Prospectus

A few students have asked me to elaborate on what's expected for the prospectus this week, and this is the answer that I've given them:



Your main goal is to analyze an issue raised by one of the primary sources and to compare and evaluate how two different historians address that issue. For instance, if you started w/ Donnelly's Caesar's Column, your topic might be Victorian responses to the social dislocations caused by the industrial revolution. For your two secondary sources you might use John Kasson's Civilizing the Machine and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden. You would likely start with a discussion of the issues raised by your primary source (Donnelly) and then compare the methods and perspectives that Kasson and Nye bring to bear upon those issues. In your comparison of their perspectives, you would ideally reveal something of your own perspective, e.g. Kasson's right and Marx is wrong, or vice versa, or they're both wrong, etc. Another example of this might be Ralph 124C41+ and comparison of two books on consumerism or technological utopianism; or Ape and Essence and a comparison of two books on cultural responses to the advent of nuclear weapons; or Neuromancer and a comparison of two books on the growth and impact of the Internet. In any of these cases, the bulk of your paper would be a comparison of your secondary sources, but your primary source would establish and illustrate the basic issues that those secondary sources address. This is an unconventional assignment for a 300 level course, so I'm asking people to produce a prospectus now in order to get these questions on the table early. The prospectus won't be graded, but it should give me a fairly clear idea of what sources you intend to use and why.