 Hi, I'm Dr. Gene Preuss. I'm your history professor for Texas History. I wanted to give you some information I hope you had a chance to look over the syllabus and to log on to Pearson Reveal so that you can get access to your textbook. You can use the 14-day free trial This is a short semester and it will save your grades as far as I know And I can import them into Blackboard. So if you want to do that, that's fine If you want a print version of the book, the bookstore does have some print versions Or you can just use the online edition that's in Reveal your Syllabus is online. Please go over it carefully. It has due dates. It has information about the assignments and Check there first because I put a lot of time and effort into the syllabus so it should cover many of your questions that you might have and If you ask a question and I say hit check the syllabus or check the assignments The assignments will have lots of information as well So whenever you log on to Blackboard and you log on to Pearson and you get access to the textbook You'll see that the chapter is broken down into parts One of the things you're going to want to pay specific attention to are the quizzes that you have By the end of this week, you're going to have several of those chapters You need to take a few questions on those are your quizzes that will account for a large part of your grade over the whole semester But throughout the week if you miss one or two or if you don't do so well, don't let that get you down That's not where most of your points come from most of your points come from the exams the essay exams and from the Weekly discussions, I'll post those you'll reply to those and those will be on Blackboard Now in the discussions you need to not only formulate a good response on your own But you'll need to respond to at least two other people's response to other people's posts so it needs to be a real discussion not just you typing something and and We want to have some Correspondence some back and forth as far that's how we learned it helps us to learn better and the reason why the essays their short essays 250 500 750 words those are each one page So the essays are supposed to be two pages of text the two pages of text. That's 500 to 700 words Typed out double spaced the formatting information is all on your in is all on the essay prompt there's also a brief little essay called how to write a good history paper and That is going to have your rubric that I'll be using to grade your exam your essay and A lot of other information questions that you might have should be answered in those directions So please look over both of those and that'll give you more information in short I've put a lot of detailed information on each of the assignments that should help you get started now for this first week We're going to be looking at chapters 14 through 19 And this is going to take us from the end of the Civil War the reconstruction period putting the Union back together All the way to World War one the beginnings of World War one and how America the United States Grew and developed in that period you're going to see a lot of things changing first of all one of the big questions This is the question we're asking throughout the course is what does it mean to be an American? That seems very Intuitive it seems very obvious and yet for many years and even today that is still a question We're dealing today with questions over. How do we deal with immigrants with DACA recipients people who are protected under that? Act how are they Americans? How do they get their rights? Do they have rights? So these are questions that we still face today. What does it mean to be an American now after the Civil War? We had six million African Americans who had once been enslaved and were seen as property Now they are Americans in 1866 how does the United States respond to them? What rights do they have? Then as America starts expanding it starts growing. What about Native Americans who are living in the West? What about Mexican Americans who are living in the West? What about Filipinos and people in Cuba as we start to expand leading up to World War one What about all the immigrants coming in are they Americans? Do they have the same rights as citizens do? Well, these are questions that are going to be addressed and going to be come up during this first week of class And so please look at the chapters look at the parts that I've Kind of laid out for you the questions that I laid out for you. This should lead you to some sort of Understanding or at least being able to formulate a question Historically, how have we addressed this question of what does it mean to be an American in this period? This is going to be the topic of your essay and if you'll look on the textbook Website in Pearson's revel website for the text There is a part of the chapter is called primary sources source collection in each of those Collections for each chapter There's five to six primary sources. These are documents written at the time by people who live through it and so this provides you with kind of insight into what people were thinking during the period and this is the Stuff of what history is made of this is the ingredients for the Cake of history as it were so look at these primary sources and when you develop your questions You need to choose at least one source from eat from three of the chapters You're gonna have six chapters this time So at least one source from three of those chapters and you can add in other sources Little hint the more sources the more analysis you do the better your essay is going to be but the primary point of your essay Is to develop an argument? How do you answer the question that the prompt gives you? What does it mean to be an American during this period and look at those primary sources? Develop your response your answer that is your thesis and then the rest of your essay should flow from there to support Your thesis. Why do you feel this way? What about the documents lead you to believe this way? The essay also asks you to use a secondary source now in this class is a shortened time period So you're not going to have a secondary source a secondary source is a monograph. It's a One or two or three people authored book that or essay That addresses a question that's based upon the primary sources now You don't have time for that in this class period So you're going to use what we call a tertiary source a third level source and on that third level source Primary sources secondary sources. These are books Essays written by historians tertiary sources written by historians too, but it's built upon the other two So I've got more information about this and how to write a good essay You're going to use your textbook your textbook provides a broad picture of what's going on So under this umbrella as it were of historical evidence and how historians have looked at the past You're going to figure out your own interpretation Your own ideas your own explanations for using the primary sources to what people were thinking in the past and develop your argument based upon that in the framework provided by your Tertiary source in this time. So it sounds complicated. It really isn't I think as you Begin doing it. You'll understand how it works. It's a short paper. It's only three pages. Stay on point. Don't Go down too many rabbit holes. Don't go down any rabbit holes You don't really have the time to do that pick a few sources at least one from each chapter and Using your book as the framework develop your argument within that context the final thing is the responses for the weekly Discussion I've already gone over those. Those are pretty straightforward as you progress each week. Look at those sources Go through the textbook. Look at the chapters. You'll have a pretty good idea of what happened So good luck. I'll be back with more video Information at a later point and I will post those assignments by the end of the night. Have a good night