Overview
Choose one of the prompts below and write an essay of 1,500-2,000 words. These prompts require formulating historical arguments and supporting them with specific examples that you’ve learned about in class. Choose concrete examples that you think provide the best evidence to illustrate your points. Be sure to provide the specific historical context that is necessary to explaining those examples/events. Avoid making overly broad, sweeping generalizations. Your paper should immediately dive into addressing the prompt you are responding to. It should have an introduction, body paragraphs, and brief conclusion. To make your case, draw on Give Me Liberty and lectures for context, as well as primary documents from Voices of Freedom. At a minimum, incorporate six documents from Voices of Freedom in your paper (at least three of which should be from Chapters 11-17, and all of which could come from Chapters 11-17), three different lectures, and three different citations from Give Me Liberty. Please use a 12-point font and double space with 1” margins. As with the first paper, you may refer to the course texts and lectures parenthetically: if you use the textbook for context (Foner, Chapter 9). In the case of Voices of Freedom documents, please cite title or author of the document and page number—for example (Livermore, 293) if citing Mary Livermore’s document. In the case of lectures.
Please write your name and the number of the prompt you’re answering at the top of the paper. No other heading is required.
In an 1864 speech, when describing northern and southern ideals of freedom, Abraham Lincoln asserted: “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.” The history of the nineteenth century could be explained as a series of debates over different understandings of “freedom.” Choose two pivotal moments or examples from 19th century history that illustrate this point. What are several key examples of when multiple groups clashed over definitions of freedom, what were those competing definitions, and what resulted from these contests? Keep in mind internal debates around freedom within different groups and be specific about whom you’re referring to. (For example, depending on the moment you’re writing about, the term “Republican” might be too broad considering the internal debates within the Republican party around how to define freedom.Be more specific—free soil Republicans? Radical Republicans?)
2. Over the course of the 19th century, questions around U.S. citizenship and who was a citizen of the U.S. became hotly contested. Explore two to three different groups of people, movements, and/or legal battles that sought to change the meaning of citizenship during the 19th century and who it included or excluded. What was the outcome of these efforts, and what do they tell us about the nature of citizenship and how it changed in the 19th century? Be sure to explain how the actors you are writing about defined citizenship, understandings of which changed over the course of the nineteenth century (the right to vote, for instance, became increasingly important to definitions of citizenship as property qualifications fell). 3. Historian Richard White posits that in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the concept of “home” was a key site of ideological battles and a powerful lens through which most people expressed political, economic, gendered, and racialized ideals. He writes: “Home embodied all the gendered and racialized assumptions of American republicanism and the American economy...The threat to the home—from industrialization, great wealth, and urbanization—became a threat to the entire society. Farmers and workers mobilized the home in defense of their interests. Those who failed to secure proper homes were cast as a danger to the white home—as happened to Chinese, blacks, Indians, and to a lesser degree some European immigrants.” Use this quote as a point of departure for an essay that explores how two to three different groups of people understood “home” in political, economic, and/or social campaigns. Or explore two to three different moments in the nineteenth century when debates or contestations over the “home” were central (think about Reconstruction, Jim Crow, nineteenth-century temperance and anti-lynching movements, among others). Be sure to provide historical context on how the concept of “home” changed from earlier periods in U.S. history and was understood in U.S. nineteenth-century culture. A reminder that use of ChatGPT or other AI tools constitutes academic misconduct. We, your professor and TAs, can discern material that relies on ChatGPT based both on our experience and on software that helps identify it.