Wikipedia Assignment

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As of last Wednesday, you should have narrowed your research interests down to two topics, and very soon you should be deciding (based on feedback you received from me and other students) which of those topics you want to pursue. Having a topic is not the same thing as having a research question (which we will talk about more in class this week. But you should at least know by now which communities or people you are most interested in learning more about, which means that you can begin the research process:

Find information. Gather as much reliable information as you can about your community. But when evaluating information (especially information found on the Internet), consider its source and its publication context before considering it reliable. I also strongly recommend that you visit (or revisit) Fondren’s Library Guide on American History and set up an appointment with Anna Shparberg, our subject librarian for history, to see if she can assist you in locating sources.

Take notes. At this early stage of the project, your primary task will be to assemble facts about your topic (who? what? when? where? why?). It’s a good idea to make notes about what you find (e.g., a timeline, a list of major figures, etc.), being sure to mark down where you found particular pieces of information.

Dig deeper. For many communities, you may have to rely on secondary sources for your part of your research. But you also need to locate primary sources that were created by community members or contemporaries of the communities you are interested in. Whenever you can, it’s a good idea to gather or make note of possible primary sources, in case you need those sources to answer questions later down the road. If you need help identifying potential primary sources, talk with me.

Wikipedia Assignment

Your next graded assignment in this class is due by noon on October 15.

For this assignment, you will be responsible for beginning or improving an entry on your community for Wikipedia. (For more information about what Wikipedia is, read this.) Last week, we talked about the technical details of contributing to Wikipedia and improved the entry on Rosabeth Moss Kanter. For this assignment, you must draft between 200 to 300 words to add to Wikipedia, depending on the amount of research you have done and the amount of information about your community already on Wikipedia.

If there is already a Wikipedia entry about your community, you have several options. Ideally, you can expand the entry by adding an additional 200-300 words of new material (for the sake of comparison, the paragraph we added about Kanter was about 140 words). Alternatively, you can satisfy this assignment by making significant revisions or corrections to the entry. ("Significant" revisions, of course, will mean more than adding a few words or changing one line.) If both of these options prove impossible, you can also consider writing an entry on Wikipedia that will link to your community’s main entry. For example, is there a particular biographical figure who was important in your community who does not have a Wikipedia entry? You could write an entry on him/her and then modify the community’s entry to link to your new entry.

When you are writing a Wikipedia entry, be sure to consider your audience. You should approach the entry in the same way you would approach writing an encyclopedia entry or a news article. In both cases, you know that you will have a large audience, but you cannot assume that your reader will know very much about the topic. In contrast to your final essay that you will turn in at the end of the semester, which will aim to persuade someone of your thesis, your main goal in writing or revising a Wikipedia entry is to inform.

Since Wikipedia has a life of its own outside the confines of this class, you will also have to make sure that your entry conforms to the standards that the Wikipedia community has established to govern its work. For more on these standards, be sure to read Wikipedia’s general editing principles and refer to the editing tutorial.

Reading Questions for October 8

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This Wednesday we will be discussing Tracy K’Meyer’s book on Koinonia Farm. If you want to see some images of the central players, check out this brief trailer on YouTube:

There is also an audio talk by Clarence Jordan from 1956 on YouTube.

As with our September 24 questions, you can comment on the book as you’d like, so long as you comment as an historian would, connecting the reading to our previous readings and discussions. For example, was the community successful, on its own terms and/or on the terms of other scholars we’ve read? In what ways was Koinonia similar to the society it critiqued? How did its relationships with the outside world, or disagreements within, impact Koinonia?

Looking forward to hearing what you think!

Blog Comment Reports

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I have read through all the comments that have been posted so far, and sent reports out indicating ways that you might improve your comments. If you did not receive a report from me, you can assume that your current grade on the comments stands at an "A," as defined by the rubric on the assignments page.

I will say, in general, that I noticed two features that consistently appeared in the best comments:

  • Specific citations from the readings that supported specific points.
  • Reflections that pointed back to other readings or class discussions (on "lumping" versus "splitting" and models of influence, for example, or applying one author’s theories to a different reading) while discussing the reading at hand.

If you have further questions about the comments, let me know.

Reading Questions for October 1

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Be sure that you scroll down and read the post on the Two Topics Memo, and don’t forget to submit that by email and bring a copy with you to class on Wednesday.

In addition to discussing these memos, we will also be talking about the assigned readings from Kanter. Please write a comment on this post about these readings. You may choose to discuss ways the readings might relate to the topics you are considering for your paper, or you can respond to one of the following questions:

  1. Do you agree with the way that Kanter defines a "successful" community? What counts, for her, as success? Why select this criterion or these criteria?
  2. Are "commitment mechanisms" a good way to measure success even on Kanter’s own terms?
  3. Underlying Kanter’s work is the assumption that internal dynamics affect a community more than external ones: do our past readings on other communities confirm that assumption or challenge it?
  4. Do we get a clearer view from these pages of what makes Kanter’s a "sociological perspective" on communes rather than an exclusively historical one? Point specifically to the things that you think distinguish her work from, say, Brundage’s, Foster’s, or Turner’s.

See you on Wednesday!

Two Topics Memo

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How do you know when you’ve written a good history paper—a work of original scholarship that contributes to the field?

In this brief chart, Dr. William J. Turkel imagines what it would be like to answer that question in retrospect, after the paper is finished. Of a "better than average" paper, you’d be able to say "you began thinking about it right away, and you’ve been mulling it over constantly ever since," whereas a "worse than average" paper would be one where "you didn’t have time to think about it until the week it was due."

Similarly, a "better than average" paper would be one where you did so much research, that you "discovered (and read through) a lot more sources than you could cite." A "worse than average" paper is one in which "you cited everything you found" because there was little to find.

We are starting our "benchmark assignments" this week because starting this early is the best way to put you in position to write a "better than average" paper. With these assignments, you’ll be able to get feedback all along the way about the research project. But the principles outlined in that chart apply to these assignments as well: a "better than average" assignment is one that selects the best of the work you’ve done, rather than presenting all of what you’ve done, while an acceptable assignment is one that meets the minimum requirements.

Put another way, the more that you give us in the benchmark assignments, the more feedback we (I and your fellow classmates) will be able to give you. The path to a "better than average" end product begins now, even with this first assignment.

The requirements for this "two topics memo" are listed on the assignments page: "a short, one-page list of two potential research topics, along with at least two primary sources and two secondary sources you have identified on each topic."

The "at least" in this description is included intentionally in the spirit of Turkel’s recommendations. The more you can find on each topic, the better off you’ll be in the long run. Conversely, if you have difficulty finding sources at this stage, that could indicate a need to rethink your topic.

That said, the "two primary and two secondary source" minimum is provided as a threshold, because it could be that there are more sources than you’re aware of—sources that I can help you locate as part of the feedback on your memo. The more you can tell us about what you’ve done within the confines of about one page, the more we can help you move to the next stage. But if all you’ve been able to find are two sources, we need to know that, too, so we can help you evaluate the likelihood that enough sources will be available to you to answer an historiographically significant question.

To sum up, the exact format and requirements of the "benchmark assignments" are less important than the general principles outlined by Turkel: the more you accomplish at each of these early stages, the more likely you’ll be able to look back at the end of the semester and tell that you’ve written the best paper you can write.

Please send me your memo by email by noon on Wednesday, and bring a copy with you to class.

Reading Questions for September 24

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This week’s readings take slightly opposing positions on the gender ideals of two utopian communities: Oneida and The Farm. Now that you’ve spent several weeks talking and responding to my questions, I’d like to give you the opportunity to comment broadly on these readings, but I do want you to make a concerted effort to evaluate the articles and evidence as an historian would. That means, for example, judging the gendered organization of work in these communities in relation to the societies of which they were a part, rather than in relation to your own beliefs (shaped by our contemporary moment) about what is "normal" and what is "weird." When possible, I’d also like you to take a clear position on the issues at stake in these articles; which author(s) more closely represent(s) your own view of the evidence, and why?

You can also make sure your comment is historical by thinking about these readings in terms of some of the overarching questions we’ve discussed this semester, such as whether there is a continuous tradition of utopian communalism in American history, and whether and why utopian radicals are worth studying.

So, in short, this is an open comment thread, but it’s an open comment thread for working historians: engage with the readings as historians and then let us know what’s on your mind.

Reading Questions for September 17

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Next week, we’ll be discussing Fitzhugh Brundage’s book, A Socialist Utopia in the New South. I’ve posted some reading tips that may be useful to you.

By noon before class, you should also write a comment on this post that answers one of the following questions:

  1. Like other communes we’ve considered, the Ruskin colony was a small group that represented a "marginal" group of radicals. How would Brundage answer a reader who asks, "So what? Why should we study this group?" Does his answer hinge on their influence, or on some other reason?
  2. In our last class, Becca raised the question of whether communalists still betrayed parts of the "American dream." A slightly different version of that question is often raised in discussions of the history of socialism; cholars were once impressed by the fact that there seemed to be less socialism in the United States than in other countries. Does Brundage’s account of Ruskin offer some explanation for "why there is no (or little) socialism in America?"
  3. You might also consider a related question of why socialism has come to be seen by so many people today as un-American. Does the Ruskin colony complicate that notion? Does its experience explain why the notion retains power?
  4. Last week’s readings from Kanter distinguished between communes that had "weak" boundaries and communes that had "strong" ones. Which kind was Ruskin, and why? Do the attributes that Kanter attributes to communities in the weak/strong category apply to Ruskin?
  5. What did "socialism" mean for the Ruskinites?

While your comment should focus on one of these questions, please work to consider all of them as you read. You are responsible for being able to comment specifically and in an informed way on the entire book, not just the part you choose to write about.