One of the goals of ILA is to get you acquainted with the library and the various resources it can provide and there are lots of ways we might do that. The most common is probably some sort of research essay; I assign a big topic, you narrow it down, develop an arguable assertion, then find some sources to back it up. You've done it before, so let's not do it again.

Instead, the project I want you to complete is one that ought to provide useful, necessary background for your reading and our discussions of Angels and Ages. Most of you will understand some of the events in Darwin's and Lincoln's lives and even some of the figures that surrounded them, but you're probably not seeing how they fit together. What I'd like to do, then, is to have you think about a specific area of 19th-century life and literally draw it out. I want you to make timelines.

Below you'll find four-person groups. This is your Timeline Team, and with each team you'll find a general topic. Your goal is to create a timeline for the period 1800-1900 addressing the details of your area. I would like each group to buy a single piece of posterboard, cut it in half lengthwise, and then tape those two end-to-end so that you've got one long workable surface write upon. Each decade must take up one tenth of the whole; each year one tenth of the tenth. Got that? The idea is that when we're done, we can tape to the wall/board four timelines which use the same scale but which provide different details on the lines themselves. Still, creativity counts in doing these things, so make the presentation board clear, accurate, and engaging as well.  Your group will then present the information/timeline to the rest of the class in a twenty-minute or so oral presentation in the coming weeks.  (I’ve attached the rubrics I will use for evaluating those presentations, both group and individual, so that you know what to prepare and what to rehearse.)

Each member of the group is responsible for carrying a full part of the workload and if it gets reported to me that someone didn't -- and it inevitably will -- that person will receive a two-grade reduction. I will ask each member of the group to present a one-page report along with the timeline; one paragraph is to detail what that person did for the group, while a second is to detail what the others did and assess whether they carried their weight or not.

Finally, you must provide an MLA-formatted Works Cited list for your timeline. Although you may use a full range of library sources -- books, magazines, journals, web databases -- you may use only one web site as a source. Failure to abide by these rules means that your project will receive a zero. (The goal is to teach you how to use the library, not Google.)