Topics in American Studies

For this assignment, please produce an annotated bibliography.

First, find at least five sources that you think might be useful to you as you write your essay. These sources might have information that you can cite to help make your case, they might articulate a similar viewpoint to yours, they might articulate a claim opposite to yours, or they may be useful for some other reason. These sources may be scholarly, like peer reviewed books or articles, they can be popular, like magazine articles or op-eds, or they can be informational, like reference entries.

You should use library resources like the Databases by Subject page to find these sources; I believe you will find Opposing Viewpoints (Links to an external site.) and Global Issues in Context (Links to an external site.) to be particularly useful. It’s important to remember that research is a web and not a line; you can use the citations in the sources that you find as a way of finding other sources.

When you find a source that you think you might like to use (or at least that was helpful in shaping your thinking), cite it in MLA style. There are a huge number of citation managers out there. These will allow you to put in any relevant information and received a completed citation in return. In my own work, I use a free, application-based citation manager called Zotero (Links to an external site.); downloading it and familiarizing yourself with it might be useful if you’re going to have to write a lot in your major. If you’d like to learn about the mechanics of citation, Gutman has a guide to MLA style (Links to an external site.) that contains a link to a reputable citation builder through the academic database company Proquest (Links to an external site.).

Citation managers have places to put a lot of different kinds of citation information, most of which are irrelevant for our purposes. When you cite materials for the class, make sure to include the name of the author, the title of the source, the publication, and the date of publication. I expect most of the sources you find for this project will come from periodicals; if you decide to cite a book, include the name of the author, the title of the book, the date, the name of the publisher, and the location of publication. If you need help finding any of this information or if you have questions about other types of sources, please let me know.

Finally, once you’ve found your sources and properly formatted your citations, annotate them. In your annotations, use 50-100 words to describe how a source will be useful to you. If you’re using it for information, say that. If you’re using it as support  for your claim, say that. If you’re using it as a counter-claim that you’re going to refute, say that. If it shaped your thinking…. you get the picture.

Completed individual citations should be formatted like this:

Barber, X. Theodore. Phantasmagorical Wonders: The Magic Lantern Ghost Show in Nineteenth-Century America. Film History, vol. 3, no. 2, June 1989, pp. 7386.
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So, to review, for this assignment you have to:

Find five sources using library resources
Formulate proper citations for those sources using MLA style
Annotate them using between 50-100 words to explain how they will be interesting to you.
You are welcome to submit the assignment as a text entry or by uploading a .doc, .docx,

{In my essay, I’m going to argue why assignments are necessary for college students. After looking at the feedback you’ve provided me I started to look at the moral aspects of my topic and decided to focus on the importance of schoolwork and the morals of students. College students are held at a high standard when it comes to work and ultimately they decide whether or not they are going to do it. One of the moral issues that we see in these cases is academic dishonesty (cheating) which only hurts the student in the long run. This will help me argue why doing the assignments yourself is necessary.}

Has to be moral or ethic (why it is right or wrong)