History 102

For this question, we are once again asking you to assume the role of a traveler.  It is the late-1700s and you are a student at Professor Pangloss’ Academy of Interesting Observations in Westphalia (in what will someday be Germany).  Professor Pangloss is fascinated by the new ideas emerging from the Enlightenment and he is interested in knowing how those ideas are being put into practice, so he sends you to visit France, the islands of the Caribbean (including Haiti), and England.  You spend a few years in each of these places (and more than six months crisscrossing the Atlantic) gathering information for a report that you submit to the good professor.

 You should write your paper from the perspective of the traveler as a formal report with an introduction and a conclusion that assesses the success of the Enlightenment. To make your case, you should likely also reference some of historical events/issues that contributed to the rise of Enlightenment ideas, or were directly connected with their successes and failures, such as absolute monarchy, the slave trade, industrialization, or the political revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. You must use at least four documents from the Envisioning Reader.  These are first-person accounts and images that mimic what your traveler would have found on his or her journeys.  You should also use the textbook and the lectures to provide context.  We strongly discourage (but don’t prohibit) the use of outside sources, but if you use sources other than the text, reader, and lecture, you must provide full sources using a standard citation format.  For the assigned sources, you can use abbreviated citations.  When you use the Envisioning Reader, you can cite it by putting the document number in parenthesis at the end of a sentence that references the work.  When you use the textbook, you should put the author’s name Hanson and the page number in parenthesis.  Direct quotes from any source must be in quotation marks.

Your paper should be seven double-spaced-pages long and use a traditional 10- or 12-point font (such as Times New Roman).