History 151 University of Massachusetts, Amherst

L. Lovett

Paper #1 Assignment

DUE: In Section, Friday, March 26, 2004

For this assignment, you will be asked to write a brief (3 page) essay on one of the topics described below. Your paper must have a signed cover sheet (Available at http://people.umass.edu/llovett/cover.html).

Please review the paper Writing Guidelines for this course before you begin to research or write.

(Available at http://people.umass.edu/llovett/writing.html.)

TOPIC 1: FSA Photographers and Rural Poverty

Write a short essay in which you answer the charge by historian William Stott that documentary photography often strips its subjects of power by controlling their presentation.[1] What is the relationship between the Farm Security Administration photographers, their subjects, their assumed audience and their agenda?

You will find webpages on the FSA photographs at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fahome.html

Scroll to Special Presentations and Choose any of the three sites, though I especially recommend the first: Documenting America)

TOPIC 2: FDR and Social Security

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was disabled from polio at age thirty-nine. The online Disability Museum has collected an array of documents, photographs, and newspaper articles on FDR and Warm Springs, Georgia, a rehabilitation center. Write a paper in which you use the sources from Warm Springs to consider FDR's impact on the country. Your paper might want to consider the possible ramifications for important New Deal legislation, such as Social Security, or posit a revision of the image of the American presidency as represented in these sources. (If you choose the latter, you may want to invoke the image of the Presidency constructed by Theodore Roosevelt.)

See http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/lib/subjects/Franklin_D._Roosevelt/.

TOPIC 3: "Blondie"

Chic Young started drawing the cartoon strip "Blondie" in 1930. The Library of Congress has recently created an online exhibit of the "Blondie" cartoon series, including many of his earliest cartoon strips. Imagine that you are an anthropologist and these cartoons are one of the only sources of information that you have about the 1930s. What would you say are the issues facing Americans during the 1930s? You may want to consider how class, work, gender roles, education, and family are represented in the "Blondie" cartoons.

See http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/blondie/.

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[1] William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).