This is a paper that is focusing on the student to analyze one significant historical figure that is interesting in reading. The paper also provides additional information to use in the writing of the assignment paper. Below is the assessment description to follow:
The focus of this research paper will be to analyze one significant historical figure you have found interesting through your reading of the textbook. Your objective will be to choose a person and to analyze their impact on the world. Specifically relating to Thomas Carlyle’s Great Man theory. The person that you choose must be from the time period of the class. If the person is mentioned in the book, then you can analyze them for your paper. According to The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, the Great Man Theory is an approach to history associated with the nineteenth-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle, who declared. “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”
Carlyle argued that heroes shape history through the vision of their intellect, the beauty of their art. The prowess of their leadership, and, most important, their divine inspiration. Carlyle’s theories have generally fallen out of fashion. Today the great man theory is out of favor. Most historians today believe that economic, societal, and technological factors are far more important to history than the decisions made by any individual. Your goal will be to pick one historical person and show how their life helps disprove The Great Man Theory. You will need to show the weaknesses of Carlyle’s theory and show that history is a lot more complicated than he makes it out to be. This is not a biography, but an analysis of their life.
After choosing someone in the textbook that you wish to research further, you will analyze their contributions to history. Do Great Men make great history, or do great events lead to great men? Helpful Websites: http://www.lycos.com/info/great man theory.html http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1038/is_n3_v39/ai_18348260 http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carlyle/index.html