Your Research Essay will be argumentative in nature and will incorporate research that you have done for the assignment.  We will read four historic essays towards the end of this course and you will be choosing one of them to use as the cornerstone of your research essay. This will require you to complete your reading early, so start looking ahead now. The four essays you will be able to choose from are: Thomas Jefferson’s “The Declaration of Independence,” Abraham Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural Address,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream,” and Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” 
For this assignment, you will be focusing on one particular argument made in the essay. Choose the one that is most compelling to you or one that is the most significant to you personally. The topics that are discussed in these essays are timeless. We are still faced with similar issues or still see the outcomes of the fights and struggles mentioned in our current society. You can look at rights given to us in the Declaration of Independence or race relations or abortions issues seen in these documents. Choose one of these topics that interests you and begin to research it. Look at the arguments seen in these essays and analyze how they have impacted our views of these topics today. How have they directly impacted our contemporary view about the topic? For this essay, you are NOT permitted to use first or second person 

Start with an introduction to your topic. What is the issue and what are the contemporary views that are held? Discuss the relationship between the current issue and the past writing about that same issue in one of the four essays you read for this assignment. Formulate an argument regarding your topic. What do you believe about the issue? What is your stance? You need to argue a particular point of view; you cannot simply inform me about both sides of the argument, but rather you will be arguing for one side you believe in.