Topic: Early American Colonization and indigenous peoples

Topics for Paper 1
For this paper, you will choose 2-3 readings from the first half of this course and use them to establish and support a 4-5

page argumentative essay that responds to one of the following topics. Should you have a particular topic in mind other than

those listed below, please email me or come by my office hours to have it approved. Some questions that you may want to

aIDress, or use to think about your argument, are listed underneath the topics:
1) Writing the Indian
How do the authors construct Native Americans as a racially, socially, and culturally distinctive group?
How does this construction serve to justify particular forms of treatment of the Native Americans?
How do Native Americans’ self-representations undermine or respond to the ways in which early explorers represent them?
2) Savagery & Civilization
What defines savagery in the Americas?
How do the authors’ usages of the term vary?
How can civilization enter the Americas?
3) Public & Private lives
How do these authors balance private and public concerns within the text?
On what basis do the authors argue that the lives of colonists should be regulated?
What kinds of authority to the writers see as extending into colonists’ lives?
4) Religious Foundations
How do the authors see their position in the Americas as being motivated by religion?
How do the authors mediate religious difference?
What role does religion play in formulating the authors’ construction of himself as a colonial subject, as an American or

as an American writer?

5) Women in the Early Americas
What roles to the author’s see as appropriate to women in the colonies?
In what ways do the authors recognize transgression from these roles?
In what ways are female authors’ self-representations different from those of men?
6) Colonial Expansion

In what ways do the authors see themselves as being representatives of their mother countries?

What roles do the authors imagine for themselves in expanding Colonial holdings?

How do they characterize their relationships with other Europeans in the new world?

The main challenge of a paper like this is to make an argumentative claim about one or more works of literature and then back

it up with nuanced close readings. Remember that only a sufficiently unobvious claim will allow you to do nuanced close

reading! Your task in this paper is not to summarize or compare two texts, but rather to use the texts to trace a pattern of

authorship and identity. You will need to frame your discussion in terms of a particular argument that you are prepared to

prove using the texts as evidence. Each paragraph of your paper should be organized around a piece or several pieces of

textual evidence that you quote and analyze at length. In other words, in each paragraph you should employ close reading in

order to further your thesis. You should assume your reader has read the work(s) you are writing on and that you are

providing him or her with interpretations of passages whose true meaning might have been overlooked.
no outside sources.