Writing Assignments, Honors Seminar on the American Frontier


Assignment 1: Hine & Bingham, Three Colonial Powers

Write a brief informal essay (2-3 pp.) which answers the following questions. Draw concrete examples from the readings to support your assertions.
What were the chief interests of each of the colonial powers (Spanish, French, and English) covered in the readings?
What sort of people are the chief historical actors in each of the colonial powers' expansion in the New World?
How did these two factors shape each power's interactions with tha Native American people with whom they came into contact?

Assignment 2: John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive

Reading a Monograph--In a brief (2-3 pp.) essay, identify the thesis of Demos's book, The Unredeemed Captive. Test its validity by indicating what argument and what evidence Demos uses to support his thesis. Is this a valid thesis, given the sources and argument of the book?

Assignment 3: High Rock Park, Staten Island

Paradigms of "Nature"--Write (in-class) an informal essay which answers the following questions: What is succession? What examples of both "natural" and "human-made" succession did you see along the Loosestrife Swamp Trail in High Rock Park? Provide specific examples, and explain what makes each example "natural" or "human-made." As High Rock Park is called a "Wilderness Area," think about what wilderness means. Do you see High Rock as more wild than settled, or more settled than wild? What is the moment of transition from wild to settled? What did this wilderness replace?

Assignment 4: Henry David Thoreau, Walden (selections)

Being Home, Ownership of Place--Thoreau wrote in Walden, "In Wildness is the preservation of the world." After your own experience in "wildness," what do you think Thoreau meant by this? To what extent was his idea of Wildness a construct, a way of looking at a place like Walden Pond as a "wild" place in spite of its being surrounded by and in close contact with a town, industry, and people? Given that a construct serves a purpose or it would never be constructed, what purpose did Thoreau's idea of wildness serve? Using Lewis and Clark's journals and The Last of the Mohicans, discuss the ways in which this construction of wildness like the construction of Native Americans as "wild" or "savage" in the nineteenth century.

Assignment 5: Trip to the National Museum of the American Indian, Battery Park

Native America--Please answer the following in a three to five page essay. Be sure to provide specific support for your argument--the name of a specific museum artifact, and direct quotes from the text--in order to prove your point.
After visiting the National Museum of the American Indian and reading and discussing John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks, you should have an inkling of the significant contestation over "authenticity"--"real" Indianness versus "phony" or "polluted" Indianness--that rages in the field of Native American Studies. With those experiences in mind, provide four examples--one of which should come from Black Elk Speaks--of ways in which Native American cultures have adapted to contact with Europeans. Then provide four examples--one of which should come from Black Elk Speaks--of ways in which Native American cultures have resisted changes caused by contact with Europeans. That contact may consist of either the moment of meeting between Indians and Europeans or changes in the patterns of interactions with Europeans and Euro-Americans after contact. Describe and explain the meaning of each example. Considering the evidence of these adaptations, and the debate over "authenticity" which we have discussed in class, explain why it is so important for people--especially scholars--to understand and document the ways in which Native American peoples have adapted to and resisted against European and Euro-American culture.

Assignment 6: Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain

Crosscultural Meetings--Using the definition of Modernism we have developed from class discussions of Austin and her work, think about the differences between Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain and Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Using these contrasts, examine the ways in which Austin's perspective is Modernist. In a 3-5 pp. essay, discuss and document with evidence drawn from the text three Modernist elements in Austin's book. Do not simply summarize Austin's argument; identify and examine the ways in which she is a Modernist.

Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for Honors 502 (The American Experience--Social Sciences), The Honors College of The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York, Fall Semester 1998. Send email to lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu
Last modified: Wednesday 24 February 1999.