Requirements

The requirements for the course are as follows: (1) Seminar Participation (15%); 2) Seminar leadership (15%); (3) Blog (30%); and (4) Essays (40%); (5) a self-evaluation (one-page, typed, single-spaced) assessing your performance in the course (not graded but required).

Blog

Each week you are expected to make a three-paragraph (or so) entry in your blog of the reading for that week and one short response to another’s post. These must be posted on your blog the day before class. These may take many different forms. A post might take the form of a standard book review in that it recaps the reading’s thesis, articulates the kind of evidence that the author draws on, and makes some critical comment. Or a post may be a more “free-form” response in which you mount a critique of the text. Or a post might go further afield and entertain an idea that you have spun out of the reading. These will, to be frank, drive you nuts, but they will hone your writing skills and prove invaluable when the time comes for seminar discussion and your comprehensives or orals.

Online writing and reading differs from print for a variety of reasons. Clarity is the name of the game. Each post must conform to the following format:

1. Post number
2. Post title
3. Space between paragraphs
4. Titles of books should be italicized, titles of articles or documents should put in quotation marks, and so on.
5. Use text links to comments should use the author’s name. Do not simply use a URL.
6. Use text links to sources on the web. Do not simply use a URL.

Seminar Participation

Seminar participation means lively and engaged discussion of the readings. You cannot hope to derive the most from the course if you sit on the sidelines and listen to the play-by-play.

Seminar Discussion Leadership

Each class member (or team of two) will be responsible for leading at least one class discussion. The leader or leaders are responsible for initiating and maintaining the discussion. I will be on hand to facilitate the process, but the leader(s) will be responsible for setting the agenda for the class. You may be a creative as you wish, but you may not be boring. For the two primary source discussions, I’ll take on the role of seminar leader.

Essays

It’s extremely important to get an early start on your papers. Let me say that again: start early. The two essays involve primary documents, so you must first sort them out, decide on a narrative, select a thesis, rally the necessary secondary literature, and then put your argument together in graceful prose accompanied by scholarly apparatus. To be sure, we will discuss the documents ahead of time, so you will have the benefits of a full class discussion and the blogs. Each of the essays should be about 8–10 pages (maybe more, maybe less).