German Immigrant Servitude

    Read through Farley Grubb, German Immigration and Servitude in America, 1709-1920 (New York: Routledge, 2014), chapter 7 (pp. 131-143) or chapter 15 (pp. 276-302). Write your critical essay on some issue or issues found in one of these chapters. I've attached the pages from these chapters that are in this book so you can read and review them yourself to help you write this critical essay. General Advice on Writing Critical Essays: A critical essay should discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the author’s arguments and evidence. Are the author’s explanations convincing, are they complete, how are you convinced, what evidence and economic reasoning is presented, is the evidence and economic reasoning strong or weak? How is it strong or weak? And so on. Don’t just state an opinion. Dissect the author’s presentation. Articulate your judgments, and support them with your own reasoning, economic ideas, and use of the author’s evidence. Explain why or how you arrived at your conclusions. Develop and elaborate your view in detail. You are not expected to be an expert in any field, but you are expected to be able to reason. Finally, you can also use your economic understanding (verbal and/or graphical/mathematical) to add to and develop the author’s argument as a form of critical analysis. For those having difficulty writing critical essays there are a few tricks that might help. It is better to discuss a few related points in detail than to list many undeveloped ideas. Narrow your discussion. Pick only the most important points and throw out minor ideas. If you are not going to discuss it in detail, don’t bring it up. If you can write a five-page essay based on one paragraph or on one page in the assigned readings that is ok. Make your essay a coherent whole, rather than a piece of shotgun writing. Trace through, step by step, the logic of the author’s argument. Are steps left out or is some kind of behavior not explained that is critical to the author’s story? Explain how and why. Are there other reasonable economic explanations that the author did not rule out? Explain how these competing explanations work. What kinds of evidence are used to support the argument? Does the evidence really support the author’s argument, or might the evidence fit some other (economic) explanation? Describe how it might fit some other explanation. What missing evidence would the author need to make the argument stronger? And so on..... Think of yourself as an economic lawyer. Either you must defend the author and keep your client from the gallows, or you are the prosecuting lawyer, and you are going to expose the author’s careless economic crimes, explode the author’s alibi, and separate the trustworthy evidence from untrustworthy evidence. Most people find it