Course Requirements and Grade Distribution
1. General in-class participation [15% of the grade]. Participating in class is a must. This is a significant portion of your grade (basically one-and-a-half letter grades!) so it’s imperative that you contribute to class discussions. I appreciate any well-intentioned participation in class discussions but I am happier when your contributions relate to the assigned readings for that day. I will carefully note through the semester those students who are actively engaging with the assigned readings.
I will also take attendance once every week at the beginning of a class, either on Monday or Thursday. No more than one unexcused absence and two excused absences will be allowed. For excused absences, I will need official written documentation. Excessive absences will significantly diminish your class participation grade.
2. Reading Responses [8 X 5 = 40% of the grade]. Every week, I will assign “Reading Responses,” the prompts for which will be posted on the course website. These will deal specifically with the readings assigned for the following week. There will usually be 3-4 questions you have to answer. Type your answers (a paragraph or two for each), print them out, and bring them to class. I will collect everyone’s answer sheets and assign a tick mark grade where 1 tick = minimal work done, 2 tick marks = fair, 3 tick marks = good, and 4 tick marks = excellent. These correspond to C, B-, B+ and A, respectively. If nothing is turned in, you get a zero. There will be 9 of these through the semester, so you can miss one and still get credit for all 8.
3. Book Analysis [15% of the grade]. This will be focused on Jacob Hamblin’s The Wretched Atom. I will post the prompt about a week before the assignment is due in class on Thursday, March 7.
4. Final Presentation [5% of the grade]. Each student will make a presentation (approximately 10 minutes) to the rest of the seminar based on his or her final paper. There will be a short (5 minutes additional minutes) opportunity for questions. These presentations are scheduled for the end of the semester.
5. Final Paper [25% of the the grade]. This will be a 12-15 page historiographical essay on a topic of your own choosing that is related to the topic of science and technology during the Cold War. Throughout the semester, students will work through a number of stages before writing the final paper. These include:
- e-mailing the professor a proposal for the topic of the paper (Monday, March 4);
- preparing an annotated bibliography of sources (Thursday, April 11);
- presenting your initial summary of the paper (second half of April); and
- submitting the final paper (Friday, May 10).
A note about the paper: The final paper must abide by the basic structural and stylistic requirements of the Chicago Manual of Style. I would like you to use footnotes and have a full bibliography.
In addition, it is imperative that when you use sources for your paper, you use secondary sources that are legitimate from an academic point of view. Such sources, for the purposes of this class, are academic journal articles, academic books, and (sometimes) academic websites. Many of you will be tempted to find a random website with some information on a topic and use it as a source (instead of using a book or journal article). Please resist the urge to do this! I will talk more during the course of the semester about how to write a historiographical paper and what kind of sources to use.
The paper will be due at the end of the semester during finals week. I will not accept late papers!
The structural requirements for the paper are the following:
- Length: 12-15 pages long (c. 3,000-3,750 words).
- Font & spacing: 12-pt Times Roman font, double-spaced; all block quotes need to be single-spaced.
- Citations: use footnotes according to the Chicago Manual of Style; footnotes need to be 10-pt font and single-spaced
- The paper needs a full bibliography at the end (also as per the Chicago Manual of Style)