Analytical Paper Assignment

HIST 1301

History is a dialogue between the past and present. As the great 20th-century American author William Faulkner observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This means that in studying the past, we must look for ways in which our course materials resonate within our own contemporary experience. In other words, we must study “history” as living material with deep relevance for our own day and age. This short-paper assignment is intended as an opportunity to explore the parallels, intersections, connections, contradictions, and enduring meanings within this ongoing past-present dialogue.

Instructions:

1. Choose one of the topic folders posted at the end of these instructions.
2. Read the documents posted within that folder. (I recommend reading course assignments in hard-copy form wherever possible, by either copying and pasting them into a text file or by printing them out. This will allow you to mark your documents where their content addresses key elements that you might wish to write about.)
   1. The first document in the folder is a primary source, consisting of material written by someone who lived during one of the historical periods we cover in this course and who has left us a record of reflections, observations, and insights about the conditions of that time. Thus, it is a historical document, to be comprehended within its historical context.
   2. The study questions for that first document are provided to help highlight key elements within it that should be summarized in the paper and then applied to the key elements in the other documents in the folder.
   3. The remaining documents in the folder are recent publications that address issues that intersect in one or more ways with the historical (primary-source) document.
3. This assignment requires you to write a 750- to 800-word response to the contents of the document folder you have chosen by addressing each of the following:
   1. (20 points) First, in one or two well-developed paragraphs, summarize the contents of the historical document.
      • Use the list of study questions for your document to construct your summary, but do not simply construct an itemized set of written responses to them.
      • Instead, maintain a paragraph format, with topic sentences, meaningful transitions between statements, and quoted phrases and/or individual sentences from the document.)
   2. (20 points) Then, summarize each of the remaining (recently-published) documents, and identify and analyze connections between them and the historical document.
      • Which specific elements of the historical document (as highlighted in the study questions) seem to have a strong relationship to the content of the recent documents? Where are they similar? Where do they differ? Do the recent documents simply echo the themes and viewpoints of the historical one, or does their content move in entirely new directions?
      • Support your points here with quoted phrases and/or individual sentences from each document (no citations are necessary).
      • Also, who are the authors of these recent documents? If they’re interviewing someone, who is that person? What significant details can you identify about the publishers of these documents?

3. (10 points) Finally, write a concluding paragraph that assesses the degree to which all of the documents you’ve written about express the theme of history as a dialogue between the past and present.
   • Do the themes and content of these documents, past and present, seem to suggest that history repeats itself? That age-old situations return, but in new forms? That more recent situations tend to be profound departures from past human experience?
   • Are we still contending with age-old issues and challenges? Can we draw lessons from the past that apply to our present circumstances and concerns?)

Because the texts involved in this assignment have been pre-established and pre-assigned, no “works cited” page is required at the end of the paper.

4. Submit your responses as a single-spaced document by clicking the “ANALYTICAL PAPER #1” link.

• Please do not e-mail papers.
• No rough drafts will be accepted, and instructor feedback cannot be used for a “re-write.”
• Late papers (submitted after the posted deadline) will receive a 10-point deduction.

5. As you preprare to submit your paper, be sure you have adhered to the academic integrity policy provided in the course syllabus:

Acts prohibited by the College for which discipline may be administered include scholastic dishonesty, including but not limited to cheating on an exam or quiz, plagiarizing, and unauthorized collaboration with another in preparing outside work. Academic work submitted by students shall be the result of their own thought, research or self-expression. Academic work is defined as, but is not limited to, tests, quizzes (whether taken electronically or on paper); individual or group projects; classroom presentations, and homework. A student discovered to have violated the academic integrity policy described above will receive an F in the course.

Under this policy, paper submissions that are detected to have been even partially generated by large language model AI software (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) will not receive credit for this assignment, and in particularly egregious cases, they risk the initiation of disciplinary action and an F in the course.