You may choose any of the following three options. Your rough draft is due in class on
November 5. It will be returned, with comments and an indicative grade (not used in calculating
your final grade), in class on November 19. The final draft is due on December 1.
Whichever option you choose, your essay should present a clear and interesting argument, an
insight that is the product of careful reading, analysis, and thought. Do not summarize the texts;
summarization is not analysis. The structure of your essay must be dictated by the structure of
your argument; its content must focus on the specific issues that you are examining.
The thesis of your essay—the argument, the insight you want to present, the product of your
analysis of the readings or data—MUST be stated within the first three sentences of the essay.
Where this is not the case, the essay will be returned to you and considered late until it is
resubmitted with the thesis stated clearly in the first three sentences. You should not focus on
historical background or context in the introduction to or in the body of your essay. The essay is
about the texts or the data you have examined, not about the broader history of the period they
were written in.
There is a guide to writing essays—to the literary form we call the “essay”—in the document
“Writing History Essays,” in the course reader. The basic rules of essay writing can be summed
up as follows: 1) An essay presents an argument, an insight, the “case” for a particular point of
view. That means it is focused from the outset on a thesis statement. 2) The body of an essay
presents the analytical steps that lead the author to the conclusion (insight, argument) that the
essay presents. That means that the body of the essay has a coherent, articulated structure
designed to lead the reader through a series of logical steps, each step supported by evidence. 3)
The claim of any essay should be that the insight it presents is important. The concluding
passages of an essay, therefore, should not only summarize what has been said, what it has
argued, but also reflect on what the broader implications of that argument might be. (This means
that the conclusion is the ONLY place in your essay where it is appropriate to address the
broader historical context.)
Remember: an essay is focused on a SINGLE insight. It does not present a list of three or four
“aspects” of the issue without explaining how they are all related to the central argument (the
thesis) of the essay.
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