Capstone Essay - Final
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School
Harrisburg Area Community College *
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Course
107
Subject
History
Date
Dec 6, 2023
Type
docx
Pages
3
Uploaded by JudgeBaboon2638
Stephen Kramer
Professor Mellinger
Contemporary American History
12/05/2021
Capstone Essay
Contemporary American History (HIST-107-V01) is a 15-week virtual course taught by
Professor Caroline Mellinger, Associate Professor of History and Real Estate at Harrisburg Area
Community College. This is not your “tradition” college level course, as there are no multiple-
choice quizzes or exams, instead Professor Mellinger requires all students to submit essays based
on the topics which are being studied. Each essay is based on 2-4 topics generally, based on
American history from WWI to present, which require a minimum of four pages and a maximum
of ten, in standard college format, in 2-week intervals.
Students are expected to use at least six different sources, one being
The American Yawp,
Volume II
,
a secondary source, which is information from a book, article, or other source that is
not direct, or first-hand evidence, and at least two of the remaining six sources must be primary
sources, which is a document, first-hand account, or direct evidence related to a subject. This is
meant to show that students have been fully engaged in a variety of sources made available to
them throughout each learning module on D2L.
As a student is preparing to write their essay, they should thoroughly review the
“Historical Article Assignment Instructions” and the “Article Questions” provided by Professor
Mellinger on the courses D2L page. These documents are key to completing the assignment, as
they provide vital information related to format and questions related to the topic needed to
complete the essay. After reviewing these documents, my suggestions would be to decide on
which topics to base the essay on, making sure to have picked the amount required to complete
the essay. Then creating an outline of the questions for organizational purposes.
From my personal experiences when working from my outline, it made researching each
topic and the questions relating to them much easier, as I became quite flustered when seeing
other questions from the various topics, but each student is different, so this ultimately won’t
work for everyone. Creating an outline also helps with time management, as that comes hand-in-
hand with organization, and I believe that if a student does not manage their time appropriately,
they may find it difficult to complete the assignments.
After ensuring that all questions have been answered comprehensively from each topic
and the collaborating sources have been cited corrected, while keeping track of the number of
different sources being cited. The next step would be to create a new Word document that will be
used to compromise of all the responses to the questions that were answered in the outline that
had been previously created, tying them into the required essay format, then adding the sources
list at the end of the assignment. Thus, completing the “Article Cycle” as Professor Mellinger
refers to.
A current event that is directly related to the topics and materials that we’ve studied in
this course this semester, are the inflation rate the United States is currently experiencing under
President Biden’s Administration. Many major news organizations have published stories
reporting a 39-year high inflation rate. This type of inflation rate was last seen in 1982 according
to an article published by The Wallstreet Journal titled
U.S. Inflation Hit a 39-Year High in
November
(
Guilford, 2021
). I believe that the past can very much inform the present, and the
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