take a deep dive into the eras we’ve been discussing. Centuries ago, there was no Internet or social media. I want you to imagine what things might have looked like if there had been.
For this assignment, I am asking you to adopt the character of a person from between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries and write up a blog post for them. Choose one of the following individuals to portray:
- A French nobleman living at Versailles under Louis XIV (c. 1700)
- A French commoner on the day that King Louis XVI was executed (January 21, 1793)
- A French soldier during Napoleon’s Hundred Days (March 20th – July 8th, 1815)
- An English factory worker at the time of the Factory Act (1833)
- A Prussian soldier on the day Wilhelm I was crowned Kaiser (January 18, 1871)
- A British journalist covering the Boer War (1899-1902)
- An American survivor of the sinking of the R.M.S. Lusitania (May 7, 1915)
- A Russian factory worker during the March Revolution (March, 1917)
- An British soldier on D-Day (June 6th, 1944)
- An East German during the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9,1989)
If for some reason you wish to write on another historical event, please email me so we can discuss it.
In order to do well on this assignment, you will need to do some solid historical research on the event you’ve chosen. Feel free to use both traditional and online sources, but remember that encyclopedias (traditional or online) are not acceptable for college-level work. Please list your sources in a bibliography at the end of your post in whatever format (APA, MLA, Chicago/Turabian) you feel most comfortable with.
Assignment Requirements:
The blog post must be submitted through the Assignments tool as a Word document. For help on how to do this, please see this article from Microsoft Office Support.
The text portion of the blog post must be between 600 and 900 words long.
The post should show historical knowledge as well as a creative effort to write in the “voice” of the person you’ve chosen to portray. Because blog posts are by their nature informal, I expect a certain degree of informality in your writing, though you do need to remember to proofread for proper grammar, syntax, and punctuation. If you choose a non-English speaking character, you should still write in English (though using some “native tongue” expressions is certainly both appropriate and fun).
Blog posts also often include multimedia elements (images, animations, audio and video clips, etc.), so you should include some of these as well. Be sure to list the sources in your bibliography.
