Category: American history

Has the constitution been effectively able to respond to developing political needs over time? Explain your answer.

Write a paper describing an event and its importance in U.S. History. If writing on an event,
place or thing, include information on the impact to the people of the time period and if
it continues to impact us today. 
Paper length: 6-8 Pages of text (cover and/or bibliography do NOT count) 
Font: 12 point, Times New Roman, left justified, double-spaced body text
Margins: 1 inch all sides 
Format: Chicago Style (the style of Historians).
Resources: A minimum of three sources are required. Your first resource is your
textbook, the second must be another book, and the third may be a journal article,
book, encyclopedia or online resource (but no Wikipedia). 
Abstract and Annotated Bibliography added to paper

America’s Founding Fathers took great inspiration from the Medieval and Early Modern British inheritance as they forged the nation’s founding documents—including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  I want you to summarize and discuss this inheritance.  From the Magna Carta, the Petition or Right, the writings of John Locke to the English Bill of Right 1689, I want you to look at the primary documents and highlight how they influenced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution using specific examples from the primary documents and details.  Minimum requirements: one primary document, one article from a scholarly history journal, and one book.  You may also use material from acceptable websites.

Compose a 200-300 word summary of the information provided in the link: 
http://www.virtualjamestown.org/essays/brown_essay.html    AND   

Include the title, author, and source at the beginning of the summary.

Identify the author’s thesis/key points and write a one-page single-spaced summary of the reading. 
Times New Roman
!2-point font

“With the segregation of the Jim Crow South came voter disfranchisement and racial violence. Given the massive white resistance to the social and political advancement of African Americans, black leaders often disagreed with each other over the best way to move forward. Judging from these selections from two very prominent activists, who had better ideas in making progress against racism and why?”

Based on chapter five of the text and Plutarch’s  history about the assassination of Julius Caesar found hereLinks to an external site., please discuss the following in about 450 words. Your posting is due by Thursday (midnight) and a detailed response to a classmate is due on Friday (midnight).  
Caesar’s assassination is one of the most infamous murders in history – why?  What motivated his attackers and, based on the historical evidence you have read, were they justified in these motivations?  The aftermath of his death pushed Rome from the republic into the empire.  Keeping this in mind, discuss an aspect of the impact of this event.
Make sure that your essay is grounded in historical evidence and not opinion.  The guidelines for discussions is found in the week one folder. Be sure to have a clear thesis with evidence from the primary source to support the historical argument.  The primary source (linked above) should be central in your post. 
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ancient/plutarch-caesar.asp

For Primary Source Assignment 2, read the two documents linked below and examine the image located below. Using the primary documents, the image, the textbook, and the videos (optional), write an essay answering all of the prompts listed below. Grades will be based on the content of the answers and must be more than 400 words in length (400 for the whole assignment, not 400 for each question). Direct quotes do not count toward the required word count.
Documents:
Image1-WW1.jpg
Document1-Wilson.docx
Document2-Debs.docx
NOTE: Read all of Document 1. Document 2 is 20 pages long, but you only need to focus on pages 5-10, especially the highlighted portions. Here is a youtube link to actor Mark Ruffalo performing the highlighted portions of the speech in Document 2: https://youtu.be/zuGp-0G1p4M
Assignment Prompts: 
Remember to address all 4 prompts in your paper.
1. In Document 1, how does Woodrow Wilson justify his support for American involvement in World War I?
2. In Document 2, how does Eugene V. Debs justify his opposition to World War I?
3. What elements of the image above reflect the ideas presented in documents 1 and 2? How do you think imagery like this affected American perceptions about Germans and World War I?
4. If you were a member of Congress in April 1917, would you support President Wilson’s call for a declaration of war. Justify your vote for or against war with Germany.
Image 1:
World War I propaganda poster produced by the United States Army in 1918.

For Primary Source Assignment 2, read the three documents linked below (two different accounts of the 1770 Boston Massacre and the Declaration of Independence) and examine the two images located below. Using the primary documents, the images, the textbook, and the videos (optional), write an essay answering all of the prompts listed below. Grades will be based on the content of the answers and must be more than 400 words in length (400 for the whole assignment, not 400 for each question). Direct quotes do not count toward the required word count.
Documents:
Image1-BostonMassacre.jpg
Image2-Join_or_Die.jpg
Document1-BostonGazette.docx
Document2-Preston.docx
Document3-DeclarationOfIndependence.docx
Assignment Prompts: 
Remember to address all 4 prompts in your paper.
1. In Document 1 and Document 2, what are the primary differences in how each author described this event? Why do you think each author chose to describe the event in that way?
2. What elements of Image 1 reinforce the account from Document 1? How do you think this imagery affected Bostonians and other American colonists? Why?
3. What message did Benjamin Franklin hope to convey with the phrase, “Join, or Die” and Image 2? Why did that message become even more relevant during the 1770s?
4. Why do you think Image 1 and Image 2 became important pieces of propaganda for American Patriots? In want ways do you see the messages conveyed by these images reflected in the Declaration of Independence (Document 3)?
Image 1:
Engraved by Paul Revere shortly after the event in 1770 and titled, “A Bloody Massacre.”
Image 2:
Originally published by Benjamin Franklin in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1754, but began to appear regularly across the colonies after 1763 and throughout the Revolution.

Go out and find a relevant secondary source to this week’s topics and tell us about it. (We’re looking for articles, or book reviews, dealing with American evangelicalism and/or democratization between around 1790 to 1830.) You guys kind of did slavery to death last week, so lets not actively search for that topic this week (it will show up in your searches anyway).
So go to your favorite database to find scholary sources (I used JSTOR to pilot this assignment, but you could use GoogleScholar, WorldCat, ProjectMuse, etc.). Enter some of these terms into the search box:
Antebellum …
… Evangelicalism
… revivalism
“Charles G. Finney”
“Camp meeting”
“Second Great Awakening”
“Election of 1824”
“Compensation Act”
“American system”
“Henry Clay”
“John Quincy Adams”
“John C. Calhoun”
“Second Bank of the United States”
There are more that can be pulled from your own reading. You don’t need to limit yourself to my terms. You could do +politics +”New York” +antebellum or something like that. It’s a little early to worry about political parties if it’s possible to filter them out.
Guidelines
The ellipses (…) means that the term needs some sort of qualifier. So search emancipation “early republic.”
Make sure the article/reviews you choose deals with U.S. history, unless you can make a case for why it’s relevant.
Don’t use anything with Civil War in the title. We’ll get to that stuff later. We want early-nineteenth-century stuff right now.
On the same note don’t use anything that has a date range in the title beginning after 1830.
To meet expectation, your submission should be 1 page, double spaced, 1-inch margins, with 12pt type.