HIS431: History of
Research Project
WWII Poster (click image to see more)
There are two parts to the Research
Project
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Secondary Source Essay (5-10 pages)
Primary Source Research Paper (10-15 pages)
Due on
November 16th
This Essay will serve as
the Literature Review and Background for your Research Paper.
Topic
You
may choose any topic that touches on the History of U.S. Foreign Relations up
until 1945. Absolutely anything is fair
game, if you can establish that it is connected to
As
you will have to live with this topic for the rest of the semester, choose
something that interests you.
In
this Secondary Source Essay, you must connect your topic to any relevant
readings and discussion from the class.
Historical
Question
Pose
a question that is possible to answer given the sources available. For this essay the question will probably
focus on the arguments available in published sources. However, the secondary sources, themselve, will rely on evidence and should provide enough
information for a specific and origninal question of
your own. Nonetheless, the point of this
essay is to establish your relationship to the secondary sources.
Discourse
Establish
what you believe to be the Conventional Wisdom.
Map the landscape of the discourse on the topic. You may find that your question brings more
than one disicipline or approach together. Your discussion, then, become the forum for a
broadened discourse.
Debate
How
do different scholars approach your topic?
Are their differences “apples and oranges”, do they disagree about how
to analyze sources, or do they simply disagree about how to weight the
importance of the evidence available?
Structure
You
must have a clear Thesis, Introduction, Conclusion, and Structured Argument
(see below for specific descriptions of each).
Citations
You
must use a formal system for citations, either Chicago Style or MLA.
Due by
December 15th
This Research Project will
include your 5-10 page Secondary Source Source Essay,
so the Secondary Essay + the Research Paper = 15-25 pages.
Topic
The
Introduction should accomplish several things: establish your Topic, state your
Historical Question, and state your Thesis.
The
topic area must be basically the same as the Secondary Source Paper. However, there may be room to change it a
little bit in light of the new angle you take, which is informed by your
Primary Source Research.
In
the event that you change you topic are, you must do a
fresh Secondary Source discussion. You
are welcome to do this, but it means that the Research Paper will now have to
be a new 5-10 page secondary source essay as well as the 10-15 page Research Paper.
Historical
Question
Since
the thesis is the short answer to your Historical Question, it is extremely
important to be clear about what is at stake.
A thesis which does not answer a question, or answers a simple or
obvious question, is not a thesis. It is
not possible to have a strong thesis in response to a lame question.
The
Historical Question will be changed in light of the research you have
done. Rather than asking an historical
question about the conventional academic discourse on the topic, you will ask a
more specific one.
Secondary
Source Discourse (already written)
Revise
your Secondary Source essay and include it (so the final Research Paper will be
15-25 pages long).
Methodology
Describe
your approach.
Why
did you look for information in the places that you did?
What
was your organizing principle that informed your approach to the material you
examined?
What
questions did you ask of the material you found?
Evidence
Finding
useful information that can be used as evidence for your argument is the
central part of this project. Depending
on the topic, you may find information in a wide variety of places. The evidence must come from Primary
Sources. It is not always entirely clear
whether a sources is “primary” or not. It depends on the question that you have posed. Generally speaking, anything produced during
the time period you are considering can be a primary source. However, remember that a source may be
“primary” for one question, but “secondary” for another. Anything written or produced afterward is
probably not a primary source (with the occassional
exception of memoirs, etc.).
Any
internet sources that you want to use must be approved (by me) before your
Research Presentation. There are some
good primary sources available on the internet, and that is fine. However, you must use sources that you find
in places other than the internet.
Foreign Relations of the United
States
Historical
Narrative
The
discipline of History is often described as an “uneasy marriage between
interpretation and anaylsis, between narrative and
explanation.” You will inevitably have
to provide some narrative background and narrative explanation. Do this efficiently. This is a short research project, so don’t
waste a lot of time telling a story that has already been told in other
secondary sources.
Some
narrative story-telling will be necessary to establish the context of your
evidence. The historical narrative is,
in some sense, part of your evidence but it is not the substantive contribution
of your project (unless you find information which alters the conventional
telling of that narrative).
Argument
The
argument is a fleshed out thesis. The
argument has a specific structure. There
are often more than one arguments capable of
supporting the same thesis. How do your
organize your evidence in order to persuade the reader/listener to consider and
accept your thesis? What are the
specific steps you are asking your reader to take in order to move them down
the path toward your conclusion? You
have told the reader/listener up front what your concluding answer to your
historical question is already; now you have to escort them along your line of
reasoning.
Thesis
State
it clearly; see the “Things to Keep in Mind” below.
Conclusion
You
have already stated your thesis, presented your evidence, made
your argument. So, do not repeat your
thesis. Conclude by suggesting how your
argument and approach might apply to other topics and historical questions. Or suggest how this argument might cause us
to look differently at the world today.
Or suggest how your study has begged a number of new historical
questions. Explain how the
reader/listener has been given a tool that can be used in a variety of other
projects.
Introduction
This
should be the last thing you revise before completion. Go back to your
introduction and re-write it with all your results in mind.
In
order to do these things, you need to introduce your Topic in a way that will
convince the reader that it is an important and interesting one. There are many
ways to do this; there is no good formula.
You
may find that your style is to introduce your topic and hook the reader as a
set-up to your thesis. That’s fine; the thesis
statement can come in the second paragraph, if you want to have a two-paragraph
introduction.
Things
to Keep in Mind
State
your Thesis clearly.
The
thesis is the controlling idea around which you construct the rest of your
paper. In a history paper, the Thesis
generally explains Why or How something happened.
Every word of your paper should support your thesis. Information you do not
directly relate to your thesis will weaken your argument.
The
Thesis is the short answer to the Historical Question that you ask in the
paper. It is the concise version of your
argument. You should be able to state it
in one or two sentences.
The
Thesis should contain an original idea.
It may be original because you happen across information that has not
yet been brough to bear on the question you have
asked. It may be origninal
because you have adopted a new approach (perhaps one borrowed from a discourse
that conventionally applies to a different question).
In
oder to make it clear that you are offering something
original, something of your own, you may need to set up your thesis statement
with an introductory clause, such as “Although the conventional explanation of
such-and-such would have us believe that….”
Or, “When considering this topic, scholars typically ask these kind of questions; I’m asking a different question, which
promises a new kind of conclusion….”
The
Thesis should be both persuasive and provocative. The reader should respond by thinking “Okay, that sounds right; now convince me that it’s true.”
Remember,
a good Thesis should be falsifiable. A
critical reader will be thinking about what kind of evidence might challenge
your argument. Write for a critical
reader.
If
there is an important point that you might need to concede, do it up front to
let the reader know that you are both informed and
What
does a bad Thesis look like?
The
evolution trial of 1925 was made a farce and a comedy by the circumstances
surrounding the trial. Behind this facade lay issues that were deeply
disturbing to the Americans of the 1920s. By an examination of the Scopes
Trial, some of these issues can begin to be perceived and analyzed and perhaps
they can reveal a better understanding of the decade.
There
is no thesis here. The last sentence seems to be a thesis, but actually speaks
to the way the paper will proceed rather than
to its conclusion. It does not explain why or how something happened.
Henry
David Thoreau, the author of Walden,
and Theodore Parker, the unitarian
minister and abolitionist, were two of the greatest minds of the antebellum
period. The purpose of this paper is to examine means of resistance through a
comparison of the philosophies of Thoreau and Parker.
This
is a statement of purpose and method, but does not begin to offer a thesis. What
is the question or problem? Comparison is a method of inquiry that leads to a
thesis, not a thesis itself.
As
slaves, African Americans were given little or no rights as families. Husbands
and wives were parted, and children were separated from their mothers by
masters who had no qualms about selling them. Even those families kept intact
were by no means protected from the hardships of slavery. Through emancipation
came new opportunities and problems for African American families.
This
is a little closer, but still problematic. It does assert something
[emancipation brought "new opportunities and problems"] about its
subject [African American families]. Yet this assertion is vague; it lacks
focus and direction. More questions need to be asked: What kind of
opportunities and problems did emancipation present? Which [opportunities or
problems] were more important to the shaping of post-emancipation life? In
short, the assertion made here is neither sufficiently adventurous nor specific
to qualify as a good thesis.