Assignment needed,
So, you want to do what's called a close reading on Harriet Jacobs' memoir, as a case study of the experiences of enslaved women? That's a fine topic. The Dubey and Harnay articles in your list look like they would probably work for secondary sources, though the Raffield piece will likely be irrelevant, and the Russell article may not be relevant either (though it might be.) You might also look at Thelma Jennings' and “Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation.”
; it doesn't give access to the entire text, but you can read a decent chunk of it there.
Rubric for Term Paper
Many of you will not have written a college-level history paper before – for many of you, thismight well be the only college-level history paper you write. Because this is the case, your gradewill not be affected by citation form. A history paper properly ought to use Chicago-stylecitations, meaning footnotes1 rather than in-text citations (like this). I want to see footnotes ratherthan in-text citations for correctness’ sake, and the “Helpful Hints” document found in Module 1will show you how to create and format footnotes, but you will not lose points for citation style.There are two primary criteria on which your grade will be based. These are:1. Your ability to come up with a strong, historically-focused argument (or “thesis”) relatingto your paper topic (your “thesis statement,” which is this argument summarized in oneor two sentences, should appear at the end of your introductory paragraph.)2. Your ability to uphold your argument/thesis, in the main body of your paper, both bysolid historical reasoning and by demonstrating that your sources support it.For most historical papers, the starting point is a research question, and the argument or thesiswhich the paper will present is the answer to that question as determined by the information thewriter has gained from their research. It’s important to be open to the idea that you might besurprised by what you find; it’s bad practice to simply make an assumption beforehand and thentry to fit what you read to that pre-existing assumption, because this can blind you to mistakesyou might be making and cause you to misinterpret what you read. I want to emphasize the“historically-focused argument (or thesis)” and “historical reasoning” parts here. A history paperis not a report, or a simple description of something that happened, or a scientific/sociologicalstudy of a social phenomenon. Rather, it examines past events and people, comes to a conclusionabout what it examines, and presents the historical evidence for that conclusion accompanied bya logical explanation about how that evidence backs up the conclusion. You will lose points ifyou turn in a paper which is not a history paper – for example, if you give me a report on thesocial impact of a particular gendered workplace practice without a clear argument/thesis and/ora primary focus on the historical aspects of this practice.4-5 Pages in length
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