History 465S.01 & LSGS 465.01—U.S./Mexico Border
Deutsch
Fall 2012
Assignments: Below are the four workshop assignments and also short descriptions
of the requirements for the document presentation, paper topic, annotated
bibliography, outline and introduction, draft, and final paper. From the outset of the
course, you should be thinking of your topic and gathering information and bibliography
for it. The readings and workshop assignments are geared to help you on your way, not to
distract you.
Workshop Assignments
These should each be two-three pages, typed, and should be as closely related as possible
to the topic you are planning to use for your term paper. Often you will be required to
submit copies of your research materials as well as your paper.
Government Hearings Assignment—1/28
In almost every decade since the U.S. acquired territory from Mexico there have
been hearings by the U.S. government concerning matters in those territories, whether the
possibility of statehood for New Mexico, border incursions during the Yaqui Wars and
the Mexican Revolution, immigration, guest worker programs or other topics some of
which are mentioned in your readings. Jacoby calls on government hearings in Shadow at
Dawn. Hearings provide a rich resource for historians since they give us the actual words
of a relatively wide range of participants, from Senators to farm workers. Using the guide
to government documents, choose one decade or topic related to your potential research
paper, locate a government hearing on it, read the hearings (or at least part of the
hearings—some of them are multi-volume—poke around in your chosen hearings a bit
before settling on a section for the focus of this assignment), and analyze the hearings—
do all the senatorial or congressional participants seem to have the same agenda? The
same concerns or obsessions? Are there themes that emerge in the testimony? Particular
power dynamics or ways of framing issues? Contentions?
Manuscript Census and Record Linking Assignment—3/4
This is an assignment geared to introduce students to the benefits, intricacies and
irritations of record-linking and the richness of manuscript census evidence as we saw in
the reading by Benton-Cohen. How you begin this assignment may depend on the topic
you are planning to choose. If you plan to write a term paper about a particular city or a
particular neighborhood, start with the manuscript census for that location in 1900 (or
1910, or 1920) choose five contiguous families on one block—and then look at that block
again in the 1910 census (or 1920 or 1930, whichever is ten years after your first date).
Analyze the character of the block, the inhabitants, and the time using these bits of
evidence. Use the web, including HeritageQuest and Ancestry.com, to try to trace the
families and see what else you can find out about them, and check the 1910 (or
whichever is the decade of your second) census, as well. Analyze your findings. You may
have other ways that make sense to pursue the aims of this assignment—just make sure
you talk with me about them before you start.
Oral History Assignment—3/25
Oral histories tell us both about the person who asks the questions, and the subject
who answers. They also reveal differences in subject position (how the speaker is
positioned socially, which affects how they interpret events through memory). Find two
oral histories, as closely related to your topic as possible, by two people who differ by
gender or racial/ethnic group. (It may be that you will have to be content with them
covering the same period as your topic.) Use your two pages to analyze similarities and
differences in their accounts as we did in our discussion of the oral histories in Oscar
Martínez’s collection. Please append copies of the oral histories, if they are brief, or of
the relevant passages if they are not.
Newspaper Assignment—3/25
The purpose of this assignment is to familiarize students with the richness of
newspapers as sources, and to focus, for the moment, on using them to get at
representations of people in public, whether self-representations of the social order in
parades and processions, or representations in advertisements, or reporting on urban
“disorders” (riots and protests). It is also crucial to note that newspapers differ in their
politics, manifested in their editorial policy, which affects how they cover and how they
define “the news.”
You have several options. In each of them, you will look at one event or
advertisements for one type of item, for two different years ten years apart, and in two
different newspapers, if possible, for each year. Using the type of analysis Paredes,
Young, and Horne do, analyze the themes, similarities, and differences you find. Please
append sample advertisements or newspaper columns.
You could, for example, 1. choose one holiday (Labor Day, Cinco de Mayo,
Commemoration Day, etc.) and examine the coverage in the same two newspapers a
decade apart; or 2. choose two similar national events a decade apart, likely to have
received significant local reaction (the “zoot suit” riots in Los Angeles in 1943 and
Operation Wetback in 1954; the mass deportations of Mexican immigrants in the spring
of 1932 and the approval of the “Bracero” guestworker program ten years later;
Operation Wetback in 1954 and the end of the Bracero Program and passage of the
immigration act in 1965) and examine the coverage in the same two newspapers; or 3.
choose advertisements for a single item or service (restaurants, telephones, cars, homes,
etc.) or help wanted ads in the same two newspapers a decade apart.
Secondary Source Assignment—4/1
In your term paper, you will need to be able to situate your argument in relation to
that of other historians as Karl Jacoby does in Shadows at Dawn. In order to be able to do
that, you need a clear sense of what other authors are arguing, what difference their
different approaches makes (including what bodies of evidence they examine and what
questions they ask of it) in leading them to their conclusions, and whether they agree with
each other. For this assignment, choose two secondary sources from your annotated
bibliography and analyze the authors’ arguments, comparing them with each other,
explaining why they reach different conclusions, and your own sense of the merits of
each, as well as giving a brief sense of how they necessitate your own approach.
Term Paper Assignments:
The Paper Topic Proposal—2/11
--one page, typed
--you must by this time have discussed the proposed topic with me
--the proposal should give not only a sense of the topic, but of the questions you will be
asking and what sets of sources you’ve identified for answering them
--in other words, the aim of the proposal is to convince me that the topic is both
worthwhile and feasible
The Annotated Bibliography—3/18
--this bibliography should include both primary and secondary sources; it can include
sources you have found in the course of doing your workshop assignments
--it should be at least two pages and include at least 8-10 items
--it should be a preliminary bibliography—that is, you will ultimately look at more than
just these sources, but you have laid this foundation
--for each item listed, you should give me (in one or two sentences) a clear sense of its
relation to your topic; if it’s a primary source, tell me what sorts of information it
provides; if it’s a secondary source, tell me the scope, and the author’s argument
Document Presentations—2/25 on—
Each student will give one document presentation. You should choose a document you
have come across in the course of your research that you found particularly interesting or
complicated; make copies for the class, and then “teach” it to the class—that is, guide the
students through an analysis of the document or ask them for their helping making sense
of it. You will need first to orient the class, telling the class how the document fits into
your research, why it is particularly interesting or complicated, and elicit from the class
what they think it tells us. It’s best if you choose a document that is giving you some
trouble interpretively. Use the opportunity to have the whole class brainstorm on what it
means. Documents can be of any kind—textual, visual, or audio. Recall that your fellow
students are also doing research in the general area, and such a presentation might be
quite helpful to them.
Outline and Introductory Paragraph—4/1
--the introductory paragraph should give a sense of your argument; it should begin by
introducing the reader to the topic, then introducing the reader to the questions you are
asking of it that you intend to grapple with in the body of the essay, and end by giving the
reader a sense of how you will go about answering those questions (by looking at what,
in what order, to what end—a sort of road map).
--you must have a title (this can change in succeeding drafts), and the title should give
some sense of your argument; ideally, you should have fun with the title; if you can’t
think of a title, it may be a sign that you don’t yet know what you are trying to say in this
essay.
--the outline need not be a sentence outline, but it should be detailed enough for me to
have a sense of the logic that holds it together—it should be clear why the
topics/paragraphs are in this particular order; remember that in an essay, each paragraph
is built around making a single analytical point, and that paragraph by paragraph, you
build, point by point, an argument that will draw the reader relentlessly to your
conclusion.
--one way to organize an outline is to write down all the ideas you have about the topic,
and then try to see how they fit together, reordering them so that they flow into each
other.
The Draft—4/22
--this draft should be as close to a final copy as you can manage; the closer it is, the more
help having me read it will be
--it must be typed
--at the same time, avoid getting too invested in it as it is—that is, you must expect to
make some changes, some of them substantial, between this draft and the final paper
The Final Paper—4/29
--15-20 pages, typed, plus bibliography and endnotes
--endnotes and bibliography must be consistent and in proper form