First Assignment, Spring 2026

Pick one:

Option 1

Interview one person aged 30 or older (by phone, Zoom, or email). Ask that person to identify her or his favorite or least-favorite U.S. president from before Donald Trump’s first term, excluding Washington and Lincoln. (It can be a president from the interviewee's lifetime or one from the history books.) In your paper, reconstruct the logic of the interviewee’s judgment. Tell how that person’s background and formative political experiences plausibly shaped that view of the presidency and this president. Your goal is not to decide whether the interviewee is “right,” but to explain why that view makes sense for someone like that person, and how individual memory intersects with presidential performance and public opinion.

Ground your analysis in evidence. Quote directly from your interview (with the interviewee’s permission). Where appropriate, use survey data to situate the interviewee’s view within broader public opinion. Use the historical record (policies, crises, institutional constraints) to tell why Americans viewed this president  positively or negatively at the time and how those views have endured or changed.

Option 2

Pick one U.S. president who served before Eisenhower. Then find a pro-1960 high school or college textbook on American history, civics, or government. (At Honnold Library, textbooks are on the first floor of Mudd, under LOC code LT.) Compare how that book portrayed the president with what we know now.  Using modern historical scholarship, biographies, and primary sources now available, explain how scholars understand this president today. 

The specifications:

• Essays should be typed (12-point), double-spaced, and no more than four pages long. I will not read past the fourth page. 
• Please submit all papers in this course as Word documents, not Google docs or pdfs.
• Read Strunk & White and my stylesheet (with links to model papers). Watch my writing lecture.
• Cite your sources. Please use endnotes in the format of the Chicago Manual of Style.  Endnotes do not count against the page limit. Please do not use footnotes, which take up too much page space.
• Misrepresenting AI-generated content as your own work is plagiarism and will result in severe consequences
• Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you. Return essays to the Canvas dropbox for this class by 11:59 PM, Friday, February 20. (If you have trouble with Canvas, simply email it to me as an attached file.) I reserve the right to dock papers one gradepoint for one day’s lateness, a full letter grade after that.

See this page for Internet resources on the presidency.