Post an essay of 2,000 to 2,500words in the assignment section of the website on this question, and use the material assigned up to this point in the course as evidence: What was the most important variable in determining immigrant success?You might consider such variables as immigrants attitudes and cultures as well as variations in how native-born Americans treated them as well as such variables as gender, social class, and age.Required Texts:
Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and
Immigrants since 1882, Hill and Wang, 2004.Miriam Cohen, Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian American
Women in New York City, 1900-1950, Cornell University Press, 1993.Ruben Martinez, Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail,
Picador, 2001.William Kelleher Storey, Writing History: A Guide for Students, Oxford
University Press, 5th edition.You will also be required to read an autobiography written by an immigrant (or the child of an immigrant) to the United States since the 1870s and at least five articles. You must do your own research to locate the autobiography and one of the articles.About the Books Guarding the Golden Door focuses on immigration policy in the United States since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Roger Daniels is one of the most prominent historians of American immigration. This book focuses more on what immigrants faced than how they acted; it sheds a great deal of light on the changing nature of federal policies.
Workshop to Office is a specialized study, a monograph (based on primary and secondary sources) that is very well written and focused. It has a precise and nuanced thesis regarding Italian-American womens changing commitment to their families. It shows how the nature of that commitment could change dramatically in a single generation while retaining much of its intensity.
Crossing Over is one of the most engaging and incisive books that I have read in the past couple years. Martinez is not an historian or an academic, but he did a great deal of personal research among Mexicanos on both sides of the border for this book, and he uses that experience to give readers a very personalized view of how migration to and from the United States affects people on both sides of the border.
Writing History is a brief but useful introduction to how historians go about conceiving, researching, and writing a research paper. If you have already written a major research paper for an upper-division history course, you may find this somewhat redundant. But every hour you spend reading this is likely to save you several down the road.Week #3
Read/View: Weekly introductory lecture
Early Draft of Long Essay #1; Discussion #3:
Post an essay of 2,000 to 2,500 words on this question, and use the material assigned up to this point in the course as evidence: What was the most important variable in determining immigrant success? You might consider such variables as immigrants attitudes and cultures as well as variations in how native-born Americans treated them as well as such variables as gender, social class, and age.Long Essays
Long essays (from 2,000 to 2,500 words) are assigned every three weeks or so during the term.
With the exception of the last assignment, it is sufficient (for all the essays posted in the discussions and the first two longer essays) to provide references only after quotations, with the editor and page numbers in parentheses. It is not necessary to list your sources at the end of the paper.
The last long essay should use the standard form of references (footnotes and a bibliography) stipulated in the Chicago Manual of Style by Kate Turabian. This system is summarized in Storey. A fuller version can be accessed through this link: (http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html). Each paragraph that presents evidence should end with a footnote that lists the sources of the evidence used in the paragraph, and the essay should be followed by a bibliography that lists all the sources used in the essay. This last essay must use the two articles specified above and at least three others from scholarly journals (such as the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, the Journal of American Ethnic History) accessed via the Oregon State Library. Here is the link to the OSU Librarys page for Ecampus: http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/. This link provides access to such resources as: information on how to borrow books from the library (and others in the Pacific Northwest) without visiting the Corvallis campus; the general catalogue (useful for finding immigrant autobiographies); finding aids such as American History and Life (to use in finding articles relevant to the autobiography one selects); and e-journals (so that one can access those journals electronically).
Tips on Essay Writing
All of the essays, brief and more extensive, should be interpretive and analytical. I am not looking for a book review or a summation of what you found interesting in the readings. Rather, I am looking for an engaging and convincing answer to a thorny question.
The trick to writing a strong essay is to both construct an interesting argument that answers the question and to back it up with evidence. The evidence is of two general types: primary and secondary. Primary sources are documents (or maps, paintings, photographs) produced by the people under study, the historical actors. Secondary texts are written by scholars, by the people doing the studying. Diaries, personal letters, or census returns are primary sources. Secondary sources are attempts to make sense out of the past, usually by people with no first-hand experience of the period they are interpreting. Your essays should use evidence from both primary and secondary sources when both are available. I have provided an example of a brief essay at the end of this section. I wrote it many years ago in a class at Northwestern University on the colonial U.S. Notice the essays structure: the thesis is declared clearly (I hope) at the close of the first paragraph. Each of the next several paragraphs then supports that thesis by marshaling several pieces of evidence from an historical source. Each of these paragraphs begins with a topic sentence, a sentence that links the evidence (in the body of the paragraph) to the thesis (the sentence at the close of the first paragraph). The essay closes with a brief conclusion that restates the thesis and speaks to larger ramifications. I have also pasted an example of an excellent student essay written for this class from a previous year. It is important to be consistentand being consistent is much harder than it looks. You will inevitably find that the body of your paper begins to drift from your thesis. Do not panic. Simply make adjustments. Revise your thesis or rework the body to fit it more closely. I expect the essays to be clear. Brilliance is not much use if no one can understand you. Strive for clear, concise sentences. Try to be sensitive to complexity in all of your essays. I often ask students to agree or disagree to an assertion. Take a firm stand in answering such questions, but the answer can be nuanced as well as firm, can, for example, agree in some respects and disagree in others.
I shall of course give you more detailed and particular feedback as we go along; the course is designed for that. I find that my own writing improves dramatically with critical feedback, and many students have said the same thing. Think of writing as being like marriage: an ongoing process. We never arrive at perfection, and we get closer to it by working hard, not by being innately talented. Online tutoring for writing is available at: http://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/services/student-services/online-tutoring/.