American Experience & Constitutional Change

Your first major writing assignment of the semester is a portfolio of newspaper clips and analysis. Preparation for this assignment will include the following:

Selecting five articles from the online or paper versions of the New York Times, the Las Vegas Review-Journal or the Las Vegas Sun. Two (2) of these articles must be from the New York Times (which can be viewed online or via our library with a free total access signup) and three (3) of these should be from either the Review-Journal or Sun (or both). You will be listing these after your overall portfolio intro but before each of the five sections of your paper with a live URL in the fashion below:

Author name, “Title of article,” Publication, date, active URL

Mary Hynes, “Las Vegas woman’s donation of son’s corneas leaves her angry,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, Aug. 22, 2019,
https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/las-vegas-womans-donation-of-sons-corneas-leaves-her-angry-1832635/

Each article should have some connection to specific themes and readings in this course and should be ready to discuss specific related passages from FHY, SSM or other assigned texts. (And, yes, you are allowed to jump ahead in FHY or other readings if you find it helpful.) Be sure to attach the date which you can clip from the top of the newspaper page.
At least three of the five articles should be from a different section of the Times, Review-Journal or Sun: national news, international news, Business, Arts, opinion, etc.
Once you have assembled your articles you will be doing the following:

1) Write a two- to three-paragraph overall portfolio introduction to the portfolio that a.) introduces the major topics and themes that you will be discussing in the portfolio b.) tries to tie the different themes together from your news selections and relates them to topics and issues discussed or read about it in class. Be creative: Think about how an article that may not be exactly like something in the class might raise some of the same or related issues to what we are reading in FHY or other sources. (i.e. in the past I had a student assemble all of his articles around issues of freedom of religion and the First Amendment or you could analyze three that focus on exceptionalism and two on republicanism as a another possible example.)

2) Write two explanatory paragraphs explaining how each article is related to theme or reading in this course. (Note: you will be doing this five times, once for each article.) These paragraphs should analyze the article for content and context and should make direct connections between specific material, passages and ideas in the texts (probably mostly FHY) and each article you chose. The more specific you can be about the specific arguments or aspects of the class text the better and you should cite source and page number (i.e. “(FHY 223)”). What does the article say? What is the context of the story? How is it connected to some specific passage of what we read and learned about in class? Why should we care?

3) Write a one-paragraph overall portfolio conclusion that suggest how what we might use this knowledge. How could it be used to affect or change society for the better?

The grade for this assignment will be based on: a.) your ability to follow the above directions b.) your explanation of the connections between articles and course material (very important), and c.) your ability to tie the material together.

Like all papers in all my classes, this paper should be typed in a standard font (12 pt., Times, Helvetica, etc.–no Hobo, Comic, Onyx, etc), double-spaced, with 1 inch margins. Only Word (.doc, .docx), text (.txt or .rtf), or PDF (Adobe Pro/Acrobat) documents will be accepted. If you are using a program other than Microsoft Word, I recommend you “save as” and scroll down to .rtf or “Rich Text File.” I simply cannot open other kinds of documents. NOTE: All other documents (.wdp, etc.) will be treated as non-submissions and will result in a grade of zero.

Note on Citation: Not citing the paper (meaning giving the date, page number, and name of the newspaper) will result in an automatic 20 percent reduction in your grade.