HTST 333: Document Essay Instructions

Transcription

1 HTST 333: Document Essay Instructions 1 For a version of this document with active hyperlinks, please go to Purpose Style The purpose of the assignment is to develop your skills at employing both primary and secondary historical evidence to make a convincing historical argument. Your essay will be focused on one of the sets of primary documents listed below. This paper is not substantially different from any other history paper you might have written. The only distinction is that you must make an argument that directly references at least one of the documents from the list below to make your case. This means that you cannot stray too far away from the subject matter of your documents. Given the variety of documents and subjects, providing you with specific instructions about how you should arrive at your argument is not possible. The trick to doing this assignment correctly is to begin with your documents, formulate an argument that relates to them, and refer to them often in your essay. Papers should be written in classic expository essay style. You should have an introduction outlining your argument, followed by a conceptually structured and thematically organized body, and a conclusion reiterating your main points and summing up your interpretation of the document/s. Headings are unnecessary and distracting in such short papers. Keep an objective distance from your sources. This is not the place to express your own political opinions or beliefs. Your goal is to explain an aspect of historical change and argue your case. Historical Writing Advice For those who are new to history essay writing, please refer to the links that I have provided on the Writing Advice tab of my web site, particularly the links to historical argument and my Style Sheet. Pay particular attention to the section on Morality and History. The Links on Historical Argument and Patrick Rael's advice on reading primary sources will be particularly useful for this assignment. Also don t forget to refer to the history writing guide recommended for this course and available in the bookstore: William Kelleher Storey & Towser Jones, Writing History: A Guide for Canadian Students. Please Remember Historians use primary sources in innumerable ways and for varying purposes. There is no one correct way to analyze a primary text or set of texts. You might spend considerable time explaining the significance of a quotation or passage. You might also use the document/s more generally, spending most of your time discussing how this piece of evidence fits into the larger argument you wish to make. I do not have a correct answer or even really a specific question in mind for any of the assigned topics. Students aiming at achieving high marks should be sure to construct an argument that is as specific as possible. In other words, take a stand on a point of historical debate and prove your point using citations to both primary and secondary sources. Do not just describe, argue! Technical Details 1) Choose one of the sets of documents that I have provided below. Some of the topics contain more than one primary source. In this case, you may choose between the documents or use them all. 2) I have given these essays very general titles for the purposes of organization. The title does not imply a specific question. Please formulate your own argument on the basis of both the primary documents and your own research. 3) Your essay should be approximately 8 to 9 double-spaced pages long. You must use the MS-Word template that I will provide on Coursekit to write your paper. (You can easily convert it to another program if necessary.) The template will contain a plagiarism statement, which you must read and sign for your essay to be graded. (See the information on plagiarism on the syllabus.) If you write less than 8 full pages you will loose marks. I will not penalize papers that are marginally (i.e. one or two pages) longer, as long as you remain on topic. 4) You must use at least five secondary sources including the two articles that I provide for each topic below. This does not include the documents, which are primary sources! If you don't understand the difference between primary and secondary sources, please refer to the Storey/Jones book or ask me or the T.A. for clarification. As a general rule, use only recently published secondary sources. The definition of recent varies by subject matter. There are some subjects that received more attention 20 years ago, so you might not be able to find any more recent sources. As a general rule, however, any analyses published during the era that you are studying (i.e. when Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini were still alive) should be considered primary rather than secondary sources. They tell us more about what people at the time thought of these regimes than about how historians now view them. Look for historical analyses that are based on archival or other primary research. Failure to use the required number or type of sources will result in a reduction of your mark for the paper. Five is the minimum; you are encouraged to use more.

2 5) You must provide proper citations (footnotes) according to the format outlined in the "The History Student's Handbook" on the History Department's web site (click on Essay Guide on the bottom left of the page) and described in the Essay-Writing Tutorial on my web site. You must also provide citations for the documents you cite. Please use H-Net's "Brief Citation Guide for Internet Sources in History and the Humanities" as a guide for formatting these citations. For online documents, whether they are published or not, please provide the URL. This is for my convenience. Do not provide URLs for your secondary sources even if you happened to read them in PDF format online. Use only secondary sources that have been published (even if you view them online) and cite the published version, providing page numbers. 6) Do not use web sites as sources! The online documents provided below are not web sites. They are previously published or (sometimes translated) archival documents that someone has made available online. For your own research, use only peer-reviewed scholarly sources. For clarification of peer-reviewed see Clarification of Scholarly Article on my web site. 7) Begin your essay by precisely identifying the document/s you will be focusing on. Do not assume that your reader has any knowledge about these sources. Determining what the source actually is may require some research. Not all of the documents have famous authors, so if you cannot immediately determine who the author is you should still try to find out something about the circumstances of the publication. (For instance, ask yourself about the press that published it.) Try to determine when, why, and how the document came into existence, and say something about this in your essay. For instance, if it was a speech note when it was delivered. You might also want to think about why it was translated and published. Even if you cannot answer all of these questions, keeping them in mind will be important for your argument, because you should be thinking about the audience. For instance, asking yourself why someone would translate and publish a collection of Mussolini s speeches or the party platform of the NSDAP will help you place these documents into an appropriate context when you make your argument. This is part of the historical puzzle that you should be contemplating. To convincingly deploy any document as a piece of evidence, you must provide your reader with its context. It is not enough to call your primary source the document or simply name its author with out introduction. Doing this would be the equivalent of saying someone told me when a friend asks why you think a rumour is true. Specifically introduce your primary evidence and then refer to it as what it is: a speech, a newspaper article, an internal government memo, a propaganda pamphlet, a military order, etc. etc. The more specific you are about what kind of primary source you are employing the more convincing your argument will be. 8) A note on the primary sources: I have provided hyperlinks for the online documents to save you a bit of time. Most of them can be found on the Internet Archive web site (see for more information). You might also be able to find other useful documents at this site. Just be aware that you must carefully judge the quality of these sources. The Internet Archive is a massive repository of public domain writings, videos, and sound files, much of which could also be found at university libraries. But the fact that private individuals can upload documents means that you will also find material here that scholars would consider unscholarly, unreliable, defamatory or deceptive. For instance, the archive has a large collection of Holocaust denial material and a growing collection of highly ideological political tracts that would be completely unacceptable for citation as supportive evidence in a scholarly essay. (Just try searching on the keyword Obama and you ll see what I mean.) These materials are actually extremely useful as primary sources for investigations of the phenomenon of Holocaust denial or various other forms of craziness, so their appearance in this archive actually underlines the usefulness of the site. But you must be able to distinguish between this stuff and the types of authentic primary resources and peer-reviewed scholarly literature that you should be using to support your arguments. 9) A note on finding the scholarly articles: All of the scholarly articles that I have provided below are available through the U of C library website. Use the catalogue to search for the journal title and then find the appropriate issue. Conducting these library searches is part of the task of writing a research essay. If you have problems with the mechanics of how to do this, please ask a librarian for help. The T.A. and I will help with these things in office hours, but we will not answer s about using the library, as this is one of those skills that is best learned by doing. 2

3 Essay Topics Topic 1: Mussolini and the Catholic Church 3 1. de Ritis, Beniamino. The Roman Accord. New York: The Fascisti League of North America, The Lateran Treaty 1. Knee, Stuart E. The Strange Alliance: Mussolini, Pope Pius XI, and the Lateran Treaty. Mediterranean Historical Review 5, no. 2 (December 1990): Gentile, Emilio. New Idols: Catholicism in the Face of Fascist Totalitarianism. Journal of Modern Italian Studies 11, no. 2 (June 2006): Topic 2: Mussolini s Socialism Do you think that by Taking away my Membership Card You will Take away my Faith in the Cause (Speech delivered at Milan, 256h November 1914) and Mussolini the Fascista friend of the People, in Bernardo,Quaranta die San Severino, ed. Mussolini: As Revealed in his Political Speeches (November 1914 August 1923). London & Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1923., pp. 3-6 and Musiedlak, Didier. Religion and Political Culture in the Thought of Mussolini. Totalitarian Movements & Political Religions 6, no. 3 (December 2005): Valli, Roberta Suzzi. The Myth of Squadrismo in the Fascist Regime. Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 2 (April 2000): Topic 3: Stalin s International Image before WWII Primary Document: Ludwig, Emil. Joseph Stalin: An Interview with the German Author Emil Ludwig. Moscow: Co-Operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., Kotkin, Stephen. Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture. Kritika: Explorations in Russian & Eurasian History 2, no. 1 (Winter 2001): Frieden, Jeff. The Internal Politics of European Communism in the Stalin Era: Studies in Comparative Communism 14, no. 1 (March 1981): Topic 4: The Russian Revolution 1. Oulianow [N. Lenin], Vladimir. Lessons of the Revolution. Russian Revolutionary Pamphlets. Petrograd: Bureau of International Revolutionary Propaganda, Lenin, V. I. The State and Revolution: The Marxist Teaching on the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, Lih, Lars T. The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: The Debates of April 1917 in Context. Russian History 38, no. 2 (April 2011): Ryan, James. Lenin s The State and Revolution and Soviet State Violence: A Textual Analysis. Revolutionary Russia 20, no. 2 (December 2007):

4 Topic 5: The Italian Campaign and Resistance during WWII 1. Lindtberg, Leopold. The Last Chance. Praesens-Film, A description from the film review website Rotten Tomatoes : One of the few Swiss-produced films of the 1940s to gain an international release, Last Chance was distributed in the US by MGM. The film stars E.G. Morrison, John Hoy and Ray Reagan as three American officers who come to the aid of a group of Italian refugees. Tension mounts as the officers do their utmost to see their charges safely over the Alps. If the names of the leading actors seem unfamiliar to you, that's because they weren't actors, but genuine Allied pilots who'd been shot down near Switzerland and who agreed to appear in this film before being mustered out. Similarly, the refugees are the genuine article. Last Chance's enthusiasm and sincerity compensates for any lack of polish or skill among the amateur performers. The dialogue is spoken in several languages, requiring the film to be subtitled in every country where it was released Lussu, Emilio. Outwitting the Fascists. Italy To-Day 2nd Series, No. 3. London: Hendersons, Dondi, Mirco. Division and Conflict in the Partisan Resistance. Modern Italy 12, no. 2 (June 2007): Absalom, Roger. Allied Escapers and the Contadini in Occupied Italy (1943-5). Journal of Modern Italian Studies 10, no. 4 (December 2005): Topic 6: Marriage and the Family in the Soviet Union 1. Anon. The Marriage Laws of Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia Pamphlets 2. New York: The Russian Soviet Government Bureau, "The Soviet Code on Marriage and Divorce, the Family, and Guardianship, decrees of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, 19 November 1926" and "The Soviet Family Law of 8 July 1944, decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR" excerpts. n_marriage_and_law_code_on_motherhood_.htm 1. Kaminsky, Lauren. Utopian Visions of Family Life in the Stalin-Era Soviet Union. Central European History (Cambridge University Press / UK) 44, no. 1 (2011): Gorsuch, Anne E. A Woman is not a Man : The Culture of Gender and Generation in Soviet Russia, Slavic Review 55, no. 3 (1996): Topic 7: Nazi Euthanasia 1. Excerpt of the sermon by Catholic Cardinal Clemens von Galen, delivered on Sunday, August 3, 1941, in Münster Cathedral 2. Signed Letter by Hitler Authorizing Euthanasia Killings (backdated to September 1, 1939) 3. Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases (July 14, 1933), Rassenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP - Erbkrank (silent film) 1. Koonz, Claudia. Ethical Dilemmas and Nazi Eugenics: Single-Issue Dissent in Religious Contexts. Journal of Modern History 64, supplement (1992): S8-S Griech-Polelle, Beth. Image of a Churchman-Resister: Bishop Von Galen, the Euthanasia Project and the Sermons of Summer Journal of Contemporary History 36, no. 1 (January 2001):

5 Topic 8: Hitler s plans for the German Economy and the Volksgemeinschaft Hitler, Adolf. On National Socialism and World Relations. Speech Delivered in the German Reichstag on January 30th Berlin: M. Müller & Sohn K.G., Kurlander, Eric. Between Detroit and Moscow : A Left Liberal Third Way in the Third Reich. Central European History 44, no. 2 (June 2011): Welch, David. Manufacturing a Consensus: Nazi Propaganda and the Building of a National Community (Volksgemeinschaft). Contemporary European History 2, no. 1 (1993): Topic 9: The Popularity of the Nazi Election Platform Primary Document: 1. Feder, Gottfried. The Programme of the N.S.D.A.P. and its General Conceptions. Munich: Frz. Eher Nachf. G.m.B.H., Joseph Goebbels, Make Way for Young Germany, speech in Munich, 31 July Adolf Hitler s Speech at the 1927 Nuremberg Rally King, Gary, Ori Rosen, Martin Tanner, and Alexander F. Wagner. Ordinary Economic Voting Behavior in the Extraordinary Election of Adolf Hitler. The Journal of Economic History 68, no. 4 (2008): Hamilton, Richard F. The Rise of Nazism: A Case Study and Review of Interpretations -- Kiel, German Studies Review 26, no. 1 (February 2003):