Attendance at weekly class meetings.
Active participation in discussion.
Timely completion of all readings and written work.
Courteous and professional manner toward fellow students and instructor.
Students are expected to attend all class sessions. Excessive absence will be penalized. All writing assignments schould be turned in on the date due or before. Late assignments will be penalized two points for each school day overdue. If you can not turn in an assignment on time, you may seek an extension in advance. Assuming your reasons are legitimate, the more in advance you request an extension, the more likely you are to receive it.
The success of this class hinges on the active participation of all students. Participation includes coming prepared to class (having done the readings; prepared discussion questions), listening attentively to others, offering your own insights, and raising questions for exploration. You are expected to be alert and attentive for each class session.
Three
Brief Writing Exercises (15%). Due Sept 20, Oct 6, Oct 27.
These essays will be workshopped in class in order to develop skills for handling primary documents. The papers should be typed, 12 point font, double spaced, with one-inch margins all around and 1-2 pages in length. They will be graded on a simple scale from 0-2. You will receive a zero if you do not turn it in or failed to fulfill the assignment. Your paper will earn a 1 if it is adequate and a 2 if it shows superior effort. The cumulative number of points correlate to a numerical grade on a 100-point scale according to the following table:
|
6 |
100 |
4 |
80 |
2 |
60 |
|
5 |
90 |
3 |
70 |
1 |
50 |
Paper Proposal (10%). Due Sept 29.
In a typed, ˝-1-page statement, you should articulate the
subject of your research paper and the question about that subject that you
seek to answer. Things to think about:
What specific sub-topics might be of interest?
How do you think this topic speaks to larger questions in the history of
the
Bibliography (10%). Due Oct 13
Submit a typed bibliography sorted into two categories: primary and secondary. You must use proper bibliographic formatting, which you can find in reference sources such as The Chicago Manual of Style. You can also find a style sheet at the UI History Writing Center. Click “style and citation,” on the left of the writing center’s home page.
Paper Draft (15%). Due Nov 10 (Group I) or 17 (Group II)
You should strive to turn in the best possible, most polished draft you can. Doing so will allow you to get the greatest benefit from your colleagues’ feedback, rather than squandering their time and effort on work you could do for yourself (such as cleaning up sloppy spelling and grammar). The more time we can spend discussing the ideas of your paper and the style of presentation, the better the final product will be. For that reason, the instructor hopes to incentivize putting effort into the draft by making it worth something in terms of your final grade. Strong drafts will demonstrate considerable effort, be as complete as possible (perhaps missing the conclusion), and show that the student has made a serious effort to fulfill the expectations for the final paper.
Drafts should be typed, 12-point font, double spaced, with one-inch margins all around. They should include a useful title, properly formatted footnotes (see Bibliography for sources on formatting), and a bibliography.
The main objective of this class is to produce a significant piece of writing based principally on primary sources. This project is an opportunity not only to go deeper into the history of one time and place, but to gain the tools to work with different kinds of documents. It is also a chance to hone your writing style and to learn how to properly cite sources, two skills that you will carry into your other history classes.
The research paper’s subject must deal with postwar Soviet life and culture. Beyond that general framework, you are limited only by your own interests. Some broad starting places for possible topics include: gender relations; popular culture (film, song, humor…); material life; black market; intellectual life; dissent; Cold War and popular culture; the war in Afghanistan and the home front; civil society; nationalism in non-Russian territories.
The paper should be approximately 15 pages long and draw largely on primary material. These sources can be newspapers, journals, diaries, memoirs, diplomatic correspondence, or other forms of eyewitness testimony. Films, music, literature, and other forms of art can be sources as well. You can also draw on primary documentation cited in secondary sources, as long as you cite the source appropriately. You will need to be creative, because material available in English is limited.
Final papers must be typed, 12-point font, double spaced, with one-inch margins all around. Footnotes and bibliographies should be consistently and properly formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style or similar standard resource.
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