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Country Overview Guidelines
Country overviews should be 3 to 5 pages. Unlike other writing assignments you will do for this course, this one will not have a thesis. It will be a straightforward, though sophisticated, presentation of information about an African nation.
Please include the following types of information:
Size, geography, ethnic groups, languages.
Major states present before 1900, long-distance trade.
Colonizer, colonial economy, colonial government.
Independence achieved with/without violent conflict, leaders of anti-colonial efforts.
System of government, current leaders, state of economy.
Be sure to list the sources you used to prepare this report. Note also that it is not easy to get all this information into a short paper. Remember that the most important and difficult thing a writer does is to decide what to leave out.
Potentially useful sources of information :
(In no particular order) AllAfrica.com CIA World Factbook in the library and online African Studies Association Home Page www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/Home_Page Britanica.com The New York Times The Economist (especially the EIU Intelligence Reports on individual countries) The Department of Defense’s Country Profiles (These exist for every country on the planet and provide lots of fairly dependable background although they are not updated as often as they ought to be.)
Plagiarism This assignment seems to result in a great deal of plagiarism. If you have any doubts at all about how to cite the sources you use and how to tell when you are plagiarizing, ask me to explain it to you. |
