Learning Goal: I’m working on a political science writing question and need a sample draft to help me learn.
The U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Historian has collected and made available declassified documents in a digital archive. The Foreign Relations series serves as an important tool for us to understand and interpret U.S. foreign policies and diplomatic activities during the Cold War era. You can access the website at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments. This archive contains private as well as institutional records from the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other entities. You can search by the administration or the volume. They are then further organized according to countries and subject matters.
For this assignment, please choose two documents between the 1940s and the 1960s to write a 5-page analytical essay on how they elucidate policy decisions within global contexts. Here are some questions to consider as you start working on the paper: Which individual or agency crafted the document? When were they written? Do the documents illuminate specific motivations or objectives? Why did the U.S. government choose to interact with a foreign government or entity this way? You are encouraged to make this assignment your own and choose a topic that interests you. For instance, you may want to evaluate U.S. government views on the Middle East’s role in the global fight against communism during the 1950s.
Your essay must analyze the two documents and not be mere summaries of them. Please do not answer the questions I posed above as a way of organizing the essay—they are meant to be general questions for you to think through and starting points for you to consider as you begin your research and writing. The essay needs to have an introductory paragraph that ends with a strong, clear thesis statement and a conclusion with well-supported arguments in the body paragraphs. Please turn in essays in either Word or PDF format and use Chicago Manual of Style citation format: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html.