HI 460 Cross-Cultural Encounters

October is pumpkins, apple cider, wonderfully crisp mornings, spooky decorations (this year: a political horror show) and … writing. Writing. WRITING. Here’s an overview of Unit 2, from Oct 10th to Oct 26th when your Skeleton Draft is due.

Class meetings
10/10 University holiday, no class meeting

10/12 Meet in the library for a research working session with Dr. Hangen and Dr. Griffiths

10/17 Source Analysis workshop – bring one primary source you’ll be using

10/19 and 10/24 A 2-part workshop on historiography; bring your current draft of the historiography section either on your laptop or as a printout

10/26 Skeleton Draft due in class (printed). We’ll watch a film in class – title TBA

Due Dates
10/21 Make sure by this date you have 6 journal entries posted to your WordPress (see prompts below)
10/26 Skeleton Draft due – see Project Guidelines tab for the details

Journal #5 Prompt
Write about your Launch Pad book. Write a book review or thoughtful critique of it, or describe what you’ve learned from it and how you’ll be incorporating or drawing on it in your paper. Or outline its strengths and weaknesses. What does it make you want to read next?

Journal #6 Prompt
Take one primary source (it can be the one you brought to class, or another one) and write a close reading / analysis of it. Consider elements such as genre, creator, motivation/intention, audience, provenance, rhetoric, structure, surface meaning, historical context, and deeper meaning. What are the “dogs not barking”? What still puzzles / intrigues you about this source?

Photo: Creative Commons licensed image from kellywritershouse

J4 Journal Prompt, due Friday Oct 8. Use this journal entry to outline your finalized topic and your research inquiry / strategy. There is no class on Monday, Oct 10th.

Reminder, please meet in the back of the LRC research area (same spot as last time) with your laptops on Wednesday, October 12. We’ll be working with Dr. Ross Griffiths on deeper / more specific research into your topics. I’ve given him a list of the topics, but also please come prepared with your questions and challenges. The goal of our session is to help you work through any of your current research bottlenecks. I look forward to seeing you there.

…after graduation, that is.

For your J6 journal prompt, spend some time in self-reflective writing thinking about your post-graduate plans. Continue reading →

Our only class meeting next week will be Wednesday, Feb 17th. You’ll notice there’s no assigned reading, and that’s because you should spend this week reading whatever YOU need to read as you identify and create your initial paper topic. Continue reading →

Manseau’s book has given us an overview of US religious history from the perspective of alternative / marginalized / persistent religious difference dating back to the nation’s earliest era. I have appreciated our lively discussion about this book and its argument.

This week, as a class, we’ll tackle some foundational common primary source texts in American religious history. Continue reading →

This week we are reading Peter Manseau’s ambitious revisionist religious history, One Nation Under Gods. Continue reading →

Reminder: make sure you’ve completed the Research Self-Assessment, posted on Blackboard.

For your first research journal entry for the semester, tackle a high school or college U.S. textbook of your choice. Study how (or whether!) it covers topics involving religion. Continue reading →

We are winding up our first unit (Very Recent History, A Crash Course) which has included an introduction to some of the methodological issues involved in dealing with recent history including archives, sources, privacy, ethics, and chronology; a well-crafted journalist’s account of America Unwinding; and some exploration with an “archives” of our own making. We now have 6 teams (they are updated under the Teams tab, above) to help organize our next unit on Research Strategy, which starts after Thursday’s class.

By way of follow-up to our discussion today of fair use and copyright, I spotted this link today – a flowchart about plagiarism – worth a look.

For the Journal #4 due on Thurs 10/2, please write a 600-700 word journal post that lays out your topic as it currently stands AND your anticipated primary source base. The latter is not hypothetical or what you HOPE to find, but should be actual sources you’ve already looked at and know that they exist and are open to you. Bring laptops to class ready for a writing exercise.

Thursday’s class will introduce a new book, George Packer’s The Unwinding, a literary nonfiction book about America’s recent past. He’s making an overall argument (that the American promise has begun to unwind, and that we can date the start of that process to about the late 1970s), but it’s certainly not a scholarly book. Rather, The Unwinding is written by a talented journalist (he’s a New Yorker staff writer) for a popular audience through interwoven biographies of both famous and ordinary Americans. I think Packer captures well the zeitgeist of the era and it makes for compelling reading and is a lovely model of innovative “recent history” writing; don’t just take my word for it, the book won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2013 (PS: you can also find him visiting The Daily Show and the Colbert Report to pitch the book’s release).

For Thursday 9/18, please read the Prologue, and bring the book with you to class. Continue reading →

Reading for Thursday, Sept 11 = Scott McLemee, “Is It History Yet?” (a review of the Potter & Romano book, Doing Recent History). Continue reading →