Introduction

Students taking this class for graduate credit should expect to do everything the undergraduates do plus some. Since graduate students are assumed to have some basic content and academic skills under their belt already, I will ask you to cover a little more ground this semester both in terms of learning material and analyzing it critically. This business of critical analysis marks the most important distinction between graduate and undergraduate education. In this course, that means that you should learn how historians agree and disagree in their analyses of post-1945 American history and be able to assess their various interpretations through a critical analysis of their arguments, sources, and methods. You should also be able to interpret primary sources in light of their historical context, authors, audience, and form as well as content. I hope to teach the undergraduates the beginnings of these skills; you should be refining them.

To that end, you will have slightly more rigorous requirements for this class and my expectations for the work you share with the undergraduates will be higher. We will need to meet a few times in addition to the weekly Thursday afternoons.

Requirements

These will be the same as for the undergraduates with the following changes:

We will schedule additional meetings occasionally to discuss the reading and your papers. When you write the short papers that are due, yours will incorporate a few more sources and should wind up being a few pages longer. I might give you separate paper topics to help you do this—we’ll see.

You will write a final paper in addition:

Students in the graduate history program may write a historiographical essay on a topic of their choice. It should incorporate about four monographs, book reviews of them, and at least one scholarly article, and be about 10 pages long.

The other option is to do a more teaching-oriented project. These final projects will be a short teaching unit (20-30 minutes), with supporting material. These will also be on a topic of your choice, and geared towards a student audience of a level you may designate. You must present the topic on three levels: 1) information—what information should students at this level know about your topic; 2) analysis—place the information in its appropriate historical context, identify important themes, and explain how this topic is connected to other related topics and events; and 3) interpretation—how have different people interpreted this topic/event, where do they agree and disagree, and why? In addition to presenting your topic, you will hand in a detailed lesson plan and a bibliography that should include about five monographs, book reviews of them, and at least one scholarly article.

The weight of your assignments towards your final course grade will be:

Midterm and final (20% each, 40% total)

Short papers (15% each, 30% total)

Final paper (20%)

Participation (10%)