History 120: US History Survey

In this assignment you will search the online database The Geography of Slavery, a collection of thousands of newspaper advertisements about runaway slaves and servants. You will record information from at least 30 ads in a spreadsheet or other document: 10 from 1736-1763, 10 from 1764-1786, 10 from 1787-1803. Download a blank Excel spreadsheet. Write a 500-word blog post analyzing your data, and provide a link to your spreadsheet in your blog post. Consider these questions as you begin to compile your database:

1. Did anything change between 1736 and 1803? Did ads for one kind of runaway become more common? Did the things the ads said, or the information they gave, change over time? Was there any evidence of change in attitudes from the Revolutionary War?
2. What kind of unfree labor are you seeing most often? Apprentices? Slaves? Servants? Is it sometimes hard to tell? Does it become easier over time to tell if the runaway is a slave, an apprentice, or a servant?
3. How old were the runaways? Did their age change over time? Where were they from?
4. What kinds of marks distinguished them? Did they try to disguise themselves?
5. Did the runaways seem to have any resources—that is, were they poor and ragged, or well dressed? Did they seem to have help, or were they alone?
6. Was there a reward offered? Did it vary depending on the person?
7. Did the runaways appear to have any skills?
8. How often did the ads give the race or color of the runaway? Was it sometimes hard to tell?
9. Did the runaways attempt to disguise themselves?
10. Is there any consistent pattern to their movements—that is, are most of them escaping from one place to another? Does that pattern change?

After considering these questions, begin a careful analysis of the data. There is no right or wrong answer in this assignment: instead, I will grade how well you support your conclusions.

It’s often useful to begin by considering if anything you found was unexpected. Were you surprised by anything you found—or didn’t find? Historians pay special attention to these "gaps" between what we expect as "normal" and what we seem to find in the material. Consider those things that surprised you—what can you conclude from them?

Next, try looking for patterns. Did the things that surprised you tend to repeat? Were there other repeated patterns? It’s worthwhile to make a list of any patterns you notice. Can you see any relationship among these patterns?

Finally, consider whether there has been any change over time. Did you notice anything different in the last set of ads? If so, what did it mean? Your goal here is not just to report what you see, but also to try to figure out what it means. You should feel free to speculate, as long as you have evidence. Here is a guide to using historical documents.

This next part is crucial: Your paper should have a thesis, a conclusion you have drawn about runaways. It should support that thesis with evidence drawn from the information in your database. It needs to be more than the obvious, more than something like "most runaways were men." You should try to be as precise as possible and to take account of any change that occurred over time. When you are describing or quoting from the evidence you have found, you must give the source in a foot or endnote.

This assignment asks you to write a 500-word critique of the movie The Patriot. This is not simply a summary of the movie. Rather, you should address how the movie presents and interprets the American Revolution though the story, characters, and composition. Ultimately, you need to explain how the movie uses these elements to present an historical argument or message. Your thesis should answer, in some form: What is the argument or central historical message of The Patriot, is it a valid argument, and why?

Guiding Questions for The Patriot

Context of the film:

• Who are the producers/writers? What is the film’s production history?
• How was the film received? Are there any differences between how academic historians and popular movie critics received the film?
• Who is the audience?

Content

• What are the Americans fighting for?
• Who are the various characters? How are they represented or portrayed?
• How are slaves and slavery depicted in the film? What is the role of black workers on Benjamin Martin’s plantation? Is the depiction of maroon black community in the film realistic?
• Who were the Loyalists and the Patriots? How are each depicted?
• How are the British depicted?
• What is the cause of the American Revolution?

You should cite examples from the movie, such as specific scenes, to help support your thesis. Feel free to use reviews of this film, but be sure to cite any you find and use. There are numerous reviews available on GMU library databases, including:

• History Cooperative
• JSTOR
• Project Muse
• Expanded Academic ASAP

All of these can be accessed through the GMU University Library’s Database Wizard.

Almost as soon as Europeans arrive on the eastern coast of what is now the United States, they continued to move west. After gaining independence, Americans continued to move west, some in search of independence and wealth, others away from cultures and trends with which they did not agree. In the nineteenth century, there were over 130 attempts establish utopian communities, many of them in the west. The goals of each varied widely, but all had the goal of creating a perfect society, and believed moving west would help accomplish that goal.

What really motivated Americans’ westward movement in the 18th and early 19th centuries? To answer this question, your task is to create your own utopian society, using the Simutopia module on Exploring U.S. History.

Read through the module to gain some background information on events happening in Jacksonian America. At the end, you will create a utopian community that address some problem or issue facing society during Jacksonian America.

You post should explain the ideology and goals of your utopia. What problems does your community seek to resolve? Is it a religious community, a socialist community, or a profit-seeking capitalist community? How would wealth be distributed? How would people live? Is it rural, or urban? Is it closed to the world, or open? What are your community’s values, rules, and customs? Who is allowed in your community? Who is not? Who is in charge, and why? Finally, how does the design of your community, its physical layout, reflect the character and values of your community?

You will need to put a picture of your utopian community in your Flickr account, and link to it in your blog post. For Windows PC users, create the community in the Flash application. Then, press the Print Screen button to copy your computer screen. After that, open Paint or another image-editing program of your choice, and paste the picture into the Paint/other image-editing program. From there, you can edit the picture, save it as a JPEG, and put the image into your Flickr account.

Macintosh users should create the community in the Flash application, then press Cmd+Shift+3 to create a screenshot of your desktop. (Optionally, you can press Cmd+Shift+4 to select what part of the screen you want to copy.) It should save your screenshot to the desktop, usually as Picture 1.png. From here, you can open the file in your favorite image editor, or upload the picture to Flickr and link to it in your post.

Give your utopia a name, talk about some of the people that are in your community. You can write your blog post as a constitution or compact that lays out laws, rules, rights, etc. You can write this from the perspective of the founder of the community, or one of its residents. I encourage creativity. Have fun with this, but think seriously about the problems and issues facing Americans in the early nineteenth century. Say what problems your community will solve, and why you think they should be solved.

This assignment asks you to choose one possible topic out of three to complete, and write a blog post about your findings. No bolded these statement is required, but you should stil think about how to make an argument, and provide evidence for your argument. The choices are as follows:

Choice #1: Alien Menace

Complete the Alien Menace module on Exploring US History

You assignment is to look for stereotypes of the Irish in modern culture, and compare them to images found in the module. How have our conceptions on the Irish changed over time? How have they stayed the same? You should also reflect on any other stereotypes, in the past and present.

Choice #2: A Bad Rap

Complete the Bad Rap module on Exploring US History

Your assignment involves finding a song from the African American Sheet Music collection at American Memory, and comparing it with a modern rap song. The goal here, like with Alien Menace, is to explore cultural stereotypes. The module has questions to help you guide your essay.

Choice #3: Understanding Advertising

Complete the Understanding Advertising module on Exploring US History

For this assignment, you should compare one modern ad to one ad from an archive listed on the module site. You can upload these images to Flickr, or embed them in your blog post. Your post should focus on a specific “theme” used in advertising, and focus on how that theme has been used or changed over time.

This assignment asks you to critique how women are represented and characterized over time, using film and television as sources. You should view one of three video clips on YouTube that relate to women in the post-World War II, then find a video clip on YouTube that depicts women today and compare the two. The three historical films are:

"Choosing for Happiness" (Part 1) "Cooking Terms!" "Oldsmobile What Women Want" (Part 1)

Questions to Address

1. How does your film characterize women, and why?

2. What specific scenes, or elements from teh film, illustrate these characteristics?

3. Have these characterizations changed over time (from teh 1950s to today)? Why or why not? Your thesis should, in some way, address how the roles of women, as depicted in film and television, have changed (or stayed the same) over time, and why. You should embed the two clips you compare in your blog post; I will show you how to do this in class. Your post will be docked 10 points if you fail to embed the clips in your post.