U. S. History Dr. VA

SECOND QUARTER PAPER ASSIGNMENT: PRE-CIVIL WAR LIFE IN AMERICA

This is your official memorandum regarding a role-playing assignment that you are to complete in two parts:

1. A research paper (maximum 5 pages, word-processed, double-spaced), drawing in part from original source material, on one of the antebellum historical figures to be chosen from the attached list.

2. A convincing performance as the person you have written about, done in authentic period dress, to take place in class for about three days during the last week of school before the December holiday.

The paper, based on extensive investigation of your character’s life, should be presented in first person (as if you were that person) in the form of what historians now would consider a primary source: a series of journal entries, a personal letter, an editorial, a speech, a sermon, or whatever. Or it could be some combination of these things. This simulated document should be dated, and the date(s) must fall sometime during the period 1815-1860.

Though it may focus on a particular event or idea, the piece should reveal what you see as the most salient traits of your person: the qualities of mind, temperament, or character that most distinguished him/her from other figures of the day. This profile should be based on as much outside research as time permits. You are to use both original and secondary sources. Let us agree on at least 5 sources (in addition to the assigned reading for class), including at least 1 primary document. One of these sources, however, may be the entry for your person in the Dictionary of American Biography or, better yet, the new 20-volume American National Biography collection. Mrs. Fenton will be glad to help you find and use either of these sources in the library’s reference collection. All publications you use in research and writing are to be footnoted (or endnoted) whenever appropriate and listed in a full bibliography appended to the paper. Any paper submitted without all of these required elements will not be accepted.

For the in-class role-playing exercise, you must come to class dressed as your character would dress (in period attire, or as close as you can come without spending very much money). The administrations of both schools will agree to suspend the regular dress code for you during the days of the role-playing. You are required to accurately reflect your character’s point of view on the social, political, economic, and cultural issues of the period 1815-1860. Beyond the additional research you will have done, careful attention to your reading assignments in the A People and A Nation text will be more vital than ever.

My role in the classroom exercise will be to introduce issues for group discussion and, if necessary, to ask questions intended to bring your character’s views to the fore. You really will have to know your stuff--both the history of this period and the extent of your character’s involvement in it. Each student’s participation will be graded according to how convincingly his/her performance is, and the results will count as a major (50 point) test.

The paper can be accepted no later than the date that I will announce in class. That will provide me enough time to complete the grading before the role-playing exercise begins.

William Lloyd Garrison (1879), abolitionist and newspaper editor.

Lucretia Mott (1880), women's rights advocate.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1892), women's rights advocate.

John Humphrey Noyes (1886), founder of Oneida Community in New York.

Brigham Young (1877), Mormon leader, following Joseph Smith.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1882), essayist, lecturer, abolitionist.

Henry David Thoreau (1862), transcendentalist and practitioner of civil disobedience.

Frederick Douglass (1895), escaped slave, lecturer, abolitionist.

Charles Sumner (1874), Massachusetts politician and abolitionist.

Dorothea Dix (1887), advocate of humane treatment for the "insane."

William Harper (1847), South Carolinian and defender of slavery.

William Campbell Preston (1860), South Carolinian, slaveholder, and defender of states’ rights.

Thomas Dew (1846), Virginian and defender of slavery.

George Fitzhugh (1881), Virginian and defender of slavery.

Charles G. Finney (1875), most influential revivalist of the 2^nd Great Awakening.

Theodore D. Weld (1895), abolitionist and Finney disciple.

Henry Clay (1852), Kentuckian, nationalist statesman, and three-time candidate for president.

John C. Calhoun (1850), nationally famous statesman from South Carolina.

Daniel Webster (1852), nationally famous Whig politician from Massachusetts.

Thomas Hart Benton (1858), nationally famous Jacksonian politician from Missouri.

Andrew Jackson (1845), hero of New Orleans and seventh President of the US.

Roger B. Taney (1864), Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1836 to 1864.

James K. Polk (1849), “Young Hickory” and President from 1844 to 1848.

Abraham Lincoln (1865), one-time obscure politician from Illinois and Civil War president.

George Henry Evans (1856), homestead policy advocate and land reformer.

Lydia Maria Child (1880), abolitionist and reformer.

Catharine Beecher (1878), educator and writer on moral/religious topics.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1896), widely-read author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

John Quincy Adams (1848), diplomat, 6^th President of the US, and son of John and Abigail.

Martin Van Buren (1862), Jacksonian Democrat and 8^th President of the US.

Susan B. Anthony (1906), social reformer and women’s suffrage leader.

Joseph Story (1845), Supreme Court justice and keep of the Marshall legacy.

Wendell Phillips (1884), abolitonist and crusader for social justice.

Denmark Vesey (1822), African-American mastermind of an unsuccessful slave revolt in Charleston, S. C.

Angelina Grimke (1879), abolitionist and women’s rights advocate.

Sarah Grimke (1873), abolitionist and women’s rights advocate.

Horace Greeley (1872), Whig (and later Republican) social reformer and newspaper editor.

Arthur Tappan (1865), abolitionist and philanthropist.

Lewis Tappan (1873), abolitionist and philanthropist.

Harriet Tubman (1913), escaped slave and conductor on Underground Railroad.

Theodore Parker (1860), minister, abolitionist, and social critic.

John Brown (1859), abolitionist, fanatic, and unsuccessful slave liberator.

Nat Turner (1831), slave insurrectionist in Southampton County, Virginia.

Jefferson Davis (1889), Southern Senator and, later, president of the Confederate States of America.

Sojourner Truth (1883), African-American abolitionist and women’s rights advocate.

Frederick Law Olmstead (1903), leading landscape architect, penetrating social observer, and author

Mary Boykin Chesnut (1886), Southern plantation wife and major pre-Civil War diarist.

James G. Birney (1857), lawyer, reformer, and Liberty Party candidate for president.

Francis Trollope (1863), English novelist, travel writer, author of Domestic Manners of the Americans.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1859), French political theorist, and author of Democracy in America.

Mother Ann Lee (1784), visionary, prophetess, and founder of the Shakers.

Herman Melville (1891), man of letters and author of Moby Dick.

Horace Mann (1859), educator and social reformer.