Synthesis & Argument unit test

Handling a counterargument in an argument essay

Handling the visual source

Reading period allocation

Rhetorical analysis: the actual task

Rhetorical analysis essay

Nuance and qualification

Common synthesis error

Choosing what to analyze

What loses the sophistication point

Qualifying rather than picking a side

The argument essay has no sources

Earning the sophistication point

SYNTHESIS ESSAY (6 points). Public monuments make claims about what a community honors and about whose history it treats as its own. In recent decades, communities across the United States have debated whether particular monuments should be preserved, altered, contextualized, or removed. Write an essay that synthesizes material from at least three of the six sources and develops your position on what principles should guide communities in deciding the fate of contested public monuments. The six sources, summarized in our own words: SOURCE A — Frederick Douglass, oration delivered at the dedication of the Freedmen's Memorial to Abraham Lincoln, Washington, D.C., April 1876. Speaking at the unveiling of a monument paid for largely by formerly enslaved people, which depicts Lincoln standing above a kneeling Black man, Douglass praises Lincoln's achievement while stating plainly that Lincoln was preeminently the white man's president, devoted primarily to the welfare of white people, and that Black Americans were at best his stepchildren. He honors the monument and simultaneously records a judgment that complicates it. In a letter written days later, Douglass observed that the monument showed a Black man on his knees and that what was wanted was something showing the Negro not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man. SOURCE B — Maya Lin, design submission and public statements regarding the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1981). Lin, then a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate whose anonymous entry won a national competition, described her design as a cut in the earth that would be healed by time, listing the names of the dead in chronological order of death rather than alphabetically or by rank, on polished black granite that reflects the visitor. The design was fiercely attacked as a black gash of shame, and a figurative statue of three servicemen was added nearby as a compromise. The memorial has since become among the most visited in Washington. SOURCE C — Southern Poverty Law Center, "Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy" (report, first published 2016 and updated thereafter). The report catalogues public Confederate symbols across the United States and documents when they were erected. Two periods account for the great majority: roughly 1900 to the 1920s, coinciding with the imposition of Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement, and the 1950s and 1960s, coinciding with the civil rights movement and resistance to school desegregation. Relatively few date from the immediate postwar decades when Confederate veterans were most numerous. SOURCE D — American Historical Association, "Statement on Confederate Monuments" (August 2017). The association argues that monuments are not themselves history but rather statements about how a past generation chose to be remembered, and that removing a monument therefore removes a memorial rather than erasing a historical fact. It notes that decisions about monuments should involve historians, that the reasons for a monument's original erection are relevant evidence, and that different communities may reasonably reach different conclusions. SOURCE E — Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997). Savage, an art historian, argues that the conventions available to nineteenth-century sculptors shaped what could be commemorated: the standing soldier on a pedestal was a form that dignified its subject, while emancipation monuments consistently depicted Black figures as recipients of freedom rather than as agents of it. He contends that these formal choices carried arguments about race that were not incidental to the monuments but were their content. SOURCE F — The National Park Service, interpretive practice at Civil War battlefields. Since the 1990s the Park Service has revised its battlefield interpretation to address the causes of the war, including slavery, rather than confining itself to troop movements and tactics, and has added wayside exhibits, revised museum displays, and expanded ranger programs at monuments and memorials that were themselves erected with different intentions. The approach preserves the physical monuments while altering the framework in which visitors encounter them.