Homework #4: Reading Questions

For this homework assignment, you should write a comment on this blog post that responds to the readings and discussions that we have been doing in class, including the readings for Monday.

In our February 5, February 7, and February 10, you have been introduced to some of the questions that historians ask about slavery in general and runaway slaves in particular. Your comment should draw specifically on these readings and our discussions to explain which historical question(s) you think we are best equipped to answer with the ads that we have identified in our spreadsheet.

The comment should be approximately 300 to 500 words long, and because it is a comment, it should take into account other comments that have already been made. Before posting your answer, read what other students have said and adjust your comment accordingly to make sure that it contributes something new and constructive to the conversation. For example, if another student has already made a point you planned to make, can you an additional supporting reason to that point, or give a different specific example or quotation from the readings that would elaborate the idea? You must post you comment before class time this Monday, February 10.

There are also two small technical requirements for this assignment:

• Make sure that your comment is formatted so that there is a single blank line between each paragraph once it is published.
• Include at least one hyperlinked word or phrase OR one blockquote in your comment, using HTML tags.

With regard to the second technical requirement, you may have noticed when entering comments on previous posts that the WordPress comment box is HTML enabled, which means you can add special formatting to your text, much as Trevor Owens did in this comment on our video games discussion. To add a blockquote or a link to your comment, you need to wrap some of your text in HTML tags, as described below and on this handout by Miriam Posner. You could, for example, link to one of the runaway ads found on the Portal to Texas History, or to one of our readings when you cite it.

Before posting your comment, I recommend that you copy and paste your comment into a Gist on Github. That way, if you make mistakes in the HTML and can’t edit your comment, you can go to your Gist, try to fix your HTML markup, and then make another comment on the post. (I’ll delete old duplicates.)

Code for a Blockquote

Here is how you would make a block quote in your comment:

<blockquote>This is text that I want to indent.</blockquote>

Now that the tag is closed, the text is no longer indented.

PREVIEW OF THAT CODE

Here is how you would make a block quote in your comment:

This is text that I want to indent.

Now that the tag is closed, the text is no longer indented.

Code for a Hyperlink

Wrap the <a href="http://www.google.com">text to link</a>
in an "a" tag that has the URL assigned to the "href" attribute.

PREVIEW OF THAT CODE

Wrap the text to link in an "a" tag that has the URL assigned to the "href" attribute.