Are We Living in a Second Gilded Age

Connection Essay 3: Are We Living in a Second Gilded Age?
Due Friday by 11:59pm Points 100 Submitting a file upload File Types doc, docx, and pdf Available Jan 30
at 12am – Feb 5 at 11:59pm 7 days
Welcome to the third Connection Essay.
Every week there will be an opportunity to consider the long-term consequences of some of the historical
subjects we’re studying. The idea is to make connections between past and present, to see how the
seemingly remote historical events we’ve learned about this week continue to affect the world we live in
today.
Each week I’ll provide a short (hopefully fun) recent article for you to read. Often they’re written by active
historians like this one by Honor Sachs of the University of Colorado, sometimes by journalists, scientists,
or other writers with great historical insight. These “connection articles” bring historical events up to date
and help us understand current or recent events in the light of the past.
To get credit for a Connection Essay, write a one-page (roughly 250-word) essay in response to the prompt
below. Use Word or a similar program to write it, proofread/edit carefully, save it as a .doc, .docx, or .pdf
file, then use the blue button at the top of this page to submit your file to me. Papers should be double-s.html)
spaced with one-inch margins and 12-point font. No title or cover page is necessary.
The 250-word guideline is a target, not a limit, so you may write more if you wish. Use details and facts
from the essay. You can respond directly to what the author has to say or go off into your own ideas, as
long as you stay rooted in the prompt provided.
I’ll use the rubric at the bottom of this page to score the essays. It explains how I’ll assign points to various
qualities in your essays: their use of detail, development, quality of content, and writing. They should be
long enough and thorough enough to convey these qualities. It would be a good idea to look at the rubric
before you begin working so you know exactly what I’m looking for.
There will be 15 Connection Essay assignments over the semester, and your best four will count toward
your final grade (or, if you prefer, we could say that I’ll drop your worst eleven scores). You can write as
many as you want to get the best four scores you can, but you must participate in at least four to get full
credit for the assignment. You can choose which four (or more) to write, and once you’re happy with your
four best scores, you can stop submitting new essays.
Submissions can be made at any time during the week but are due by Friday at midnight, at which point it
will no longer be possible to submit anything for that week’s assignment. If you submit nothing by that
deadline, you’ll receive a zero for the assignment that week — but remember that you need a minimum of
only four for the semester.
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For this week, read “We won’t get out of the Second Gilded Age the way we got out of the first” by David
Huyssen, a historian at the University of York in the UK. You can either download a pdf of the article
Preview the documentor read it on the original website (Links to an external site.).
Regardless of the topic of the article, the prompt will be the same every week. Here it is:
What did you learn from this article about events in the past? What did you learn from it about recent or
current events? What similarities and differences can you see between past and present?
Let me know if you have any questions, and I’m looking forward to reading what you think!