Example Essay Assignment

Example Assignment: Multimedia Essay(s)

As the Syllabus states, we will create two essays in this course. It is really one essay, with an “essay-in-progress” due midterm (covering the period through WWII) and the final version at the end of the semester (covering the entire century).

This multimedia essay assignment is meant to be an ongoing and culminating assignment. The content and skills taught week by week, along with the digital history skills developed in the lab, come together in this assignment. The idea of a midterm essay-in-progress is to give you critical feedback before you are finished so you have the opportunity to improve. It also is an effective way to prevent you from putting off the project until the end of the semester (a tactic many of us know all too well!).

Intent

There are several purposes of the project.

Develop competence with historical research in both primary and secondary sources.
Develop and present historical arguments about twentieth-century US history based on primary sources and informed by secondary sources in clear prose.
Develop basic digital humanities skills in both research and presentation.

Topics

Our research topics will be broadly political history. Our collaboration with the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning has already provided a couple large datasets: all the State of the Union Addresses for the twentieth century and each of the Republican and Democratic Party Platforms during presidential elections in the twentieth century. These datasets are not meant to be the heart of your work. Think instead of them being the background or foundation or skeleton of the century’s political history. They are a useful place to start and explore.

But you will follow your own interests.

Choose a topic that crosses the century in some way and can connect in some way to politics.

Here are some random ideas:

Examine the success and failure of civil rights legislation or litigation.
Investigate intersection of gender and family within the organized labor movement.
Track and explain the rise and fall of conservatism or liberalism within one party or another.
Look into anti-military activism among religious groups.
Analyze the political cartoons (or some other element of political culture) relating to women’s roles in elections or elective office.
Find out how the public pressured politicians to change immigration laws.

I could go on and on (and I’m happy to brainstorm with you). All of these examples would need better definition, but they give you a sense of topics that are not bounded by a small number of years (e.g., the political fortunes of the New Deal or the rise of Ronald Reagan).

You will not want to—or be able to—make this comprehensive. No history ever is. So, you’ll want to think strategically about the four or so subtopics or periods or examples you can use to develop your project. Having those examples, along with the background data, will furnish a nice set of evidence for your interpretation of one angle of twentieth-century US history.

Digital Data and Platform

Our labs will help you develop competence and confidence in both using digital humanities data and presenting in a digital form.

It may be that trends you find using the “distant reading” techniques of text analysis and topic modeling help you identify your research topic, or parts of it. Or you might be able to search the datasets we have provided for something like “family wage” or “civil rights” or “immigration” and see how those terms pop up in platforms and speeches. Or maybe your research topic is not present in the outputs of your “distant reading” exercises, and that absence may well be as revealing as its presence might have been.

In addition, writing in the multimedia format provides some new opportunities. For most history we read and produce traditionally, the historian or history student goes off, reads evidence, and reports back. But the digital platform allows you to incorporate, share, and link to primary sources, which invites your reader to follow the evidence themselves. It allows your research to be illustrated and more engaging than 10 straight pages of text. There’s no reason in 2022 for us to be working in the text medium alone!

And finally, why should only you and your professor get to see your hard work? Of course, there is no requirement that you make your multimedia essay public and available to anyone with an internet connection. But you could. And thinking seriously about what would make an engaging, convincing, and aesthetically-pleasing interpretation of twentieth-century US history available to the world (or your family or future employer) might get us outside the typical limited thinking of “what will please my professor.”

Here are a few examples to give you the look of these sorts of essays:

Sources

What Kind

The building blocks of historical analysis come from primary sources—that is, those sources created by participants and observers in the past. But scholars offer important insights in their secondary sources—that is, those sources experts create after studying many pieces of original evidence. At times, theoretical perspectives can inform an approach, and relying on background materials to get basic information can be helpful. We normally use all these sources in a big project; however, we do not use them all the same way. This is really important and gets overlooked too often which is why I’ve changed the type to get your attention and focus.

Here is quick way to think about these sources: Writers rely on background sources like encyclopedias or textbooks to verify general information, analyze primary sources from which they build their interpretations and arguments, engage secondary sources to show how their ideas fit with (e.g., overturn, extend, support) others’ ideas, and evoke or imply theoretical perspectives.

In other words, build your argument by analyzing primary sources; if you find yourself drawing conclusions from general, secondary, or theoretical works, you are doing it wrong.

How Many

Often students want to know the minimum number of sources required for an assignment. This is hard to judge, since no two sources are equal. One 500-page autobiography hardly compares to a 500-word newspaper article. But I recognize the need for guidelines. Typically, I think you need double the number of primary sources to secondary sources. Probably more even. A project of this scope probably needs around five scholarly sources. These are estimates, but they are reasonable ones. Of course, you do not need to read every word of every source. Last, as much as the basic number of sources, the type of sources matter, and you should strive to find different types, such as letters and photographs, speeches and news articles, oral histories and diaries, etc.

Where to Find Them

Avoid general Google searches, unless you are looking for something very specific; otherwise, you’ll be overwhelmed and get frustrated. Use scholarly databases instead on the Library’s website.

Think about diverse source types. A list of common types and how to use them is available here. Consider maps and photographs, as well as newspapers or memoirs and government reports.

Some Online Sources

The University of Idaho has a growing set of digitized sources in its Digital Collections. Pretty much every university has these now, so search out other universities and find their archival sources.

The National Archives have a great deal of sources available online. A lot of them are government reports, and that might sound boring, but they often contain fabulous resources.

The Internet Archive has also compiled a huge set of digital resources. I often find versions of documents that are accessible here that I cannot find elsewhere. Not all sources here are primary, so you’ll need to be careful.

Newspapers are better sources than you might imagine. Chronicling America has digitized a vast number of American newspapers going far back into the past, as you have learned in your WWI propaganda assignment.

There are many, MANY others; these are just ones I find useful.

Additional Requirements

Length

For the final essay, we are aiming for a paper that is roughly equivalent to 10 pages if it were typed and double spaced. That’s roughly 3000 words. That doesn’t include the footnotes or captions.

For the Essay-in-Progress, aim a little more than half of that. And the Essay-in-Progress only covers the twentieth century through World War II. Think of it as a complete essay of roughly the first five decades of the century.

Citations

Following the most frequent practice in history, we will use footnotes following the Turabian style (a version of Chicago Manual of Style). Samples and explanations of that format are available here.

A Word on Citation Practices: You should cite sources whenever you take someone else’s (a) words, (b) ideas, or (c) information that is not common knowledge. Otherwise, you are plagiarizing (i.e., passing off someone else’s work as your own). However, it is common and acceptable (and I find it very much preferable) to consolidate your notes. For instance, I typically use one footnote per paragraph in which I include every source or all the page numbers needed for the paragraph.

Note: In my experience, citing sources—especially if this is a new format—generates enormous anxiety in students. Don’t let it. First, misplacing a comma or having things out of order will be noticed, but it isn’t going to ruin your essay. Second, it is pretty simple, and I am always happy to help you figure it out. So, please try to relax on that.

Questions

We never want you to feel alone in this process and project. So reach out and ask questions. Feel free to make appointments to chat via Zoom.

Topic Modeling Data Resources