Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Paper #1

Here's a thread for you to ask me and your classmates about potential paper topics.

In the paper, I'd like you to take an issue that we've discussed or that interests you concerning marriage, and using the assigned readings as well as additional books and articles, trace how different historians have approached the topic.

8 comments:

Cait said...

I definitely want to do something regarding gay marriage. How specific do I have to get within this general idea?

Claire said...

I would like to investigate the current religous debate over civil unions in the context of the historical Christian (particularly Protestant) ties to the national government.

Bailey said...

I would like to work on a paper that links coveture and contract to the current debate about divorce and parental rights. Basically how historians discuss gender role and the way in which it relates to social contracts within the family.

Gale Kenny said...

Cait and Claire - you might want to wait and do gay marriage/civil unions for the final paper instead of the midterm paper. It would require a lot of outside reading at this point.

I recommend looking at something that will help you with this latter paper. Claire might want to right on church and state and marriage; Cait - I'm not sure what you want to do. Try to think about what specific issue might make it easier to write about gay marriage later.

Bailey: good topic. Again, you might save the current debate part until the final paper, and focus on coverture and maternal/paternal rights over children in the 19C for now.

Gale Kenny said...

Floating paper topic ideas:

Since some of you are English majors, you might want to do an analysis of marriage in novels from a specific time period. You could even do an analysis of a film - Gone with the Wind, for example, in relation to this week's reading on slavery.

Cait said...

I really like the idea of analyzing a film. Would we just pick films set in the time period of our readings and analyze how they compare with teh ideas of marraige formed by our readings?

Gale Kenny said...

Cait - let me know what you're thinking about.

The idea would be that a historical film is 1) made during a specific moment in US history, and 2) trying to represent the past, as people think of it at that moment.

Beth said...

Is it actually all right to do a paper on Gone With The Wind as you suggested? I tried to come up with other period films but I just couldn't think of any that had so many examples of marriage. I was thinking that I can relate it to a lot of things having to do with marriage in America: slavery, marrying multiple times/becoming a widow, and maybe even divorce. I'm not sure if it would be better to write a paper on the book or the film, though. Is this idea even viable or has someone already taken it?