History Question

Description

Please write a 6-8 page (~2000 word) paper in which you respond to one(1) of the following

prompts:

1. Compare and contrast what men and women had to do to be to be admired and

respected in Renaissance Italy. Please draw from multiple sources in your answer

to this question including, but not limited to, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, and Alberti.

OR

2. In 1516 Lorenzo II de Medici (grandson of Lorenzo from the Pazzi Conspiracy)

captured the city of Urbino at the head of a papal army. He installed himself as prince of

the city, but his rule was insecure. Pretend that you are Niccolo Machiavelli and asked

for advice on how to rule Urbino. Write an essay–or letter– in which you give

advice to Lorenzo on how best to rule his new city. Please keep in mind the

historical context of both Italy and Urbino. Use Machiavelli, the lectures, and any other

sources you think necessary to answer the question. Remember also that Machiavelli was

tortured at the hands of the Medici family, so would he actually provide good advice or

would he seek his revenge?

A rubric for this essay has been posted to Canvas. In general, you will be graded on whether you

have a strong argument well supported by the primary source texts and relevant historical

background. To do this, you will need to adduce a clear thesis and cite each of the texts regularly

as evidence for your claims. You should use evidence from a minimum of three (3) different

texts from the class in making your argument.

Format for your paper: Please format your papers to be double-spaced in Times New Roman

12-point font. Please use a 1” margin on all sides of your page. Please include a title. At the top

of the page you should indicate your name.

Citations: Please use footnotes to indicate your source whenever you cite in this paper. Failure

to give credit to an author for his or her ideas is plagiarism. In this class we will use the Chicago

Manual of Style format (http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html). Here

is an example using Machiavelli’s The Prince.Machiavelli asserts that ““you will find men are always wicked, unless you give them no

alternative but to be good.”1

For a second citation, you need only to include the author’s last name and page number:

Machiavelli avoids talking about republics in The Prince, stating that he has discussed them

elsewhere.

2

Essay Writing Guidelines

Start with a clear, concise introduction. Long introductions seldom work. For this relatively

short writing assignment, your introduction should: 1) introduce the paper’s topic, including why

your topic is important, what is at stake in it; 2) present your thesis/argument and briefly map out

the logic of how your paper will prove your thesis. To accomplish this, you should need, at most,

half of a double-spaced page (which is a bit on the long side.)

Be sure that each paragraph furthers your overall argument. Your paper should have a

logical structure, with strong topic sentences for each paragraph, and strong paragraphs that

successively contribute to your overarching argument. Strive to write analytical, sustained

sentences and paragraphs that follow an overall argument. By the time you reach the conclusion,

you should have amply proven your thesis/argument with strong, relevant points and evidence.

Write a strong conclusion. You should restate your thesis in a synthetic, bringing-it-all-back-

together way. You should also push your argument to a broader implication. Ask yourself after

you’ve proved your thesis, “So what?”

Provide adequate historical context. Situate authors and texts in their specific contexts. State

circumstances under which certain perspectives and sources emerged, such as their geographical

location, time period, audience/critics, and so on. You, as the author, must be the judge when and

how much context is necessary in specific cases.

Avoid too many broad generalizations. Statements like “Throughout history people have been

identified by their ancestry” or “The Renaissance was a period of change” are vague and not very

useful. Not that they are not true, but such generalizations are often better replaced by more

specific arguments/topic sentences that state how, when, and why change occurred.

Use summaries carefully and productively. As with your treatment of historical context, be

careful not to get bogged down or lost in lengthy summaries that are not really critical for the

purposes of your discussion. You may at times find it necessary to briefly summarize a source,

the best uses of summary usually only introduce those aspects of a source that are relevant to

your essay’s arguments.

1 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. David Wooton (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995), 73.

2 Machiavelli, 6.PREPARE before writing. Making outlines or sketching out arguments in whatever way works

best for you really makes a difference in the quality and persuasiveness of an essay. Good

preparation is the key to effective essay writing.

Leave enough time to edit and proofread. Editing requires more than a spell-check. All papers,

no matter how good, can benefit from subsequent drafts to polish up one’s writing and express

ideas more clearly. Sometimes, reading papers aloud and correcting as you go along helps, to

catch awkward sentence constructions, sentence fragments, and so on. The more time you give

your paper, the better it will inevitably be.

MAKE SURE TO USE RUBRIC FOR GUIDANCE. Let me know if you need anything.