causes and effects of rapid national expansion between 1820 and 1860. Explore all the apparent forms of expansion, not just land. Also look at rapidly growing population, wealth, poverty, alcohol production, enslavement, education, health, religion, rural and urban mass production, urbanization, immigration, etc..
Then gather as much evidence as you can from the textbook, lectures, and at least two books from the Columbia State Library about the many emerging reform movements and leaders who wanted to address these issues.
Step 2: Analyze that evidence and see what it is telling you: Determine what you see as the most serious problems that the nation faces, and collect all of the evidence that led you to that analysis.
Step 3: Communicate your findings honestly to yourself and others: Write five pages or more about what kind of reformer you would have been:
- The year is 1860. Write a brief paragraph on who you are, where you live, your age, etc.. Are you in a rural or urban area? Were you born in the United States? What ethnicity are you? Mentally put yourself in that time and place.
- Write three or more paragraphs on what you see as the the most troubling aspects of your location in 1860. What are the conditions in your immediate area? What created these conditions that concern you so much? What concerns you most on a personal and professional level, and why? Remember to communicate in statistics, events, and examples. Here is where you can also cite valuable information in your sources from the Columbia State Library. The most efficient way to find these Library sources is to do a search in the Columbia State Library main search page, attain those sources (many are available digitally), and go to the index of those books, to search for specific issues and reform movements that interest you most.
- Commit yourself to do something about it. Write at length (three or more pages) about what reform movements you would join and why. Show the statistics, events, and examples that motivated you to join those movements. Detail the work you would be doing in that organization. Include any historical figures alive at the time that you would recruit, and explain why you want to work with them.
- Conclude the paper by traveling back to the present as yourself, and write a paragraph or more about what you can and will do to be that kind of reformer today. The conditions will have changed of course, but many of the challenges that existed in 1860 persist today. Fortunately, your world has many more resources, technologies, and opportunities than the world in 1860. Most importantly, the modern world has you. What do you want to do? Notice that many of the issues that faced the Us in 1860 are still with us today, and your education, training, and passions can address those very same issues.
Criteria for success Earning a high score:
- Gathering evidence: A successful exploration will include thirty or more specific statistics, events, and examples within the paper, taken from the lectures, readings, and at least two sources from the Columbia State Library.
- Analyzing the evidence: A successful examination will include ten or more analytical observations on patterns, causes, and effects that you see based on the evidence you have gathered.
- Communicating honestly to yourself and others: Successful communication will include five or more pages with detailed evidence and analysis, with major topics organized into paragraphs, with correct grammar and spelling. Your two or more library sources should be cited at the end of your paper in the following Chicago Manual of Style format: Author first name, author last name, Book Title in Italics (City and State of the Publisher: Publishing Company Name, year of publication), pages.
- Example: Thomas Flagel, War, Memory, and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2019), 112-125.
