Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Paper Topics
Here you guys should post your ideas for your papers, so we will know your interests and be able to post links to anything relevant we run across in the course of the semester. I'm not sure if the group blog format will let you edit this post and just include the information here. If it does, great. Otherwise, put your plans in the comment thread.
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Hello Everyone,
ReplyDeleteI’ve been collecting ideas for both the historiography essay and the New Yorker style essay. First, the Historiography essay:
I have found a suitable topic for the essay: “How have historians interpreted the political and economic relations between settlers and plains Indians in the decades before the Civil war?” I was originally going to focus on Comanche hegemony, but did not find enough articles addressing that topic over a long period. The articles I chose are:
1. Indians in American-Mexican relations before the War of 1846 by Ralph A Smith, published 1963.
2. Creating trading places on the new Mexican frontier by Martha Works, published 1992.
3. The Politics of Grass: European expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Power in the Southwest Borderlands by Pekka Hamalainen.
I am going to read these articles then start writing the historiography essay this week.
For the New Yorker assignment I have been playing around with some ideas and have narrowed it down to an article exploring popular notions about Mexicans and the Texas border. The border issue has been a recent topic in political debate, so an article about it would be relevant, I just need to find a way to bring modern events and history together in a way that would be interesting to the casual reader. To do this I’m going to look at pop-culture representations of this border issue as well as personal experience anecdotes, and maybe some interviews. I’m thinking of looking at the issue first from a northeast perspective, the idea that some people think of Texas as being full of fat racist white people. Then looking at it from another personal perspective, that of a Mexican friend of mine from Texas who used to get into fights (verbal) at bars with people where he would try to set them straight on what it means to be from Texas. Here I want to transition to a Texas point of view: I’m thinking of contacting my Mexican Texan friend (or as I used to call him “Texican” –but I looked that up and it means something else entirely) so that I could get in touch with his dad, who is a Mexican-American Lawyer and Federal Judge in Texas. I’m also going to use the recent movie Machete, a twisted but hilarious commentary on the issue of racism and U.S. border policy. Each section of the paper will start by giving a modern/popular perspective, then look at its historical origin before moving on to the next perspective. This is going to be hard, and as you can see, I haven’t really gone past the initial brainstorm stage of spewing a bunch of ideas down on paper. My next step is to continue reading, but at the same time to try to bring some structure to the whole idea of showing different perspectives from both a modern and a historical standpoint.
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