howard cosell condemned american sports W r i t i n g

Please answer one of the following two questions—your choice!

1.“The black freedom movement in sports and the women’s sports revolution were mirror images of each other—the only difference is that one was concerned with race and the other was concerned with sex.”Do you agree with this statement?Disagree?Agree somewhat?Explain your reasoning.A compelling essay will consider the goals of these movements, the forces that led to change (laws, activism, athletic feats, etc.), and gauge the extent to which these movements have or have not been transformative—that is, you will assess change (or the lack thereof) over time.

2.Howard Cosell condemned American sports as “a never-ending spiral of deceit, immorality, absence of ethics, and defiance of public interest.”In other words, sports have had a profoundly negative influence on American society.Write an essay in which you agree with Cosell’s negative evaluation and explore the three most significant ways that sports have had a negative influence on American life.

Regardless of the essay you chose to write, an outstanding essay (1) will have a clearly stated thesis statement (i.e. your argument) that explicitly answers/addresses the question we have posed; and (2) will support that argument with evidence drawn from class meetings and readings (for evidence requirements, see below).

Please note that we are not requiring you to provide a counter-argument in this essay, but if you think providing one will strengthen your argument—i.e. it will enable you to better head off critiques of your argument—please do provide one.

EVIDENCE REQUIREMENT:As one of the skills of the historian is interpreting documents and using them as evidence for their claims, in this paper you must explicitly reference at least three of the sources assigned this semester—this means our assigned primary and secondary sources, including King of the World and Against Football.Though we strongly encourage you to use information from the textbook (and cite it), the textbook will not count as one of the required sources.

By “explicitly reference” we DO NOT mean that you should just throw a quote into your prose and let it speak for itself.By “explicitly reference” we DO mean that you need to introduce the quote or information that you are using and, once you have provided that information, explain how it bolsters your argument.