Topic Choices
Please choose one (1) of these topics to write on, based off your reading of Ernesto Chávez’s The U.S. War with Mexico and at least one peer-reviewed secondary source obtained through JSTOR:
1. What arguments did American opponents of the annexation of Texas, and later of the war with Mexico, make? How did they try to connect those arguments to American ideals?
2. How and why did slavery play a big role in both the Texas conflict and the later US war with Mexico?
3. What role did public opinion play in the way that both sides (US and Mexican) fought the war and negotiated the peace?
4. How did white Americans’ ideas about race affect the conduct of the war and the policies after annexing land from Mexico?
5. How did Americans use gender stereotypes to support their conduct in the war with Mexico? Be sure to discuss stereotypes about both men and women.
The dropboxes for all steps of the assignment will be available under the “Take-Home Essay” module on D2L.
All steps must be uploaded as .doc, .docx, or .rtf documents – do not use .pdf.
If you receive a penalty for academic dishonesty on the original paper submission, you will not have the opportunity to submit a second draft.
You will submit a short document in which you lay out which question you are choosing to answer, what your thesis statement will be, which (at least) three sources from the Chávez book you will use, and which peer-reviewed secondary source(s) obtained through JSTOR that you plan on using. You may change these between the outline and the paper – and indeed, I might give you feedback encouraging to do so – but this is to get you thinking about how to structure your paper.
Please put your name somewhere on the front page and indicate which question you are answering. Your paper will need to be between 900 and 1100 words long, with your thesis statement underlined somewhere in your introduction. You will need to use at least three primary source documents from the Chávez text and at least one peer-reviewed secondary source obtained through JSTOR.
You may, but do not have to, submit a final draft which you will have rewritten taking my feedback into account. I will average the grades of the original submission and your second draft to determine your grade on the essay. So, if you get a grade of 80 on the first submission and a grade of 90 on your second draft, your final grade will be (80+90) ÷ 2 = 85.
I will provide you with sample documents showing how to format both your outline as well as the actual paper.
In the outline, you will indicate which secondary source(s) you plan to use by including an entry in the bibliography format of the Chicago Manual of Style Note-Bibliography system.
In the actual paper, you will have two types of citations.
Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) has guidelines for the Chicago Manual of Style:
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/chicago_manual_17th_edition/cmos_formatting_and_style_guide/chicago_manual_of_style_17th_edition.html
You do not need a works cited section or bibliography.