This essay is your opportunity to demonstrate a more sophisticated knowledge of the source materials we have been working with thus far in the semester and to explore some of your own ideas and insights in more depth than the one-page summaries have allowed. Your paper should be between 4 and 5 pages (1,000-1,250 words) in length, it should be built upon a solid foundation of evidence, and it should demonstrate some of the qualities of historical imagination we have been discussing all semester.

From a technical standpoint, remember that all analytical essays must have a thesis somewhere in the first paragraph. If you are unclear about how a thesis statement differs from a statement of the facts, please be sure to see me before you begin to write. You should also revisit the Student Guide to Writing a Paper available to you from my website and Richard Marius’ book on historical writing.

Before you begin to write, please outline your paper. Producing an outline first helps you to make sure your thoughts are organized and that the evidence you are using supports the larger points you are making. If the evidence you have chosen does not support those points, you might want to ask yourself why you have chosen it. Remember: the historical record often includes evidence that both supports and challenges the conclusions you draw…so your paper should take into account those pieces of evidence that might lead another historian to different conclusions.

Finally, I want to remind you that your textbook is an invaluable resource for context. You can avoid many errors and can save yourself significant amounts of time puzzling over the material if you read the textbook pages I assigned. At the same time, I want to caution you against simply restating what is in the textbook. I’ve read it several times over the past few years and it will be instantly obvious to me if your paper is simply a recapitulation of what the textbook’s authors have to say.

Topic:

The idea of human progress, that is progression of humans and human society toward some more perfect state, was inherent in much of the political thought of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. In a detailed and analytical essay, discuss how this idea of progress is reflected in the constitutional experiments we reviewed in class. Your paper should consider both the theoretical works of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, and the concrete evidence provided in the various constitutional documents. Your paper might also consider how the scientific methods developed during these same centuries influenced these developments and/or the idea of human progress.