It’s the British comedian Eddie Izzard, from his 1999 HBO show Dress to Kill, which should be required viewing for history majors. It’s fun, but there is a lot of casual profanity, so don’t watch if that upsets you. The show is available on DVD but you can find many of the best bits on YouTube.

There’s one glaring exception to this “better late than never” philosophy: plagiarism. This is the time of year when people use plagiarism as a kind of ’short cut’ because they have so much work to complete. They might write most of the essay but stick in an uncredited paragraph to round out the paper. But this kind of plagiarized ’short cut’  can cost you the whole semester and all the work  you have done. It’s dishonest — and if that doesn’t bother you — it’s too big a risk.

1. Write an essay of approximately 600 words about the selection from Hobbes, Leviathan on page 30-32 of the Sherman book. The essay should answer the question: “what does this document tell us about world history?” It should have a thesis, analyze the document and provide meaningful context that proves your thesis.
2. Write an essay of approximately 600 words about the Roosevelt Corollary, on page 145-146 of the Sherman book. The essay should answer the question: “what does this document tell us about world history?” It should have a thesis, analyze the document and provide meaningful context that proves your thesis.
3. Write an essay of approximately 600 words about the document by Hashimoto Kingoro on page 182-183 of the Sherman book. The essay should answer the question: “what does this document tell us about world history?” It should have a thesis, analyze the document and provide meaningful context that proves your thesis.
4. Write an essay of approximately 600 words about the document entitled “Ethnic Conflict in Nigeria” on page 206-207 of the Sherman book. The essay should answer the question: “what does this document tell us about world history?” It should have a thesis, analyze the document and provide meaningful context that proves your thesis.

Advice: to succeed you need to do four things in each essay

1. Read and investigate the primary source, as we have done in class.

2. Using Bentley and Ziegler and your lecture notes, find an historical context that demonstrates the meaning of the document in the overall setting of the course.

3. Develop an insightful thesis that pulls together your interrogation and contextual research. You will probably not figure out what this thesis is UNTIL YOU HAVE FINISHED a first draft of the essay. That’s normal! Often the oh-so-difficult-to-write last sentence of your first draft will contain your thesis, since only through writing about your ideas can you really learn what you think. So put that sentence into your first paragraph, probably near the end, and rewrite the first draft so that it proves that thesis.

4. Use contextual names, dates, stories, plus vocabulary, and quoted fragments of the primary source to prove your thesis.

Hints and reminders:

1. To earn 5 pts extra credit [half-a-letter grade on the test]: Get out your old graded test. Before each essay, after the instructions in blue, I probably typed in a comment in italics starting: “What needs improvement”. Copy and paste this entire section (there may be two or three) into your file.

2. The test is due before 1:30 pm, Tuesday, 12/11. As before, send an email to Garrigus@uta.edu containing the Mavspace address where you uploaded the file.

3. Please combine all three essays in a single file to upload to Mavspace. Whatever you call that file, put your last name in the filename, preferably at the beginning. Don’t send me a file called “HistoryTest”!

4. Use Bentley and Ziegler, but don’t take their words directly for your paper. Close the book and write the story they tell in your own language. I encourage you to minimize your reliance on outside sources.

5. If you do choose to use outside sources, you need to cite them correctly. A bibliography is not a requirement UNLESS you get significant information from beyond the class books and lectures. Then, a bibliography, footnotes and the accurate use of quotation marks will guarantee that you cannot be accused of plagiarism. But why even go there? This is a 2-page paper. Your problem will be streamlining your ideas, not bulking them up.

The one difference is that this time there will be 4 documents, instead of 3. One will be from the first section of the course and one will be from the second section of the course. These will be documents listed on the syllabus that we have NOT yet written about in a test. The other two documents will be from the last section of the course.

What will be the same is my desire to see improvement in your test essays! When I grade your exam, I will pull up my comments on the old exams. Did you address my concerns in your latest work? Or are you still making the same mistakes?

Extra credit — as before: Go into exam #2 and copy the comments I made there into the new exam. This will save me some work, but the most important thing is that it will remind you to improve!

What I’d advise you to do is to focus your presentation a little more tightly than last time. Instead of “Many people say ______ about Islam, but Karen Armstrong says ______”, why not pick one of the specific countries she describes in the second half of the book? These would include Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Algeria, and Iran.

One of the keys to representing Armstrong’s argument, as we’ve been saying in class, is to recognize that is historical. In other words, Islam and the countries whose populations are devoted to that religion have all changed over time. Deities may be eternal, but human beings and their societies are constantly changing, and so are the religious doctrines that they follow — and this includes “fundamentalists”. We had a good discussion in class about one of Armstrong’s key ideas: “the modernity of fundamentalism.” In a nutshell, she argues that when people say “we believe this … ” or “we do this because that is the way we have always done it” or “… that is what we have always believed” it is quite possible that parts of these “traditional beliefs” may have been adopted to fight against the threat that modernity seems to pose to the religion.

Note that Armstrong sees fundamentalist movements in all the major religions and she believes that this specific kind of religiously inspired “push-back” to the modern world began in the U.S. in the early 1900s and came only to the Islamic world in the 1960s.

Although her notion of fundamentalism is essential to Armstrong’s argument, I would encourage you to stick with a specific place in the Islamic world and NOT to do a PowerPoint about fundamentalism. As a philosophical and social concept, this would be difficult to illustrate graphically. And illustration is at the heart of this assignment!

Don’t forget to use Mavspace to send me the PowerPoint file. If you wait until 9:59pm you may have trouble with Mavspace — so send it in a little early, if you can!

Dr. G.

Advice: to succeed you need to do four things in each essay [and extra credit ...]

1. Read and investigate the primary source, as we have done in class.

2. Using Bentley and Ziegler and your lecture notes, find an historical context that demonstrates the meaning of the document in the overall setting of the course. I strongly urge you to use the handout entitled Overlapping contexts to study for this exam.

3. Develop an insightful thesis that pulls together your interrogation and contextual research. You will probably not figure out what this thesis is UNTIL YOU HAVE FINISHED a first draft of the essay. That’s normal! Often the oh-so-difficult-to-write last sentence of your first draft will contain your thesis, since only through writing about your ideas can you really learn what you think. So put that sentence into your first paragraph, probably near the end, and rewrite the first draft so that it proves that thesis.

4. Use contextual names, dates, stories, plus vocabulary, and quoted fragments of the primary source to prove your thesis.

Hints and reminders:

1. To earn 5 pts extra credit [half-a-letter grade on the test]: Get out your old graded test. Before each essay, after the instructions in blue, I probably typed in a comment in italics starting: “What needs improvement”. Copy this entire section (there may be two or three) and paste these bits into the beginning of your file.

2. There’s no class on Thursday, November 1 [just as the syllabus says].

3. The test is due to by 10 pm Sunday November 4. Send an email to Garrigus@uta.edu containing the Mavspace address where you uploaded the file.

4. Please combine all three essays in a single file to upload to Mavspace. Whatever you call that file, put your last name in the filename, preferably at the beginning. Don’t send me a file called “HistoryTest”!

5. Use Bentley and Ziegler, but don’t take their words directly for your paper. Close the book and write the story they tell in your own language. I encourage you to minimize your reliance on outside sources.

6. If you do choose to use outside sources, you need to cite them correctly. A bibliography is not a requirement UNLESS you get significant information from beyond the class books and lectures. Then, a bibliography, footnotes and the accurate use of quotation marks will guarantee that you cannot be accused of plagiarism. But why even go there? This is a 2-page paper. Your problem will be streamlining your ideas, not bulking them up.