Announcements for 4/28
Posted: April 28, 2011 Filed under: Announcements Leave a comment »1. Our final class meeting next week will begin at 9am on FRIDAY, MAY 6. Bring the hard copy of your final essay, which must be uploaded to Blackboard before class. I will take attendance. Also, the regular late policy will NOT be in place; all late papers will receive a 0. Be sure that you leave yourself enough time to upload it to Blackboard.
2. During finals week professors usually don’t keep their regular office hours (since the schedules are so different), so my office hours next week will be from 11:00 to 12:45 on Wednesday, May 4.2.
Announcements for 3/29
Posted: March 29, 2011 Filed under: Announcements Leave a comment »Next week I will be presenting at a conference, so there are a few changes to the schedule. We will have class on Tuesday, but my office hours on Wednesday will be canceled as will class and office hours on Thursday (April 7). I will still be available by email should any problems arise.
Announcements for 3/15
Posted: March 15, 2011 Filed under: Announcements Leave a comment »1. When you sign the attendance sheet, you must sign your own name and no one else’s. I need an accurate attendance record, so don’t sign in your friends!
2. There will be no map quiz this week, so focus on the textbook and our debate about Andrew Jackson’s Indian policies.
Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Exhibition
Posted: March 10, 2011 Filed under: Interesting Tidbits Leave a comment »
This is the website for the Lewis and Clark National Bicentennial Exhibition. I had the opportunity to see this while it was in St. Louis and I can attest to the many interesting artifacts included in the exhibit. The homepage includes links to a virtual map of the Corp of Discovery’s route (under “Virtual Journey”), and if you launch the video on the homepage it will end with a link to the gallery, which contains the images we used in our material culture analysis along with other items contemporary to the expedition. There are also some educational materials for those of you who are secondary ed majors.
General Comments on Student Essays
Posted: March 9, 2011 Filed under: Assignments, Helpful Tips Leave a comment »These comments may or may not apply to each of you, but I wanted to post them here so everyone would be on the same page.
1. Make sure that your paper is uploaded to Blackboard by 9:30am on the due date AND that you bring me a hard copy. This requirement appears on the assignment description. I was a little lenient for this first essay, but for the next assignments, your file must appear in both places to be considered complete.
2. I generally only correct grammar, style, usage, and punctuation on the first few pages. What you need to do is take that advice and apply it to the rest of the paper; this will help you improve your writing since it requires you to locate the problems yourself and figure out how to fix them. I can talk you through some of those issues, or you can take your work to the Writing Center, located on the second floor of the Psychology Building. UNC-Chapel Hill also has some articles that I highly recommend. Becoming a better writer takes practice and hard work, but it will pay off in the end! Don’t be afraid or embarrassed to ask for help, since I guarantee that every student in every major has something to work on in this respect.
3. Citations are NOT optional! Remember that even if you are just paraphrasing you still need to cite the source, even if it is not a direct quote.
4. Just because you are using a citation style that may be unfamiliar does not mean you should throw everything you know out the window. Just like in MLA format, when you use the Chicago style you need to cite every quotation, put quotation marks around any words that are not your own, etc. All of those requirements stay the same no matter what citation style you use; the MLA and Chicago styles have more similarities than differences. If you are still struggling with citations, please come see me and I can provide some advice and guidance.
5. Don’t forget about the “conventions of history” discussion we had earlier this semester, which included such advice as: 1) don’t use the first person, 2) avoid casual language, 3) write in the past tense when describing past events or people, etc. You read about this on pp. 22-30 of the course reader, so if you need to, go back through those few pages and refresh your memory.
Citation Style for HIST201 Essays
Posted: February 25, 2011 Filed under: Helpful Tips Leave a comment »The citation style you will be using in this course will be the footnotes style, also known as the Turabian style or the Chicago style (not parenthetical citations as in the MLA format).
In order for your footnotes to display correctly, you will need to use the automated feature in your word processor.* If you are still using Word 2003 on a PC or Word 2008 on a Mac, you can insert a footnote by clicking “Insert”–>”Reference”–>”Footnote,” which will pop your cursor down to the bottom of the page. That is where you type the citation. In Word 2007 for PCs, you can click on the “References” ribbon and then click “Insert Footnote.” You will need to add content to the footnote manually. If you use the “Add Citation” feature, at least on my office computer, it will not be correct even if you select Chicago or Turabian as your style.
Your essay can only have one footnote #1, one footnote #2, etc., so don’t manipulate the footnotes to start renumbering on each page. Think of it like page numbers–it would be confusing if a paper had two or three pages all with #1 in the corner, so the same goes for footnotes.
To figure out the content for those footnotes, use the Chicago Style Citation Manual posted here under “Class Handouts.” Also, the Turabian Manual Quick Guide and Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide include formatting information. In both cases, use the “N” format for notes. You will not be using the author-date system (used in the hard sciences).
All of this may sound complicated, but footnotes are really quite easy as long as you follow these directions! More than likely your computer’s default setting is correct, so if you find yourself having to change all of the settings and it gets complicated, then there is a good chance you are doing it wrong. Adding footnotes is not a complicated or tricky maneuver.
*You cannot add footnotes into the footer of the paper, because the text that appears in the footer will appear on every page in the exact same format. The description listed above is the ONLY correct way to add citations, so do not attempt to adjust it manually.
Submitting Digital Assignments
Posted: February 24, 2011 Filed under: Assignments, Helpful Tips Leave a comment »If you don’t know how to turn in a digital assignment in Blackboard 9.1, check out this YouTube video tutorial.
Announcements for 2/22
Posted: February 22, 2011 Filed under: Announcements Leave a comment »1. There will be no map quiz this week, but keep up with your studying because we will have more in the future.
2. As I said in class last week, I have eased students into the course so the reading load is going to pick up in the next few weeks. There is also a change to the syllabus. For this week read pp. 66-95 AND pp. 115-124 in the Henretta textbook.
Olaudah Equiano a Fraud?
Posted: February 21, 2011 Filed under: Interesting Tidbits Leave a comment »
One of the primary sources we will be discussing tomorrow is an excerpt from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African, originally published in 1789. This is one of the most influential books by an African, and famed Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (author of Things Fall Apart) has called Equiano “the father of African literature.” [1] However, in the past decade there has been some debate about Equiano’s birth and whether or not he actually experienced the horrors of the Middle Passage. This news article from The Guardian provides a brief introduction to this issue and explains why some historians, particularly Vincent Carretta, have cast doubt on the narrative’s accuracy. I continue to assign this source to students because Carretta’s evidence does not mitigate the usefulness of a source that presents the African perspective on the Middle Passage (see Paul Lovejoy’s article available here).
If you are interested in learning more about Equiano’s life, his autobiography is available online and for purchase at sites like Amazon.com.
* The image above is taken from The National Maritime Museum’s Atlantic World Gallery.
[1] David Dabydeen, “Review: Equiano the African by Vincent Carretta,” accessed February 17, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/dec/03/featuresreviews.guardianreview3?INTCMP=SRCH.
Announcements for 2/15
Posted: February 15, 2011 Filed under: Announcements Leave a comment »1. This week’s reading assignment from the textbook has been changed slightly. Instead of reading pp. 96-126 in the Henretta textbook, read only pp. 96-115. We will catch pp. 115-126 later in the course. There will be five questions about the textbook on this week’s quiz.
2. The states you need to identify for this week’s quiz are: the Mid-Atlantic states (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware), and the “Old Northwest” states around the Great Lakes (Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin).
