history

· Context: This week’s topics (political ideologies, growth of empires, modern society) share a common element – a sense that some people are superior to others. The groups could be defined by nationality, sex/gender, economic class, race/ethnicity, or some other factor, and some argued against these ideas of superiority while others created new systems and tried to fit even more people into their schema. One key paradox of the modern world is how ideas of democracy, equality, and inclusion coexisted with ideas of superiority, imperial overlordship, and race/class/gender difference. For this paper, you will adopt the persona of someone who is deeply involved in at least one of these controversies (e.g. social class, gender, empire, tradition v. modernity, etc.). One conceit of the assignment is that your person must be well-read, no taking on of uninformed points of view is allowed. For this paper, you may use any or all of the primary sources assigned to date (i.e. you can revisit material from earlier modules). Additional primary sources addressing the issue of imperialism have been added to the list.

Prompt: Taking on the persona of someone who is well-informed and believes passionately in your opinions, argue for or against a major decision to be made by your home country’s government in the period from 1850-1914 (you will have to identify your country and the decision – be sure it’s a real one that is introduced in the textbook). The decision should be involved with one of the aspects of superiority/inferiority discussed in the primary sources as well as this modules’ textbook chapters.