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Assignments

EXAMS: There will be two essay exams during the course of the semester.  Both will be based on lectures and on Fellman, Gordon, and Sutherland, This Terrible War: The Civil War and its Aftermath.  The midterm exam is a take-home and must be submitted via email.

BOOK PAPERS: Each of you will write 450-word, single-spaced answers to questions distributed in class on Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Hospital Sketches and Confederates in the Attic.  The grades for these papers will be based more or less equally on content and on presentation.

CONVENTION PROSPECTUS:

On July 30 we will hold a Constitutional Convention.  Early in the semester you will be assigned a position—as a secessionist, Radical Republican, African-American, etc.  We will meet in convention to determine how to resolve these long-standing problems.  The premise is that you are meeting on June 30, 1865; you are aware of everything that has happened up to that time, but nothing, of course, destined to happen afterwards.  The 13th amendment has passed Congress and is in the process of being ratified by the states.  Andrew Johnson is president.  All of the Confederate armies have surrendered.  That’s about it.

On that day you will turn in a 450-word, single-spaced "position paper" stating and explaining the constitutional amendments that you believe your group would have tried to pass had there been a Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1865.  Remember, you should develop your paper based on what Americans of the 1860s would know and think, not on how Americans of the 2000s would respond to these issues.  Your chief source will be the section on Reconstruction in This Terrible War.