By: Max Jarck
The due date for the first project is still over two weeks away but June 19th is approaching faster than I’d like to admit. I’m still in the early stages of research but I’ve done enough where I feel comfortable giving an update.
I chose to annotate the beginning of the Pacificus-Helvidius Debate. The debate consists of argumentative essays written by founding fathers hidden by pen names. Alexander Hamilton is Pacificus while James Madison is Helvidius. The essays center around President Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality (1793) and the constitutionality of the proclamation. Hamilton defends the proclamation with strong arguments, remember from the play how much emphasis is placed on Hamilton’s writing ability. Madison attacks the proclamation but with less skill than Hamilton’s defense. The debate was published as essays in a series of newspapers over the course of 1793.
When choosing a document, I read over most of the options and tried to see what had enough information in it that could be annotated and explained. I didn’t want to pick a document and then a few weeks later realize there was very little to annotate. I find the debate fascinating because it’s a constitutional debate by two of the founding fathers; two people who have intimate knowledge of the document because they helped write it.
Research has been well honestly its been a bit rough. There isn’t a surplus of material specifically about the debate but I am digging. I’m searching databases and looking up books. I requested a book from the GT library but it turned out to be unavailable. This was a minor inconvenience but not the end of the world. The research task is tedious and pulling together all this information into annotations is a challenge. I think that it will just take time and patience and a lot of reading to complete what seems like a hard task.
