Final Essay Case study

For my first-year seminar, I was in “20th Century Revolutions,” a sociology course with Professor Misagh Parsa. In this course, we learned about theories of revolution, focusing on the social revolutions in Iran (1979), Nicaragua (1979), and the political revolution in the Philippines (1983). The piece that I have attached here is the final paper for the course, the essay that I think was my best from the class. For this essay, we were to choose a 20th century revolution to analyze as a case study. After addressing the revolutionary processes and outcomes of the particular revolution of our choice, we were to evaluate John Foran’s theory of revolution in light of our findings. I chose to study the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 because I had not known about it or much about the history of Eastern Europe post- WW2. I also found it interesting that it is still a point of contention whether the revolution was successful or not.

I think this is my best piece from my first-year seminar because I learned from what I failed to do earlier in the term. I struggled to write in the style of sociology papers with the previous assignments in this course. However, with this final piece that I wrote on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, I used what I learned from my previous papers in order to write in the most precise, effective, and organized way that I could, as my professor had guided me to do. Instead of writing a two-part essay that had a clear delineation between my analysis of the revolution itself and Foran’s theory of revolution, I integrated the two elements of the assignment. My analysis of the revolution was laced with reflections of Foran’s theory. I believe this produced a more sophisticated and more sociology-geared final paper.

Additionally, since we chose our own case to study for this paper, I honed my researching skills. Scouring the internet for reliable sources as well as diving into the stacks for dusty old books, I am very proud of the amount of time and effort I put into researching for this piece. With this, I was forced to focus my research on what I really needed to write the paper, rather than compiling extraneous information. This skill of narrowing my research focus and synthesizing the information that I gathered will, I believe, aid me greatly in my future research papers at Dartmouth.