write about the bill of rights

Your final paper will be an 6-8 paper based on a lesser known document of your choosing that reveals some larger point about the American Revolution. The choice of documents and the larger point you want to address are up to you. Your objective is to find a document that is not one of the famous ones from the period. Do not use The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights (you can select documents that talk about the Declaration, Constitution, or Bill of Rights–but you cannot use the documents themselves). Please stay away from Washington’s Farewell Address, Alien and Sedition Acts, Coercive Acts, or any other infamous law; no Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation; no Olive Branch Petition; no Common Sense or any of the famous pamphlet literature from the era; no citing the “Remember the Ladies” correspondence between John and Abigail Adams or any of the correspondence that you can find nearly anywhere. I want you to do some digging to find a new and interesting document and to decide for yourself what you think the document’s historical significance may be. You should avoid well-worn sources and those we have already covered in class. You also need to stick within the time period: 1760–1800. If you have any questions about whether a document is off-limits or fair game, email me. First, you need to find as much information about the document as possible: What is the document? When was it written? Who wrote it? What do we know about the author? What events or issues does the document describe? What do historians know about the people or events or topics listed in the document? Ultimately, your objective is to explain what the document says that you find important and to explain how that document fits into the broader history of the Revolution. Perhaps the best way to think about this assignment is to imagine that you will be teaching high school students about some topic and that you’re planning on incorporating a primary document into your lesson plan. To pull off the lesson successfully, you’re going to need to have a document that is clear, readable, and that reveals something about the larger point you have designed the lesson to teach. Because students do not always get the connections or know the larger history, you will need to be able to explain the big picture and to explain specifically–with reference to the details in the document–what this document has to say about the topic. By asking you to expound on the document’s “significance,” I’m not asking you to find documents that shed light on important moments in the Revolution’s political and military history or documents that are, in and of themselves, key texts of critical events, like the Constitution, or an influential pamphlet, or a hated law, or a tide-changing battle. In fact, ideally, what I’d like you to do is the opposite: to find a little-known document about an event that we don’t know that much about and to explore how that document fits into the larger story of the Revolution. By doing this, you’ll be doing the kind of thing that professional historians do: uncovering something new and different about the Revolution. If that doesn’t strike your fancy and you want to focus on some important text or battle or event, you need to do so by focusing on a little-known document that gives a perspective on that text or event (i.e. a rarely cited editorial, or pamphlet, or letter, or diary entry that talks about the Declaration of Independence, or the Battle of Saratoga, or the Constitution). The topics are endless. Maybe the document is an example of debates among Americans over British policies and independence during the 1760s and 70s; maybe it’s a document that gives the loyalist or patriot perspective, giving reasons why the author chose one side or the other. Maybe the document reveals tensions between different groups of Americans over the meaning of the Revolution: who should vote, who should be free, how far rights should extend or how much they should be limited. Perhaps it’s an example of how elite or ordinary people or slaves or women or Indians viewed an event. Your document might reveal a reaction to an unpopular law or policy. It could reveal something about the gentry or artisan-led committees, the use of crowd action and political violence, or the kinds of demands made by abolitionists. It might be an example of propaganda on one side or another of some debate: protests against Britain, the war, the Constitution, Indian policy. Your document could explore how the Revolution shaped American culture: dress, language, literature, art. It may be about the hardships of war as experienced by a solider, the growing independence of a wife whose husband was at war, the triumph of a slave who escaped to Canada, or the anger of an Indian chief whose tribal lands were dispossessed in a peace treaty. Let me offer some suggestions to help you frame the document’s significance. First, you don’t have to find some long-lost document that proves why the British lost the war or some other huge historical question. Instead, you’re merely looking to tie your document into what historians already know (or think they know) about the subject(s) that your document addresses. If it’s a document that addresses a colonial grievance with a British policy, you want to be able to explain the grievance and the policy that bothered colonists and to discuss the importance of that grievance to the wider Revolutionary movement. If you’ve got an example of a crowd attacking a British official, you need to put that document in the context of eighteenth century rough music and the other political violence from the era. If it’s an essay calling on Americans to remain loyal to Great Britain, you want to explain how typical this argument was of the kinds of arguments that loyalists made to their neighbors, friends, and families. If you’re working with records from the Revolutionary committees that deal with the punishment of a group of loyalists, you need to explain whether or not this document was representative of how loyalists were treated during the war. If your document is a report of a meeting of an American diplomat with Native Americans who were reluctant to pick a side (or who told the diplomat they were siding with Britain), you need to explain how this relates to the choices that Indian peoples made during the war. If you’re using the lyrics to a patriotic song, you want to analyze the message the song is trying to covey and to explain the role of songs in the culture of the Revolution. If your document is an advertisement for a runaway slave, you want to be able to fit the document into the larger story about runaway slaves during the Revolutionary era. If that slave escaped to freedom in Sierra Leone, you need to place that experience in the context of slaves who escaped overseas during the war. If you’ve got pension records from a soldier who describes having to fight with little ammunition, and hike all day on worn-out boots and an empty stomach (and do all this without being paid), you need to explain how typical or atypical such experiences were for soldiers. If your document is an essay against the Constitution, you want to be able to fit that critique within the larger body of Antifederalist writing. If your document is a poem or a petition written by a woman during the era, you want to explain how this document is reflective of women’s education or politics during the era. In many ways this assignment is as easy or as challenging as the document you choose. It should be easy if you select a document whose significance is fairly clear: a pamphlet arguing for independence, a petition from farmers complaining about war debt speculation, a newspaper story describing one of the many tea parties against the Tea Act, a soldier’s account of the slaughter at Harlem Heights. The significance will be harder to divine if the document is vague about the issues or events being described or if the subject is really off the beaten path: a really obscure law, a local matter you can’t find any other information about, or a conflict or controversy the subject of which isn’t exactly clear that involves people about whom little historical evidence has survived. If you’re having trouble figuring out the significance of a document you have selected—or even what the document is talking about—it is probably best to drop it and choose another document. There are four parts to this paper: 1. Select a topic 2. Find a document that reveals something important about that topic 3. Find secondary sources (books and journal articles by academic historians) that help you understand the larger significance of what you have found in the document 4. Write a paper that introduces your document, explains what it says, and expounds on its larger significance in a clear and coherent way. The paper needs to elaborate on the specific details on the document and explain the big picture it helps illuminate–making crystal clear the link between the specific details in your document and the bigger historical picture you get from the secondary sources. 1. Selecting a Topic There are countless topics to explore. Here are a few possibilities, but feel free to work on a topic not listed here: Political and Intellectual History: You can write about the political developments or the political culture of the era. For example, you could pick some revealing passages from the debates over the 1787 federal Constitution, the 1776 state constitutions, or the bill(s) of rights to make a larger point about the creation of new governments (i.e. how democratic or undemocratic were they?), a particular “right” the new state and national governments protected (i.e. what did state or national leaders think about the right to bear arms? or whether the slave trade should be legal?). You might want to investigate some issue the new governments dealt with, such as Indian policy, or paper money, or the war debt; you may merely want find a document that gives a sense of the kind of issues governments in the late18th and early 19th century dealt with (things as seemingly mundane as road construction or the regulation of taverns). You could find a document that reveals something about the political culture of the period. You could look at the political culture of the elite: How did the governing elite conceive of politics? How did they debate? Were those debates pitched to the average citizen or to an educated elite? How did they characterize their political opposition? What did they think of elections? What did they think of ordinary people? You could also find documents that reveal the political culture of ordinary Americans: find petitions written by regular folk or documents that talk about popular protests, riots, or uprisings and, then, use these documents to talk about how ordinary people thought about politics, what issues concerned them, and how they expressed their political beliefs. Social and Cultural History: You can find documents that talk about the lived experiences of people. You can find documents that tell us something about gender roles for men and women; or you could examine find a document that reveals something about the possibilities or limits of the Revolution for women. You could investigate race relations or racial prejudices, or talk about what the Revolution meant for slaves in the north or south or for Indians. You could find documents revealing the tensions within Native American societies or how Indians dealt with US attempts to put them on reservations or assimilate them into American culture. You could look at documents about the experiences of a particular ethnic group or that document ethnic tensions. You could find documents about what the Revolution meant for ordinary farmers, artisans, and servants. You could investigate the working lives of merchants, farmers, artisans, servants, or slaves to get a sense about what people did for a living (or what they were forced to do) and how easy or hard that work was, and, if possible, what they thought about their jobs. You could investigate popular views of religion or religious freedom, or examine the tensions between different denominations and sects. You could examine class differences and explore how the gentry lived, acted, dress, and ate to try to set themselves apart from everyone else. You could examine “high” or “low” culture in terms of entertainment, food ways, or folk ways. You could find documents about medical practices or popular “cures” for various illnesses or ailments or documents that reveal ideas about science or education. Military History and Diplomatic History: You could focus on documents that deal with the Revolutionary War and wartime experiences or the relations among the colonies or between the new United States and foreign powers. You could find documents that reveal war strategy or that show the strengths and weaknesses of military planning or of the Continental Army or the militia. You could examine the experiences of the army in the field with documents that talk about ordinary militiamen or Continental soldiers or army officers. You could talk about class and hierarchy in the army, or about the military roles served by women, slaves, or free African Americans. You could talk about the genteel war fought against the British or frighteningly brutal conflict in the backcountry. You could talk about black and white loyalists who fought for Britain, about wartime persecution of loyalists, or about what happened to these people after the war. You could investigate Indian wars or talk about diplomacy between the US and Native American or between the Indians and the British or between different Native American tribes. You could use diplomatic correspondence to say something about relations between the US and allies like France or enemies like Britain (and, later, France). 2. Selecting a Document The goal is to select some non-famous primary source document from (or about) the Revolutionary Era (1760–1800) that can be used to reveal something about the topic you have selected. Terry Bouton, Professor at UMBC, has put together an amazing list of online databases of primary sources related to the American Revolution (I’m sharing with his permission): https://terrybouton.wordpress.com/revolutionsource… 3. Finding Secondary Sources You will need at least FOUR secondary sources. Concentrate your efforts on books and journal articles written by academic historians. Be VERY wary of using the web for interpreting the documents you find. There is some reputable material out there, but there is also a great deal of misinformation or misleading or slanted coverage–especially if you’re looking for information on a particular issue. For example, if you’re examining religion and the Revolution, you can get skewed interpretations from fundamentalist Christian websites trying to prove the founders wanted a government founded on Christianity just as you can get an incomplete portrait from a website arguing that the Founders were all Atheists. If you are having trouble finding sources, you may want to look for journal articles. Our library is very user-friendly and allows you to search for journal articles through major search engines, such as JSTOR. 4. Writing the Paper Your paper should be 6-8 double-spaced typed pages with a normal font and margins. Your paper should also include a transcribed typed version of the document (not part of the 6-8 pages); if you photocopied or downloaded the document in a PDF, you should also include the original copy. The transcribed document must include bibliographical information or the website location where you found the document. Here’s is what you should do to structure your paper: 1) You should start out your paper with an introductory paragraph that introduces us to the larger historical topic or question your document addresses and end that paragraph with a thesis that states how the document shed light on this issue or question. 2) After the introduction that spells out the thesis, you should take ONE paragraph to introduce the document: What kind of document is it? Who wrote it? When? What basic information does the document convey or what story does it tell (paraphrase here)? 3) In the body of the paper you should use focus on building paragraphs that address the larger points of your thesis. These paragraphs should incorporate material from secondary sources and they should include SPECIFIC EXAMPLES and QUOTATIONS from your document that relate to those larger points. You are using your document as EVIDENCE and a CASE STUDY of the broader argument you are making about whatever aspect of the Revolution you are investigating. Again, you MUST use QUOTES from your document in the body of the paper and explain how those quotes provide support for the various points you are trying to make. 5. Citing Sources You MUST cite your sources properly. If you need help, consult the Purdue’s Online OWL (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/01/), the Chicago Manual of Style, or ISU’s Writing Tutorial Services (see syllabus). Your paper should also include a works cited page at the end with the full citations listing all the sources you used. Again, if you need help formatting this properly, use the resources above

 

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