Making the project say somehting

This project is not just a rehashing of history; you are asserting something based on your knowledge.

Thinking about your paper

Asking questions and not just regurgitating what you have read.

What questions are you asking of your artifact?

Your Main Question:

Why has this artifact maintained a cultural significance for over BLANK years?

            Topics it addresses (Is there a difference between then and now?)

            What are the givens surrounding your topic?

How to Ask Good Questions

“Should the atomic bomb have been dropped on Japan?" Such a question is simply an opinion question: it requires no research or special understanding into the problem. One way to begin framing better questions is to steadily add facts into the stew. These complicate your argument, basing it on solid historical premises (which of course you would need to prove in an essay). Think in terms of "givens." For example:

• Given that the Japanese military establishment had vowed to fight to the bitter end, should the United States have dropped the bomb on Japan?
• Given that the United States' government was becoming increasingly concerned with post-war struggles with the Soviet Union, should the United States have dropped the bomb on Japan?
• Given that many in the United States expressed what may be called racist views of the Japanese, and in fact interned Japanese Americans in concentration camps during the war, should the United States have dropped the bomb on Japan?
• Given that the United States had already embarked on an extensive and deadly campaign of carpet-bombing Japanese cities (like Tokyo), should the United States have dropped the bomb on Japan?

2. Explore premises and make them explicit. The questions above are not quite explicit enough. For example, so what if many in the United States were racist towards the Japanese? What does that have to do with the legitimacy of dropping the atomic bombing? Of course, most of us can guess what this author intends: that racism might have pre-disposed the U.S. to drop the bomb on the Japanese without sufficient military or political provocation. But it is very important to not let assumptions go unstated. It is the task of the author to make every part of the argument explicit. In the case of the questions above, each of the unstated premises may be expressed as a more detailed part of the larger question:

• What impact did racism have on the decision to drop the bomb?
• What impact did the brewing Cold War with the Soviet Union have on the decision to drop the bomb?
• What impact did military strategy have on the decision to drop the bomb?

3. Keep going. Even these questions can be further broken down:

• Did racism lead the U.S. to drop the bomb on Japan when it would not have done so on Germany? How exactly did American views of the Japanese and Germans differ? How could such popular cultural views have influenced a foreign and military policy thought to be rational?
• What in our dealings with Stalin might have prompted the U.S. to drop the bomb on Japan? Why might U.S. strategists have thought dropping the bomb would have been useful at all?
• What, rationally, could U.S. strategists have considered necessary to win the war against Japan? Why did they press for unconditional surrender when they knew Japan was beaten? What is actually the case that dropping the bomb saved U.S. lives? If so, what about the moral costs of bombing civilian non-combatants?

Let’s do this with Streetcar

Given:

            Streetcar came out at a time when America just won WWII

            The sexual topics in Streetcar were considered “taboo” for the 1950s

Tennessee Williams like to write about sex and madness (given the topics   this and subsequent plays)

           

Explore the premise and make it explicit:

What impact did TW treatment of homosexuality have on gays in the media after the play?

What impact did “the stage” on taboo ideas?

What impact did WWII have on TW in the way he constructed his characters?

Keep Going:

           

           

There are two major types of plagiarism:

1.Word-for-word copying, without acknowledgement, of the language of another writer. Having another person write or dictate all or part of one’s composition is plagiarism of this kind and is clearly forbidden. But, in addition, the student should copy NO printed passage, no matter how brief, without acknowledging its source and either placing it in quotation marks or setting it aside as a block quotation. This applies to even the briefest of phrases if they are truly distinctive.

2.The unacknowledged paraphrasing of an author’s ideas. The student should no more take credit for another person’s thoughts than for another person’s words. Any distinctive, original idea taken from another writer should be credited to its author. If the student is not sure whether or not an author’s idea is distinctive, he or she should assume that it is: no fault attaches to over-acknowledgement, but under- acknowledgement is plagiarism. Also, no first person stories will be accepted for mid or final projects.

To avoid plagiarism, cite everything you borrow in the text unless that information is common knowledge.

Determining What Constitutes Common Knowledge

Sometimes, however, common knowledge is difficult to determine. Consider information common knowledge if:

• reliable authors refer to it without citing its source,
• most people knowledgeable in the field accept it as a fact,
• few experts would dispute it,
• it is reported in most introductory textbooks or basic reference books on the subject.