Blog

Purpose: The
intention behind this assignment is to help you pull together all of
the individual skills that we have been working on in our Portfolio
Assignments to create a cohesive essay based on your reading of the
graphic history Battle Lines!
Skills: This
assignment will help you to gain or improve upon the following skills,
which are essential for your success in this course:
Argument–the ability to explain your own point of view and show the reader why you are right.
Analysis – the ability to use the
evidence to show the reader why your argument is right. (Please note
that this is not simply using quotes but explaining why they are
important for your argument.)
Effective use of primary sources
Effective use of secondary sources
Critical thinking
Task: Write a 3 page
paper addressing the prompt below. Your essay should be double-spaced,
with one inch margins. Please be sure to use Times New Roman font. Your
essay must have an introduction with a coherent argument as well as a
conclusion. I will expect you to use direct evidence from the book as
well as contextual information from the textbook, podcast, and lectures.
Be sure to use citations where needed! Footnotes or in text citation
are acceptable. Papers submitted without citations will receive a zero!
In the preface to Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War,
Ari Kelman and Jonathan Fetter-Vorm note that “some 65,000 books have
been written about the Civil War. If one had been published every day
since the war ended, we’d still have ten thousand or so left over.
Clearly there is something about this moment in American history that
continues to fascinate and confound reader

s” (Fetter-Vorm, p. x). Based
on your reading of Battle Lines! do you find that you have a
clearer understanding of the Civil War or are you still confounded
(confused) by it? In your answer provide no less than three specific
examples from separate chapters of the book to help make your case. As
you assess your understanding of the period, consider whether the
graphic history format of the book helped or hurt your comprehension.
Criteria for Success: While there are many different ways to approach this prompt, there are certain things that I am looking for in your papers.
1. I expect that you will use complete
sentences with proper grammar. This is an essay and a formal assignment,
so you want to take the time to turn in a polished finished product.
Proofread carefully AND use your spell checker.
2. I expect that you will use evidence from the Battle Lines!, lectures, and other readings or podcasts.
3. That evidence MUST be properly cited.
4. Provide a clear argument and show me how you are going to prove it in your introduction.
5. Provide a clear conclusion showing me how you have proved your point throughout your essay.
6. I expect you to show me you’re
thinking. I have read this book and thought about it for a long time,
but I don’t know what you are thinking. I don’t know how you are
processing the information. Give me a little insight into your
intellectual world. This does not necessarily mean writing your essay in
the first person, but it means taking a clear position on why this
document is important for understanding this period in history.
Sources will be from the American Yawp and Battle Lines along with the three-note packets.