PART 1 identify five primary documents that seem relevant to the questions about happiness that have become of special interest to you.
Keep in mind that there are probably three steps that you will take:
1. After thinking about your period as a whole, identify events themes, people, topics in which happiness and/or well-being has either explicitly or implicitly been raised or addressed.
2. Once you have those themes or questions or events in mind, consider which collections in U.S. History Matters might contain one or more primary sources that connect to them in some way.
3. Search within those sites for at least five relevant primary sources. (You won't interpret these until your next assignment.)
PART 2
How have any of the readings, writings, or postings of your colleagues helped you to think about your own educational plans? Have there been any clues to new directions, new questions, or options that have emerged for you to date? That is, have you noticed any connections between this exploration of happiness in American history and your own assumptions about your education and the degree you are pursuing?In about 150 words, please describe your current thinking about any connections you have thus far found between this study and your overall educational planning process.
The goal of these next three weeks is to work with the primary sources that you have chosen. This is an important step for two reasons:
1. You will be trying your hand at the act of historical interpretation (really trying to make sense of the primary sources you have chosen).
2. You will be learning more about happiness by linking your sources to the chronological period about which you have been studying.
So here are your tasks for weeks 8-10.
You should carefully examine your five primary sources and write an essay (of about 500-750 words) in which you interpret anythree of those sources. (If you prefer to interpret four or all five of your sources, feel free to do so.) Your interpretation should include:
1. a description of the main ideas, values, feelings, worldviews, that you find in your document(s).
2. a discussion of how the specific words or images-clues-that you have found in your source help you interpret that document.
3. an analysis of the ways in which what you see in your primary source offers you insight into the major themes, problems, and/or concerns about "happiness" relevant to your period. (This is a place where you should consult and refer explicitly to the background readings on your period that you have done.)
PART 4 The goal of this final section is to reflect on your learning in a number of areas, and to write in an essay of about 500 words. Your reflection essay should be guided by the following five questions:
1. What have you learned about American history?
2. What have you learned about doing history; that is, about being an historian and dealing with documents and interpretations?
3. What insights have you gained about happiness, and about how it relates to what you have learned about people in different times and places thinking about happiness?
4. How have your own choices, including how your own educational choices are informed by your assumptions about happiness? Especially for those of you also using this study as part of Educational Planning, this is a second opportunity to ask how what you have learned might help you think about your planning your Empire State College education. For example, do any of the ideas about happiness that you have uncovered help you to think about your personal, academic, and/or professional goals? Have you come across others ways to think about happiness (or its absence) that have affected your own way of thinking about your own life? Hopefully you will have already collected some preliminary ideas about these things when you "paused to reflect" during Weeks 6-7. (It could be possible that some of your ideas from this essay are directly applicable to the writing of the Rationale Essay for your degree program.)
5. What new questions or new concerns about happiness as a topic in your life and in our lives today have emerged for you as a result of this study?