NB These assignments are for Juniors ONLY.

All assignments are due on Wednesday, 08 September 2010. The first assignment listed (Henry Adams plus The House of the Seven Gables) is for Juniors taking AP English Language and Composition. Scroll down to find the assignment for English Five Honors.

Summer Assignment for AP English Language & Composition

This summer you will read the “number one nonfiction book of the twentieth century,” The Education of Henry Adams and Nathanial Hawthorne's eerie ghost story of greed, treachery, mesmerism, and murder, The House of the Seven Gables.

Please send an email to me tflaherty@schools.nyc.gov when you have read this assignment. Put your name (Last name, First name) in the subject. When you have questions about the assignment, send me an email and I will answer them as soon as possible.

N.B. This is not an easy assignment. You will struggle with it. Do not expect to "get" everything or even most of what Henry Adams is talking about. Do not give up. Contact me when you have questions or need help. Do not wait until the last week of August to start this assignment. Assignments are due on the first day, Wednesday 08 September. You will need to use secondary sources, but do not plagiarize (cite your sources).

There are several editions of these texts. Any edition will suffice, so use whatever edition you prefer. You don’t need a physical paper book; you may use an E-text or hypertext, read it on your smart phone, iPad, Kindle, whatever works.

You may read the works in plain text online at Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

or you may read them in hypertext at American Studies at The University of Virginia

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/hypertex.html

or you may borrow them from the public library

or you may buy them.   The Modern Library paperbacks are about $12.00. 

Directions for the House of the Seven Gables part: Please read the Preface and the story. You do not  need to answer any questions or keep a journal. All you need to do is read the Preface and the "romance" (after you read the Preface, you will know why The House of the Seven Gables is not a novel, it is a Romance).  

Directions for the Education of Henry Adams part : Please write a complete answer to each question. The question numbers correspond with the chapter numbers. Answer the questions in order. Do not skip questions or any part of a question. Again, write a complete response to each question. Please type each question followed by its answer. Do not forget to type the questions. You must type the questions and the answers, black ink on white paper, Times New Roman 12. Do not use both sides of a page.  Put your name in the upper right corner of each page and number the pages at the bottom right. You will need to consult secondary sources. You must attach an MLA style Works Cited page to the last page of the assignment ( http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/12/). Please list the primary text in this citation first, followed by the secondary sources. In other words, tell the reader what primary text(s) you used or what copy or copies of The Education of Henry Adams you read (e.g. The Modern Library paperback).

There are 35 questions or prompts; they correspond with the 35 chapters of The Education. 

1. Why does Adams contrast Boston, where he spent winters, and Quincy, the nearby summer home and residence of his paternal grandparents?
2. Why does Adams offer a detailed introduction of his father, Charles Francis Adams (1807–1886)?
3. How does Adams’s choice to describe his visit to George Washington's home at Mount Vernon, in the slave state of Virginia, impact our impression of Adams? How does Adams’s realization that great men can sometimes be associated with wicked practices influence his education?
4. In this chapter, Adams becomes acquainted with several Virginians at Harvard. He claims to like them; his descriptions of the Virginian students (including the son of Robert E, Lee), however, reveal much about Henry’s deep prejudice against all Southerners. Why does Adams expose this apparent contradiction?
5. What lesson does Adams’s discovery, that his knowledge of the German language is inadequate, teach? Why does Adams include this lesson in The Education?
6. Why does Adams ultimately concede that he has become "a tourist, but a mere tourist, and nothing else”?
7. What do you make of Adams’s description of Lincoln?
8. How does Adams’s perspective from England impact his view of the war?
9. Who is Algernon Swinburne and why does Adams mention him in this chapter?
10. How does Adams develop his critique of political men in this chapter?
11. How is the title of this chapter “The Battle of the Rams” a fitting one?
12. How does Adams develop his critique of eccentricity?
13. What is the tone of this chapter? What rhetorical strategy does Adams employ to introduce his tone or attitude toward "the perfection of human society"? Is this an effective strategy for introducing this idea? Why or why not?
14. In what sense is Adams a dilettante? In what sense is your experience as a high school student a form of dilettantism? 
15. This is one of most important chapters in The Education. Its importance, however, is not obvious at this point in the reading; we can, nevertheless, deduce its importance from what we’ve read thus far and from what we know about science and history. Make an inference about the importance of this chapter.
16. What does Adams’s interest in governmental control of the economy, especially "greenback" currency, teach us about him?
17. Diction, or word and phrase choice, is a rhetorical strategy. Select a word or phrase Adams uses in this chapter and explain how it works. That is, explain how Adams makes effective use of diction or how his choice of words influences the reader of his text.
18. How, according to Adams, did Lincoln weaken the Constitution? This is another difficult question; you need to infer, use prior knowledge, and even use a secondary source to answer it. What did Lincoln do during the Civil War that someone like Adams would say "weakened" the constitution? Look it up.
19. What is the tone and what is the mood of this chapter? How does Adams establish the tone? How does he create the mood?  
20. Is Adams a failure as a Harvard professor? Is his overly self-effacing, even disingenuous assessment of his Harvard professorship warranted? 
21. “ONCE more! this is a story of education, not of adventure!” Why does Adams make this claim? 
22. Why does Adams include a trip to the Chicago World's Fair in The Education?
23. “The scientific scheme in theory was alone sound, for science should be equivalent to money; in practice science was helpless without money.” What are the implications of Adams’s claim that science is helpless without money?
24. What is the most interesting aspect of this chapter? Explain. 
25.   This is the most important chapter in The Education. Read it twice.  In this chapter, Adams begins to speculate about the medieval strength of Christianity and how it relates to the twentieth-century power generated when mechanical energy produces electricity. Write a summary of the chapter.
26. Why does Adams include John Hay in The Education?
27. Another very difficult chapter. Why does Adams contrast unity and multiplicity?
28. What is Adams’s prediction about the future of Germany? Does history confirm his prediction? Explain.
29. “Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.” What is the fixed point Adams selects to measure man? Why does he select this point? What might Einstein say about Adams’s claim about force and motion?
30.  Critique Adams’s claim about the superiority of women?
31.  What is “The Grammar of Science”?
32. Describe Adams’s reaction to vis nova (new force) at the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904? Contrast it with his reaction to the Midwest.
33.  This is a difficult chapter. What might Einstein say about Adams’s theory of history?
34. Who is Francis Bacon and what is the Baconian method? 
35. How does Adams conclude The Education? Is his conclusion satisfactory? Why or why not?