For the last four weeks, we have been building a theory of what history is and how it works. Next week, we will take all of the theory we've been building and use it to try to understand one of the most important and difficult case studies in contemporary America: the Tea Party movement. On Tuesday we'll read from a secondary source, Kate Zernike's book Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America, the first significant piece of history to be written about the Tea Party (and considerably more even-handed than Milbank's book on Beck). On Thursday we'll read from a primary source, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, one of the texts most often read and quoted by Tea Party activists.
To begin our study, I will ask you in this post to do another Rankean search-and-synthesize project -- similar to what we did with Loughner, only this time it's harder, because it's less focused and more open-ended: here, it's not just "why" that's up for debate, but also "what," "who," "where," and "how". ("When" seems fairly well established, although Zernike might beg to differ.) Obviously, I'm not asking you to solve all these problems for good in a 300-word blog post. But I am asking you to:
1) Read Zernike carefully. Note connections to...well, pretty much everything we've studied so far.
2) Look through the data I sent out via email, from the CBS/New York Times poll of Tea Party members. Again, keep note of the information you find most important, and most relevant to Zernike and the stuff that's come before (especially last week's material).
3) Find at least two sources of your own on the Tea Party -- including (at least) one primary source and (at least) one secondary source -- which help you build your understanding of the Tea Party, either by confirming or by contradicting the stuff you learned from Zernike, the poll data, and Network / Weber / Adorno.
4) Write a post, of usual length (minimum ~300 words), in which you bring these sources together -- (a) Zernike, (b) the poll data, (c) your two sources, and (d) at least one thing from Network or Weber or Adorno -- to start making some sense of the Tea Party. This is not easy. There are no clear answers. This history is still being written. Here are some questions to think about (feel no need to address them all): What, exactly, IS the Tea Party? Who is in it? Who isn't? Why have people chosen to join? What do people want out of it? What are people getting out of it? How does it work? What kind of power does it have? How does it use that power? Who is in charge? As always, when doing Rankean history, make sure you make strong arguments for your position and defend your arguments with evidence from your primary and secondary sources.
Have fun -- as someone who's spent a lot of time with this stuff and still feels like he can barely wrap his head around it, I'm really excited to see what you find!
No comments:
Post a Comment