Format • Use APA, MLA, or Chicago style citations for primary sources and other information. o Please do not include any title pages, section headers, or abstracts o 3-5 resource required • Any amount of plagiarism will result in a zero for the assignment. Formatting Details: 12-point, Times New Roman font; double spaced; one-inch margin Assignment Description For this writing assignment you will write an argumentative historical essay. History is both an interpretive and an empirical field. Historians examine the evidence left to us from the past and offer their interpretation of what happened. The quality, believability, and, ultimately, the wider cultural acceptance of their work depend upon the convincingness of their prose and the quality of the evidence they use to back up their argument. For this assignment you’ll argue for your own interpretation of some aspect of the American past and provide evidence from primary sources in order to back that argument up. For this paper you are free to choose to write about any subject in American History that happened between 1492 and 1865. Essays dealing with content outside of this time WINDOW will receive a 25 point penalty. For the subject you choose, you’ll analyze primary sources about that topic. The sorts of questions that you should have in your mind as you explore the primary sources are: What changed? Why did change (or a lack of change) happen? Why did change happen when it did? Or why did change happen (or not happen) the way it did? Why does the author of this document make the argument or use the language they do here? Based on this document, what do I think is really going on here? In the end, your goal is to write a paper that offers an argument for why things happened the way they did. For any historical subject there are many such explanations. Your goal is to choose one explanation and prove that it is correct using primary source evidence.
