Posted: September 22nd, 2015

thesis-driven, argumentative paper

thesis-driven, argumentative paper

Using the sources and information from the course to contextualize the immigrant experience, write an argumentative paper about the nature of immigration in American history.
The primary sources are to be accounts from immigrants about life in the United States.
Use the sources in the attachment and also the course sources, which I am also attaching.
The primary sources must be the driving evidence in the paper, but you must also use the material from the course to contextualize all four sources.
The paper must be a thesis-driven, argumentative paper. This is not a report where you simply relate the information in the sources or provide an account of an immigrant’s life. Instead, you are to take the information from the sources to come to a central conclusion about the history of American immigration and make an argument about that history. For example, some questions that could be the core of the paper: Is the United States a nation of immigrants or a nation of some desired immigrants? Is the history of immigration in the United States the story of multiculturalism or the story of assimilation to a set of cultural values shared by all Americans? Going with our course theme, what is an American and how do immigrants change or reinforce certain conceptions of Americanness? You are not bound to these questions and in fact are encouraged to devise your own approach to American immigration history
The paper must be a thesis-driven, argumentative paper. This is not a report where you simply relate the information in the sources or provide an account of an immigrant’s life. Instead, you are to take the information from the sources to come to a central conclusion about the history of American immigration and make an argument about that history. For example, some questions that could be the core of the paper: Is the United States a nation of immigrants or a nation of some desired immigrants? Is the history of immigration in the United States the story of multiculturalism or the story of assimilation to a set of cultural values shared by all Americans? Going with our course theme, what is an American and how do immigrants change or reinforce certain conceptions of Americanness? You are not bound to these questions and in fact are encouraged to devise your own approach to American immigration history. The paper needs to be 4-5 pages, double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 point font, and have 1-inch margins all the way around. Any paper shorter than four full pages or longer than five full pages will be docked points. Any paper not following the stated formatting requests or primary source requirements will be docked points. Whenever you quote or paraphrase from the course material, cite using Chicago Manual Style and footnoting. Note: The 4-5 page requirement is to be considered without footnotes, i.e. you need to have 4 full pages without footnotes and no more than 5 full pages without footnotes
A successful paper will have a clear and original thesis that provides a sophisticated argument about the history of immigration and ethnicity. The organization of the successful paper will be evident, easily followed, and have excellent transitions. The evidence will be used to support every point and will make sense and relate to the argument of the paper. Evidence will be integrated into the argument not simply placed in the paragraph (Standalone quotes will be docked points). The paper will be logically argued with connections that illuminate the thesis and offer a unique perspective on immigration and ethnicity in American history. Finally, the paper will have excellent grammar, diction, sentence structure, correct use of punctuation, proper citations, and generally free of errors.

Very important:
Please use follow message to the upmost when writing the paper-
Looking over these sources, all will work except for the Purcell source, which is a secondary account of immigration from 1995. If you want to pursue Indian immigration in the 20th century, it might actually be helpful to see what primary source Purcell used to write his history.

I did want to make a note as well about the Shaffner and Thatcher sources. While both can be primary sources, they are not primary for the annotation that followed. What I mean by that is that you are attempting to use Thatcher, published in 1862, to discuss the American Revolution and Shaffner, published in 1863, to discuss the Atlantic Slave trade, and they are not primary to those events as they are both written well after. You can, however, use them to discuss how people thought of America’s immigration history on the eve of the Civil War. For example, while you can’t use Thatcher to discuss immigration during the Revolution, what you can do is discuss how people used the Revolution to frame immigration issues in the early 1860s. The same will work for Shaffner; you cannot use that source as a primary source to discuss the Atlantic slave trade, but you can explore what impact the slave trade had on conceptions of immigration during the 1860s. And actually, if that is your conception, to use histories of immigration to look at how immigration was portrayed at that given time, then even Purcell will work in that framework (but you can’t use Purcell to discuss previous immigration, just how immigration was perceived in the mid-1990s).