What is a nation, term paper
I want you to write a nine to twelve page paper about a book that was written sometime between 1877 and 1914. Below you will find a list of recommendations. Read the book, read a biography of the author, and incorporate your class readings into the paper to give larger context to the issue(s) the author addresses.
In your paper I want you to outline the arguments or message of the writer and provide historical context. What, in your assessment, were the strengths and weaknesses of the author’s message? Based on your additional reading, why do you think the public was receptive to this message in the writer’s time?
You can come up with a substitute title after having consulted with me.
My how to write lecture
Recommended books
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907). A genteel intellectual’s bewildered look at the modern world.
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910). The famed feminist pacifist social reformer’s autobiography.
Horatio Algier, The Cash Boy, Bound to Rise, or any other novel written after 1877. Novels about boys who make it by “pluck and luck.”
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911). The original cynic’s vision of the world.
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888). A utopian novel that implicitly questioned Social Darwinism.
Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money (1914). A progressive expose on banking.
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895) or Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893). Novels by the famed turn of the century realist.
Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth. The philanthropists’ vision of a nation guided by the wealthy.
Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young (1883). Dime novels, dirty pictures . . . something must be done!
Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909). A progressive’s vision for America.
Thomas Dixon, The Klansman (1905). The novel that gave birth to Birth of a Nation
Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar’s Column (1890). A grim, dystopian populist novel.
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (published in 1900 but suppressed; republished in 1912). Another realist novel by the author of An American Tragedy.
W.E.B. DuBois, Race and the City (1899). The famed socioligist’s study of black life in turn of the 20th-century Philadelphia.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898). A feminist critique of housework. Far ahead of its time (and ours).
William Harvey, Coin’s Financial School (1894). Free silver!!!
Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (1881). An expose of U.S. treatment of Native Americans. Or read her novel Ramona (1912).
William Dean Howells. Any novel, but A Hazard of New Fortunes or A Modern Instance would be best.
William James, Pragmatism (1909). The most important outline of this disinctly American philosophy.
Walter Lippman, Drift and Mastery (1914). An argument for the importance of government in American life.
Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894). A polemic against monopoly capitalistm.
Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907). A Christian vision of social justice.
Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (1889, 1894, 1896). Ya gotta be tough these days. Pick one volume to read. And don’t read more than 250-300 pages.
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906). The novel that gave us two Federal laws.
Henry Morton Stanley, In Darkest Africa (1890) or Through the Dark Continent (1899). Stanley did discover Livingston. Pretty much everything else is a lie. Read Hochchild’s King Leopold’s Ghost along with either of these books (btw: they’re long books, so just read about 250 to 300 pages, no more).
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Womans’ Bible (1892). Read for yourself what pissed everybody off.
William Graham Sumner, Folkways (1906). You can’t mess with society, much as you might like to.
Ida Tarbell, A History of the Standard Oil Company (1902, 1904). For this you’ll also want to read her autobiography All in a Day’s Work
Principles of Scientific Management. How to get people working at their most efficient.
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). A piercing critique of modern consumer capitalism.
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1900, 1901). A quintessential vision of self-reliance from an African-American perspective.
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905). Not a lot of mirth in this absorbing novel about a young woman who must make a choice between marriage for love or for money.
Ida B. Wells, On Lynchings, A Red Record (1895). For this you’ll also need to read her autobiography Crusade for Justice
A note about plagiarism. Don’t do it. The University’s definition of plagiarism and its policies can be found here. Don’t underestimate me. I catch plagiarizers, and when I catch them I flunk them and send them to the Provost.
