Davis’s arguments about the spread of slavery using the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
Please note, moreover, that the searches you had to conduct in order to answer the questions in Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database Assignment were written to provide you with most of the material needed to critique Davis’s argument (though you are welcome–and encouraged!–to develop your own search strings for this assignment). As you had to provide the citations for your queries, you can quickly and easily access them through the document you submitted. In other words, you already have found most of the information needed to complete the critique.
You would do well to review the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database Assignment to refresh your understanding of how to query the database.
Sample Outline
Students who submit well-organized, well-written essays will, all other things being equal, perform better on this–or any–assignment than those who turn in poorly organized papers. This assignment lends itself well to the five-paragraph essay standard, so I expect that all of the papers I read will be well organized. As I am especially keen to encourage students to write well-organized essays, I have nonetheless developed the following simplified outline. There are many ways to draft this essay, of course, so feel free to modify this outcome to suit your needs or to ignore it altogether. Each numbered item represents a paragraph:
Introduction (your introduction must include a thesis statement; for a paper of this length it should generally be the last sentence of your introductory paragraph)
Factors that Davis Argues Drove the Expansion of Slavery
Geographic Expansion of Slavery
Critique of Davis’s Arguments Using the Database
Conclusion
