HNRS Assessment Fall 2025
1. Select an assignment to evaluate.
2. Assignments must include a minimum of fifteen pages of student writing and must include a minimum of five research sources.
3. In the Excel sheet, please include the last names of each student. Then, assess for the two outcomes. You can make “X” for the category corresponding to your assessment (mastery, satisfactory, unsatisfactory).
4. Email the excel sheet by December 12, 2025.
A hoax (plural: hoaxes) is a widely publicized falsehood created to deceive its audience with false and often astonishing information, with the either malicious or humorous intent of causing shock and interest in as many people as possible.
Some hoaxers intend to eventually unmask their representations as having been a hoax so as to expose their victims as fools; seeking some form of profit, other hoaxers hope to maintain the hoax indefinitely, so that it is only when skeptical people willing to investigate their claims publish their findings, that the hoaxers are finally revealed as such.
A hoax is often intended as a practical joke or to cause embarrassment, or to provoke social or political change by raising people's awareness of something. It can also emerge from a marketing or advertising purpose. For example, to market a romantic comedy film, a director staged a phony "incident" during a supposed wedding, which showed a bride and preacher getting knocked into a pool by a clumsy fall from a best man. A resulting video clip of Chloe and Keith's Wedding was uploaded to YouTube and was viewed by over 30 million people and the couple was interviewed by numerous talk shows. Viewers were deluded into thinking that it was an authentic clip of a real accident at a real wedding; but a story in USA Today in 2009 revealed it was a hoax. --Wikipedia
Hoax is believed to be a shortened version of hocus pocus, thus conveying the feeling of trickery and sleight of hand. April First, also known as April Fools' Day, is a day of hoaxes. Successful hoaxes in history: Orson Welles' War-of-the-Worlds radio broadcast in 1938 and the alien autopsy film footage made public in the 1990s. Do you believe the American moon landing in 1969 was a hoax? You're not alone. Six percent of Americans believe this event was staged.
an act intended to trick or dupe, a humorous or malicious deception, something accepted or established by fraud or deception, a plan to deceive a large group of people; a trick
If you put on big fake feet, stomp through your muddy backyard and tell everyone you saw Bigfoot fixing a steak on your grill, you are playing a hoax on your friends.
Prostitution is pregnant with disease, a disease infecting not only the guilty, but contaminating the innocent wife and child in the home with sickening certainty almost inconceivable; a disease to be feared with as great a horror as a leprous plague; a disease scattering misery broadcast, and leaving in its wake sterility, insanity, paralysis, the blinded eyes of little babies, the twisted limbs of deformed children, degradation, physical rot and mental decay.
--The Chicago Vice Commission
Please remember, as you read this, that America is becoming more and more un-American every day. Each ship, each train Westward or Eastward bound, is now daily dumping into our Land . . . thousands of the scum and vice criminal element of South Eastern Europe, Asia and the Orient, and remember too that a short five-years of residence here converts the filthiest criminal from Turkey, Arabia, Syria, Italy, or any place else where vice and brutality reign supreme, into an American citizen with the right to vote into office men who will and are sworn to protect and aid in every possible way the Jewish, Russian, French, or Chinese whore-master as he rents a shanty and proceeds to fatten on the very life-blood of the young girlhood of this and other lands.
--Dr. Jean Turner-Zimmermann, Chicago Rescue Mission and Woman’s Shelter
The Mann Act
James Robert Mann circa 1917 | Library Of Congress
One of the landmarks of Progressive Era legislation was the White Slave Traffic Act — better known as the Mann Act for its author, Illinois congressman James Robert Mann. The Mann Act made it a crime to transport women across state lines "for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose." While designed to combat forced prostitution, the law was so broadly worded that courts held it to criminalize many forms of consensual sexual activity, and it was soon being used as a tool for political persecution of Jack Johnson and others, as well as a tool for blackmail.
The Mann Act was born during the "white slavery" hysteria of the early 20th century. Along with other moral purity movements of the period, the white slavery craze had its roots in fears over the rapid changes that the Industrial Revolution had brought to American society: urbanization, immigration, the changing role of women, and evolving social mores. As young, single women moved to the city and entered the workforce they were no longer protected by the traditional family-centered system of courtship, and were subjected to what Jane Addams called the "grosser temptations which now beset the young people who are living in its tenement houses and working in its factories."
As Progressive Era social reformers (many of whom did not distinguish between sexually active women and prostitutes) began to call attention to what they saw as a widespread decline in morality, foreigners emerged as an easy target. Unfettered immigration provided an endless supply of both foreign prostitutes and foreign men who lured American girls into immorality. Muckraking journalists fueled the hysteria with sensationalized stories of innocent girls kidnapped off the streets by foreigners, drugged, smuggled across the country, and forced to work in brothels.
