History 474B

Devine

Fall 2014

Paper Assignment #1 Option C

This essay is due by 11:59 pm SUNDAY, November 23rd. You may email your essay to me as an attachment.

If you are submitting this essay as a draft and intend to work with a writing tutor on a revision of your essay, please indicate in the subject line of your email that the document you are submitting is a draft. Your final version will be due ONE WEEK after your appointment with the writing tutor. To make an appointment, call the History Department at 818.677.3566.

All students are welcome to make an appointment with me to go over a draft before submitting a revision and the same deadline will apply.

How Long?

• Papers MUST 1500 words and no longer than 1900 words.

Format?

• Typed, double-spaced, 12-point font with one-inch margins all around.

• Please remember to number your pages.

• Give your essay a title that indicates what the paper is about. (Something more revealing than “Paper #1” or “Rivethead”) Clever titles will be duly noted.

How to cite?

If you are quoting directly from a source, cite the author and page number in parentheses within the body of the text, i.e. (Farber, 47). All direct quotes MUST be in quotation marks and must be cited. Paraphrases of ideas drawn from the readings MUST also be cited.

How will I be graded?

You will be graded on:

1)  focus (does the paper make a clear argument that answers the question posed in the prompt?)

2)  evidence (do you back up your argument with specific information from the reading and class discussion?)

3)  coherence (is your argument consistent? do all of your sentences and paragraphs make sense? do your paragraphs flow in a logical order?)

4)  scope (does your paper deal with the question in appropriate depth and breadth? or is your argument superficial and backed up only with the most obvious evidence that we went over in class?)

If you have any questions or are in any way unsure about what you are being asked to do, be sure to speak with me via email or in person. 

THE ASSIGNMENT

Answer ONE of the following questions:

1. When a group of Iranian students took U.S. embassy staffers hostage in November of 1979, most Americans considered this a random act of violence, a “bolt out of the blue.” Drawing on David Farber’s book Taken Hostage, explain why this was not really the case. How did U.S.-Iranian relations over the previous thirty years help produce the kind of tensions and raw emotions that could lead to the hostage crisis?

2. One could easily argue that despite the high wages he earned and his “birthright” as a shop rat, Ben Hamper would have been much better off not working for General Motors. Why were Hamper and GM a bad match?

[You have a lot of leeway here since you must provide your own original answer to the question (or, to put it another way, you must devise your own thesis and then provide support for it). Among the factors you might consider as you contemplate why Hamper and GM were a bad match: Hamper’s strengths and weaknesses as a person; the nature of the work he was doing at GM; the notion that his pay stub was like a “concrete pair of loafers;” the way GM management ran the factory; and Hamper’s own insight at the end of the book that in his line of work, “thinking tears you apart.” (233)]

3.   Ronald Reagan's political opponents often dismissed him as merely "a B-movie actor" -- someone who was completely unprepared and unqualified to take on the responsibilities of the presidency and to achieve success in that office. Why does a close look at Reagan's pre-presidential life suggest otherwise?