Essay Prompt:
One of the purposes of the GE core is to introduce students of different majors to the academic disciplines, or, as one of my colleagues often says about the history GE, “to teach students to think like a historian.” At the most basic level, thinking like a historian requires that we treat artifacts like film and literature as windows onto the ages in which they were produced, rather than as objects of transcendental aesthetic beauty (which is the realm of literary analysis and criticism) or as moral and political signposts (which is the realm of philosophy, religion, and politics). Your job is to use We Wish to Inform You, Manual for Survival, White Teeth, and the film “The Battle of Algiers” to think like a historian. What do these artifacts tell us about human preoccupations and concerns during the latter part of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries? Are there commonalities in the outlooks, concerns, and/or ideologies of Gourevitch, Brown, Smith, and Pontecorvo?
Please carefully review the requirements for essays in the syllabus for information on appropriate length, format, style, and citation style. Failure use proper Chicago-style footnotes constitutes a failure to complete the assignment as directed.
Essay guidelines:
Each essay should be 5 pages in length (roughly 1,500 words), double-spaced, and typed. You are welcome to discuss the prompts with other students, but if you do so please indicate their names on the cover of your essay. By turning in an essay, you acknowledge that you are familiar with SSU’s policy on cheating and plagiarism. Because I use take-home essays in lieu of in-class midterm and final exams, I will not review drafts beforehand. If you are worried about the quality of your writing, I encourage you to take advantage of the resources that the Writing Center offers.
I expect you to write at a level appropriate for juniors and seniors in college. Consequently, your essay should be free of elementary grammatical errors. I also expect you to conform to conventional essay format. Your essays must have an introduction that includes some sort of hook for the reader, a clearly stated argument, and a description of the structure of the paper (or how you will illustrate the argument). Likewise, you must write transitions between the different components of your essay, and end with a conclusion that restates the argument. I encourage you to consult my style guide (available on my website), where I have listed the most common grammatical and stylistic snafus that I encounter in student writing at SSU.
You must use Chicago-style footnotes when quoting or paraphrasing the readings. In addition, please be sure to use ibid. and shortened citations where appropriate, as demonstrated here:
1Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (New York, 1995), 22-23.
2ibid., 45.
3Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (New York, 1968), 56.
4Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 78.
Your life will be considerably easier and your blood pressure lower if you use the footnote function in your word processing program.
No block quotes, please.
Finally, please identify yourself only on the cover page of your essay. The cover page should include your name, the names of anyone with whom you discussed the question, and the title of your essay. All essays must be submitted via Canvas.
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