Week 3 Response-

Melissa Diaz
Professor Hobbs
History 209S
18 January 2016
Bianca Dang examined the changes in the rhetoric of Henry McNeal Turner before and after the Civil War. She argued that Turner shifted to a more uncompromising stance on emigration after the end of the Reconstruction. She also showed that the American government was not going to protect the rights and interests of African Americans. Dang structured her essay historically to trace Turner’s changing opinions on the question of emigration. Specifically, she pointed to the 1876 election and the 1883 Supreme Court ruling as turning points in Turner’s thinking. Both of these incidents, as well as the violence and lynchings of the post-Civil War era caused Turner’s rhetoric to become more uncompromising. She was able to use Turner’s speeches and editorials for her primary source analysis. This analysis primarily focused on Turner’s rhetorical choices and use of historical events.
She was able to establish the historical context for each of the periods she focused on. She would summarize an event, then provide Turner’s reaction and analysis. She focused a lot on Turner’s confidence in his assertions, and explored Turner’s reasoning. She also brought in differing perspectives on emigration from the time, like Frederick Douglass and other prominent African American leaders, and showed how Turner defended against this criticism. At times, it was difficult to follow her argument because it was woven too deeply into historical context.

Jennifer Ockelman began her paper with a wonderful introduction that really drew in the reader. She effectively used the example of American society’s acceptance and rejection of film star Clara Bow to immediately establish the essential question of her paper. She argued that there was a tension between the modern woman and modesty in the 1920s and that the flapper tied these conflicting feminine ideals together. She explained the relevance and importance of the media in broadcasting feminine expectations, and defended her use of certain media sources for her analysis.
The strength of this paper lies in the author’s ability to present a ‘problem’ and guide the reader through clear analysis, without losing nuance. At first, I thought using three very different sources would be too ambitious. However, her question was broad enough that she was able to use advertisements, two films, and a Fitzgerald short story to provide an overview of the American flapper. She spent the bulk of her paper explaining the plots of the films and the Fitzgerald short story and analyzing how the concept of the flapper fit into those types of media. Her footnotes, however, were not extensive, and she did not use many secondary sources. It would have been interesting for her to compare her conclusions with the conclusions of other historians.
Possibly owing to the provocative nature of her topic, her writing style was refreshing and entertaining. I noticed that some of her paragraphs were relatively short, but the style was quite effective because she made quick and simple points that helped move her argument along. She was still able to structure her essay logically, and her argument was not lost among the enjoyable stories conveyed in her primary sources.

Higgenbotham began her analysis of race by consolidating it into a “three-pronged approach.” She explained that race was a social construction, that the metalanguage of race has been used to influence other power relationships, and that race provides an opportunity for dialogue. She argued that feminist scholars have historically excluded black women from feminist constructions. She argued that scholars have attempted to analyze womanhood without realizing that gender, race, and class are inextricably related.
An experienced writer and academic, Higgenbotham took more risks in her writing. For example she effectively used a seemingly unrelated quote by a Supreme Court justice about obscenity as an analogy to define race. She was able to use modern examples of government aid to African American women and the perception of the AIDS epidemic to shed light onto the problems with respectability politics. She relied more heavily on the work of other historians and academics, possibly due to the complex theoretical nature of her topic. Since she gave an overview of the treatment of African American women in history, she was able to pull material from theorists and historians of the particular time she focused on. In this way, she was able to use secondary sources as primary sources that revealed  the state of academia in that particular time with a focus on race and gender.
In addition to using sources by other historians, Higginbotham incorporated the case of Celia and the writings of Sojourner Truth to explore the construction of black “womanhood.” She was able to quickly alternate between quotes from primary and secondary sources one after the other. This structure kept the reader engaged with the time period, but it risked overwhelming the reader with information that could distract from the main argument.