History 103 *** AMERICAN HISTORY TO 1877 *** Fall 1996

Second Position Paper

Write a short paper (4-5 typed, double-spaced pages) in response to one of the following statements. Whether you agree or disagree with the statement, your paper should make your position clear and cite historical evidence to support your judgment. You should also endeavor to anticipate and refute potential objections to your position. You are expected to draw on at least two of the assigned readings in framing your response. A major goal of this assignment is for you to synthesize and interpret material presented in Part Two of the course.

Be sure to identify the sources of all direct quotations, paraphrased passages, and important assertions derived from the work of others. You may use footnotes, endnotes, or parenthetical notations for this purpose. Although papers will be evaluated mainly on the basis of content, the quality of your presentation also matters. The professor values clarity, logic, originality, documentation, and concise prose.

PAPERS ARE DUE IN CLASS ON MONDAY, NOV. 4. Late papers may be penalized, as may be papers that seriously violate the page limit. Please do not ask for an extension except in cases of dire emergency.

Statements:

1) "In retrospect, it appears that the loyalists were right and the American revolutionaries were wrong. Unduly influenced by the alarmist views of English opposition writers, the patriots mistook reasonable and relatively benign efforts at imperial reform for a despotic plot to destroy American liberty and enslave the colonists. Since no such plot actually existed, the explanations offered by the patriots to justify the Revolution were essentially irrational. Indeed, a careful analysis of the Declaration of Independence reveals that by 1776 the patriots had totally lost touch with reality and embraced a paranoid view of Great Britain, its people and its rulers."

2) "As Federalist No. 10 and No. 51 make abundantly clear, by 1787-88 James Madison and the other framers of the Constitution had lost faith in the capacity of the American people for republican self-government. From the framers' perspective, the events of the 1780s demonstrated only too plainly that most voters cared more about their private interests than the public good. As a result, though the framers stopped short of proposing a return to monarchy, they sought to transfer political power from the people at large to the more enlightened 'natural aristocracy.' Understood in its proper historical context, the Constitution represented a profound rejection of the democratic principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence." .