Assessment 2: Essay.

Due date: 15th of May

Value: 25%
Length: 1500 word footnoted essay with bibliography (bibliography &
footnotes not part of word count).

Description

STEP ONE:
Choose one of the following essay questions (if you want to change your
topic from the one you did your essay plan on, thats fine, but this
assignment is designed for you to keep the same question):
Unit 2: What were the causes of the American Revolution? Discuss a variety of
interpretations. Which do you find most convincing and why?
Unit 3: How did the East India Company go from being just a trading company to
being an imperial ruler? Discuss a variety of interpretations. Which do you find most
convincing and why?
Unit 4: What caused the Indian Uprising? Discuss a variety of interpretations.
Which do you find most convincing and why?
Unit 5: Why did the campaign against slavery happen when it did? Discuss a
variety of interpretations. Which do you find most convincing and why?
Unit 6: Discuss the British treatment of EITHER New Zealand Mori OR Australian
Aboriginal people. Discuss a variety of interpretations of these relationships. Which
do you find most convincing and why?
Unit 7: Did Britain really rule its imperial territories? Discuss a variety of
interpretations. Which do you find most convincing and why? (*You might want to
pick a case study for this question from the Americas, India, Australasia or Africa).
Unit 8: What were the causes of the Scramble for Africa? Discuss a variety of
interpretations. Which do you find most convincing and why?
Unit 9: What were the causes of independence in EITHER India and Pakistan OR
East and West Africa? Discuss a variety of interpretations. Which do you find most
convincing and why?

Unit 10: Is the Commonwealth an imperial institution? Discuss a variety of

interpretations. Which do you find most convincing and why?

STEP TWO:
READ. Dont skip this part. Nobody passes unless they have really done
some reading.
You should read at least 10 good academic sources, 8 of which must be
peer reviewed secondary sources books, chapters of edited books, or
articles. Peer review (when other academics read your work and comment on
it before publication) is a very important process of quality checking work
books and articles from academic journals (including online articles from
academic journals) are peer-reviewed. A good place to find peer-reviewed
articles (especially if you are not near a good library) are the databases
JSTOR and Proquest go to the USP library e-database page
(http://www.usp.ac.fj/?id=14250) where youll find the links to JSTOR and to
Proquest.
The other two readings you do can be A) more peer-reviewed sources, B)
primary sources or C) other high-quality content. Website content is
usually poor quality (if youre unsure you can ask me).
You can re-use the sources from your literature review and essay plan
assignments if I have advised you that they are good sources.

STEP THREE:
Write a 1500 word essay on your chosen question. Your essay should:
1. Answer the question with a clear argument, backed up with
evidence.
2. Engage with the arguments of other historians. What have they
argued? How does your argument fit in, or contradict, theirs?
3. Footnote the sources where you got all your information (see
guidelines below).

Clear writing, with correct spelling and grammar, is expected.

Include a bibliography. This should be correctly formatted in the Chicago
Style (see the guide on Moodle and the example below). Do not include
sources that you have not footnoted.
Look closely at the rubric, included in the Moodle box; it shows exactly
what I expect from you.
Remember to carefully read the feedback from your other assignments.
They have all been designed in order to help you improve for your essay
your argument, structure, the readings you are doing, your writing skills etc.
This assignment is the big one!

How will it be marked?

The essay will be assessed according to the marking guide in the Moodle
assessment box. You will get:

10 marks for providing evidence for your argument

15 marks for the logical integrity of your argument
15 for structure
5 for writing in your own distinctive voice
10 for writing clearly and correctly
20 for reading, representing and assessing authors arguments
10 for locating your own argument among those arguments
8 for referencing appropriately (noting where you got all your
information from)
and 7 marks for referencing correctly (according to the guidelines in
this assignment description below)

You should show that you have analysed the question, read widely and
critically, understood the arguments of other historians and come up with a
clear and independent argument.

Why has this assignment been set?

This assignment is designed to showcase your writing, critical thinking and
research skills, as well as your understanding of the course themes.
It aligns with the following learning goals:

Knowledge Learn about the big events in the history of the

British Empire, the themes and the important debates.

Critical thinking - Develop your ability to construct arguments,

criticise the arguments of others and think historically.

Research - Get better at finding and evaluating sources, and

referencing them correctly.

Writing - Improve the fluency and structure of your essays - but

always keep your own distinctive voice!

Confidence This is your time to show that you have the above
skills, and you are on the way to being an independent researcher.

FOOTNOTING:
Here is an example of footnoting from my PhD thesis (I have added some
explanations in red beside the footnotes):
There has been a recent profusion of writing about memory, or the processes by
which people make sense of the past. The relationship between memory and
academic history has been a focus of this literature. Pierre Nora, a French historian
and one of the key figures in this field, described memory as a living, changing
relationship to the past, in contrast with history, which is the reconstruction,
always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. 1
The relationship between the rigorous attempt to reconstruct an account of past
events, and the more dynamic, social process of remembering the past, is a
complicated equation. Some argue that academic history is just one of many
influences on collective story-making. Greg Dening, acknowledging that there is no
word in English which encompasses the many different ways of knowing the past,
suggested they might all be called history.2
Nora also wrote of lieux de mmoire or sites of memory where the transmission
of stories about the past takes place. Examples of these are [m]useums, archives,
cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries,
[and] fraternal orders.3 Nora argued that not only are the stories of the past

1 Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mmoire," Representations 26, Special Issue: Memory
and Counter-Memory (1989), 8.
2 Greg Dening, Performances (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996), 36.
3 Nora, "Between Memory and History, 12. (note how this is the second reference to this
article, so a shortened version of the reference with just the authors last name and the first
part of the title, is used).

produced at such sites, but our identities rest upon them as well. 4 Peter Novick
elaborated on this point, explaining that:
there is a circular relationship between collective identity and
collective memory. We choose to center certain memories
because they seem to us to express what is central to our
collective identity. These memories, once brought to the fore,
reinforce that form of identity.5
Henry Rousso, another French historian, wrote a groundbreaking book called The
Vichy Syndrome (1991), an account of the way the Vichy regimes involvement with
the Nazis had been communicated and understood in France over time. He
described the changing levels of attention paid to the history of the Vichy regime,
coalescing in a series of crisis situations in which the presence of the past cannot
be denied.6

Here is a link to the Chicago Manual of Style quick guide which explains
footnoting and bibliographic referencing in more detail:
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html

Bibliography:
1. The bibliography should begin on a new page
2. Title the page Bibliography, centre-aligned
3. Arrange the works in your bibliography alphabetically from A to Z by
surname of the author
4. When citing a second work by the same author, use three dashes and
a full stop: ---.
5. Use a hanging indent from the second line onwards for each reference
6. Do not use use bullet points or numbers
7. There is no need to use borders on the page margin
8. Please feel free to email me any questions you have if you are
confused
4 Ibid. (use this if the reference is the same as the one immediately before it, including the page number it - here the
reference is to page 12 of the Nora article again. If the page number is different, say it was page 14, use: Ibid., 14.)
5 Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London: Bloomsbury Publishing,
1999), 7.
6 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), 219.

9. See next page for an example of a correctly formatted bibliography

Bibliography
Belgrave, Michael. Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories.
Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 2005.
Dening, Greg. Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas 17741880. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1980.
---. Performances. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996.
McAloon, Jim. "By Which Standards? History and the Waitangi Tribunal." The New
Zealand Journal of History 40, no. 2 (2006): 194-213.
Neumann, Klaus. The Cornelia Rau case: a historical perspective (paper presented
to the History Department, University of Melbourne, May 12, 2005). Accessed
July 21, 2012. http://www.apo.org.au/commentary/cornelia-rau-casehistorical-perspective
Nora, Pierre. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mmoire."
Representations 26, no. Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (1989):
7-24.
Novick, Peter. The Holocaust and Collective Memory. London: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 1999.
O'Regan, Tipene. "Old Myths and New Politics. Some Contemporary Uses of
Traditional History." New Zealand Journal of History 26, no. 1 (1992): 5-27.
Oliver, W.H. "The Future Behind Us: The Waitangi Tribunal's Retrospective Utopia." In
Histories, Power and Loss: Uses of the Past - a New Zealand Commentary,
edited by Andrew Sharp and Paul McHugh, 9-30. Wellington: Bridget Williams
Books, 2001.
Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1991.