October 4, 2007

A public-domain file containing both assigned excerpts from Staël's Ten Years' Exile is now posted in PDF format.

October 2, 2007

A study guide for Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is now posted in PDF format.

September 25, 2007

Guidelines on 5-page essay

The essay assignment is designed to familiarize you with some of the modern scholarship (secondary sources) for your assigned unit. I also envision it as a way to seed class discussions with “experts” on a given subject who may be called upon to give perspectives or pose questions on the main course readings. All of the “extra” readings on the syllabus put the main readings in broader historical context; it's up to you, the weekly essay-writers, to figure out exactly how. With this in mind, 5-page essays should include (1) a restatement and review of the main arguments presented in the “extra” readings; (2) a set of questions these arguments raise about the period under study; and (3) some exploration of how the main readings for the week shed light on these questions. The format of the essay, and the order and manner in which you address these three points, are up to you.

Guidelines on annotated digest

The aim here is to get you to do some primary-source research of your own while at the same time freeing you from the constraints of a conventional research paper. Our period is one in which diaries, letters, and memoirs offer unique insight into the lives of people enduring times of stress and upheaval, but also tremendous creativity; so too, its dramatic events provided ample fodder for the newspapers and periodical press. What I want you to do first is locate one of these two types of sources and begin to xerox chunks (whether pages or paragraphs) that seem somehow interesting and important to you; then you’ll set about collecting them into a “digest” to turn in and annotating them appropriately.

The list of possible sources and subjects is almost endless; I encourage you to draw on course texts (including “extra” readings) and lectures for inspiration. If you come across a person you’re interested in, look them up on Google Book search (books.google.com), Janus, or Summit (especially using words like “correspondence,” “letters,” “memoirs,” or “diaries” in keyword searches); consult the footnotes, indexes, and bibliographies of the course texts; use the “Research Aids” links on my homepage to find relevant articles and books; or ask me about them. You may need to track a topic through various levels and layers of footnotes until you dig down to the root primary source: again, the letters, memoirs, diary, or newspaper you intend to write about.

Annotation is harder than it sounds. Having collected a corpus of primary sources, imagine what a typical reader (say, a fellow student in this class) would need to know to read them in sequence. Your job is to interleave the xeroxed source excerpts themselves with your own commentary. You’ll need to (1) explain unclear terms, identify unknown persons, and elucidate cryptic passages, at least insofar as you’re able to track down their meanings; and (2) provide enough of your own interpretation to link the your excerpted source passages together into a pleasant and readable final document. The whole product, including sources and annotations, should be 20-30 pages. I’d imagine that 5-7 of these will consist of your own writing.