You will be assigned reading throughout the semester, as indicated on the schedule. All of this reading is required. When the schedule indicates that you should “complete” a reading assignment during a particular week, you should start it at the beginning of the week and plan to have it done by our Thursday class meeting, so that we can refer to the texts during our class discussion.

Students in the Spring 2011 semester of HIST 246 will also have the special opportunity to work on an online archive and exhibit project in conjunction with the sesquicentennial of the War. Students will work collaboratively and independently to study Lt. Dick Dowling, a Confederate officer remembered for his role in the Battle of Sabine Pass, and to examine how Dowling and the battle have been remembered, misremembered, contested, and represented at different moments in the past century and a half.

Graded assignments in this course have two purposes: to help you learn, and to assess–both for your information and for mine–how much you are learning. These assignments will include:

Two Library Assignments. Each will require you to go to Fondren library to complete a research task. One will involve finding a particular issue of a newspaper or magazine, either on microfilm or in a bound volume, that contains an article about Dowling and then preparing the article for digitization. The other will involve examining past textbooks or scholarly works about the Civil War to see whether or how Dowling has been included in the work, and then preparing an excerpt for digitization. In both cases, I will provide the class with a list of periodical issues and particular book titles, and students will select which ones to look at for your library assignments. These assignments will be due in Week 7 and Week 12, as indicated on the schedule.

Small Group Project. Working in a small group of four or five people, you will be designing and producing a digital product in support of the online archive and exhibit we’ll be creating about Dowling and the history of collective memory about him. Each group will be charged with producing one of the following: (1) an interactive map of sites related to Dowling’s life and memory; (2) a digital video related to the project; (3) a Podcast or audio file related to the project; (4) a timeline using special plug-ins in Omeka, the open-source web publishing platform we will be using for the project. Dr. McDaniel will assign students to these groups, and more information will be provided about the projects throughout the semester. Support for the technical dimensions of these tasks will also be available; students’ most important task will be to make judgments about how to interpret and represent Civil War history for an audience in the general public. Working together with other group members and Dr. McDaniel, students will produce a contract in Week 13 that will make clear what work each group member is responsible for completing by the due date for the project. Each group member will be assigned an individual grade based on the expectations outlined in the contract.

Two Position Papers. Each will require you to defend, in writing, your position on a question about the Civil War that historians still debate. Dr. McDaniel will distribute the prompt for each paper, along with specific guidelines and criteria for grading, at least one week before each is due. Each prompt will require students to read a set of articles related to the question at hand and then, on the basis of those articles, take a position in the debate and explain the reasons and evidence for that position in around 4 to 6 pages. Dr. McDaniel will read the position papers and assign them a numeric grade on the “zero to 4.3” gradepoint scale. These papers will be due in Weeks 6 and 10, as indicated on the schedule. (If you are unsatisfied with your performance on one of the position papers, you’ll also have the opportunity to write an optional third position paper, due by the end of the final examination period. You must inform me by the last day of class which position paper you want to replace. If your grade on the optional final paper is higher, it will replace the grade on the paper you specified. If the grade on the optional paper is lower, then the earlier grade will stand.)

Weekly Blog Posts. Students are required to write a blog post–a short piece of writing that will be published online–every week, with the exception of Weeks 6 and 10. The posts will be due by 9 a.m. on Thursdays, and prompts for them will be distributed in advance. Technical instruction about how to use blogs will also be provided. The prompts for the blog posts will usually ask students to answer questions or respond to ideas raised by the assigned readings, by the library assignments, by class discussions, or by the small group projects. Coming to class and keeping on top of these other assignments is essential to writing the blog posts. Fully responding to the prompts will typically require at least 400-500 words, but may require more. (Dr. McDaniel and Mercedes Harper, the teaching assistant for this course, will both read your blog posts, occasionally commenting on them. Mercedes will assign a numerical grade to each one using a set of criteria that will be distributed to you, and these grades will serve as guidelines and recommendations to Dr. McDaniel, who will use them to make final decisions about grades and average them together. If you miss a blog post assignment, you will have the opportunity to make up one of these posts within a week of the initial due date, though you may be assigned a different prompt for the make-up. You will receive an official report about your grades on the posts so far in Week 6 and Week 15. Dr. McDaniel reserves the right, but is under no obligation, to bump your blog posts average higher if your grades on these posts trend steadily upward over the course of the semester.)

As each of these assignments approaches on the schedule, the criteria for grading will be discussed and explicitly communicated to you in class. Be aware that these criteria will only be concerned with assessing how well you are meeting the general learning objectives for the course; that is, students won’t be graded on a “curve” in relation to other students’ performance. The point of grades is to let each student know where he or she stands in relation to the specific objectives of the assignment and the objectives of the course as a whole. Here’s how individual assignments will be weighed when calculating your final grade:

Library Assignment #1 = 10%
Library Assignment #2 = 10%
Small Group Project= 20%
Position Paper #1 = 15%
Position Paper #2 = 25%
Average Weekly Blog Posts = 20%

Deadlines

As indicated on the schedule, you will have a “week-long window” in which to turn in your two position papers, and the prompts for these papers will be distributed a week before that window opens. This gives you two full weeks to work on each position paper at a pace that works with your own schedule and work habits. You can also think of this policy this way: I’m giving you a due date for the paper one week after the prompts are distributed, and then giving you a week-long grace period in which to turn it in late.

Because of this, I will not be willing to accept position papers turned in after the “week-long window” has closed. Moreover, the longer you wait to turn in the paper, the less time I will have to offer extensive feedback on the paper. It’s in your interest to turn assignments in early in the “week-long window” so that you can get more feedback from me on how you are doing in the course and how to do better. All papers will get a fair read and an honest assessment, but be aware that papers turned in at the eleventh hour will not receive as many comments as papers turned in earlier.

Library Assignments, Blog Posts, and Small Group Projects must be completed by the deadlines specified in the schedule. Exceptions to the deadline policies will only when there are extenuating circumstances such as an illness or personal emergency, but these circumstances must be documented to my satisfaction and brought to my attention immediately when they arise. Please remember, too, that the power of some circumstances to make your work late–like becoming sick the night before a post is due–can be mitigated by starting to work on written assignments in advance of the deadline, so that even in cases where rare extenuating circumstances prevent you from finishing something on time, you will have some work to turn in.

Honor Code

Unless specific exceptions are explicitly provided in writing, the Honor Code applies to all written assignments in this course. My default position is trust, and my basic assumption is that students are in this course to learn. But suspected cases of plagiarism and intellectual dishonesty will be reported to the Honor Council. (Students: If you are unclear at any time about what constitutes an Honor Code violation in this course, it is your responsibility to clarify the issue with me before any ambiguous case arises.)