Research Paper:

DUE: Full Draft: Thurs, April 16

DUE: Final Draft Wed, May 6 at 11am

The primary object of the History Senior Seminar is for you to write an independent, original, research paper fundamentally grounded in primary source materials (20 page + bibliography minimum w/ proper footnotes). The goal is for this assignment to serve as a culmination of your career at Denison as a student of history. You might conceive of it as your opportunity to write an article-length piece of original scholarship. For this particular class, the paper must focus on the History of the Atlantic World (which we will define more accurately together over the course of our discussions), 1400-1890, roughly. The work must be grounded in one or more primary sources and draw widely upon secondary sources (journal articles and books).

Warning: This is not the equivalent of a high school report, it is an opportunity for you to produce original historical research. The research paper is to be fundamentally grounded in primary documents. It should not be an encyclopedic summary of other historians’ arguments or a narrative of events taken from secondary sources, but the presentation of your own arguments based on your readings of available primary sources and the pertinent secondary literature. Over reliance on secondary sources will adversely affect your grade.

The paper will be graded primarily on the depth, breadth, and quality of your research, the originality of your arguments and their persuasiveness, and the quality of your writing.

The paper should be typed, double-spaced, and in Times New Roman 12-point font. It should have 1-inch margins on all sides and employ proper citations in footnotes and the bibliography. Footnotes and bibliographies should follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 18th ed. You may use short citations (last name, short title) after an initial full citation of the source has been given. The paper will be due on Thursday, Dec 22nd, at 11am, but feel free to turn the assignment in early. Please upload a completed copy of your paper to Notebowl.

Hint: If you don’t already, you might consider using Zotero (a free bibliography program available at zotero.org)

One of the most difficult and yet crucial steps in the process will be to chose a historical problem and conceptualize a plan of how to frame your paper. Because many of you are not familiar with the history of the Atlantic World you should probably begin by thinking broadly about the types of historical questions, sources, and approaches that have drawn your highest degree of interest during your history career rather than trying to come up with an argument at the start. You might think of it in terms of what questions/problems within particular national histories you have found most compelling, and, what types of historical approaches or methodologies (women’s, economic, gender, race/ethnicity, political, intellectual, etc.) have captured your attention in other courses. With those ideas in mind, we can begin to brainstorm about the possibilities of conducting research on such a historical or historiographical question within an Atlantic framework.

Fundamental to this process is the locations of manageable and pertinent primary sources. Once you have a general historical problem you would like to explore, the next and most important step is to identify primary sources. Your historical questions, and the subsequent answers to those questions (your hypotheses) should emanate out of your reading of the primary sources.

I have provided an initial list of potential published primary sources (and there are so many more that we might find), but you will need to quickly move from a consideration of potential projects/questions to whether or not your project is manageable both in terms of available primary and secondary materials as well as time constraints.

Once you have settled on a general historical problem (you will be required to submit a Initial Statement of Research Questions and Sources on Sept. 14th) you will need to do lots of reading and note taking and begin to think about what your big historical and/or historiographical questions will be. Hint: As you read, take copious notes (with reference to exactly what you are reading and where you find it).

At this point, you should still be thinking about questions (derived in large part from you reading of primary materials) rather than arguments. You will also need to discover if other historians have attempted to answer your questions. (Email me a Research Proposal and Description on Sept 25th; see description below for specific instructions).

Thereafter, there are a series of benchmark assignments that you will be required to complete in order to help you towards completing your research project. They will include two (2) Primary Source Analyses (1st Complete Draft Oct 17th, 1st Final Draft Oct 19th; 2nd Complete Draft Nov 9th, Final Draft Nov 14th), an Annotated Bibliography and Historiography Outline (Oct 24th), a Historiographical Essay (Complete Draft Oct 31st, Final Draft Nov 2nd), a rough draft of your paper for peer review (Nov 30th), and finally a Plan for Revision (Due Dec 5th before one-on-one meetings to discuss Rough Drafts). Specific instructions for each assignment are below.

In writing your final project, it might behoove you to keep the following in mind.

Hints:

Some Grading Criteria

Assignments Related to Final Project

Initial Thoughts on Historical Question/Problem

Please submit a 1-2 paragraph description of a general idea for your research project, and some thoughts as to what types of primary sources that you might be interested in employing. Then we will schedule individual meetings to discuss the possibilities of your general topic. (Due Mon, Feb 2 at 11:59pm)

Project Proposal (5%)

Please submit a detailed description of your evolving Project that describes your historical question(s), historiographical question(s), and any questions you might have about your project. Also include an initial bibliography of at least ten (10) secondary sources, and a description/discussion of the primary sources that you plan/hope to employ. You should not have arguments yet (tentative hypotheses at best), the arguments should come from the primary sources!

Note: This should represent a refined statement of your research plan and not simply a reiteration of what was included in your “First Thoughts”. It should represent the growth and increased focus of you topic. Project Proposal graded on a full credit (+), ¾ credit (√+), half credit (√-) or no credit (0) basis. Complete Draft Due: Tues, Feb 17 Final Draft Due: Tues, Feb 24

Primary Source Analysis x2 (5% each)

Open your paper with a two to three paragraph description of your project. That description should represent an evolution of what you wrote in your Proposal, and should provide a foundation for your explication of your primary source.
You are to identify and critically analyze one of the more significant primary documents for your research paper. If your source base relies on a vareity of smaller sources (say, newspaper articles), you should analyze multiple sources.

Approach this assignment as if you are the first person to have discovered your primary source(s); and you wish to express what it contains, and its meaning(s) and significance to a fellow historian (me). In addition, you should consider what the document doesn’t say: what can’t it tell us? What sort of questions do the sources raise that can only be answered with other sources, primary or secondary?

Most importantly, you need to situate the document within the general questions of your specific research. How does it help you articulate, and potentially answer, the questions most central to your study?
Your analysis should focus on why this document was written, the meaning of the document in the context of your research, the assumptions and arguments that form the basis of the document, and the potential implications of the source for your project and Atlantic World History.

The Source Analysis should be a maximum of 4 double-spaced typewritten pages and should follow the general format instructions for the final paper. Please include a copy or (or a hyperlink to) the document you are analyzing if possible.

The professor must approve the primary source(s) you plan to use in advance.

Primary Source Analysis #1

Due: Complete Draft for Peer Review: Tues, March 3;
Final Draft: Thurs, March 5 (via Canvas).
If reasonable, please deliver a copy of your primary source, or the section of the source, that you evaluate along with your paper.

Primary Source Analysis #2

Due: Complete Draft for Peer Review: Thurs, April 2;
Final Draft: Tues, April 7 (via Canvas).
If reasonable, please deliver a copy of your primary source, or the section of the source, that you evaluate along with your paper.

Annotated Bibliography and Outline of Historiography (5%)

Annotated Bibliography

You will need to include a minimum of ten (10) secondary sources, including three articles in scholarly journals, as well as an initial list of the primary sources you plan to employ. You should also annotate the important primary sources you plan to use (and can annotate them as a “collection” (say a collection of letters) if necessary). The key is not just having the appropriate number of sources but to identify those sources most relevant to your topic. Remember to pay particular attention to the date and place of publication in addition to any basic information that might be available about the author as you make your selections.

Your annotated bibliography should include each of the four components listed below:

Include separate sections for primary and secondary sources.

Note: While ten sources might seem a significant number, it represents a bare minimum. For the sake of comparison, two of my published articles include 32 and 48 cited secondary sources, which would not include the other materials I consulted but did not need to cite.

DUE Tues, March 10

Historiographical Essay (7.5%)

Write an approximately 750-word, double-spaced, 12 pt font, historiographical essay, with proper footnotes, on your research project.

DUE: Complete Draft: Tues, March 24 Final Draft: Thurs, March 26

Description:

As a historian, you are contributing to ongoing scholarly conversation relevant to your research. In your final paper, you will want to position your own arguments relative to those conversations.

You will identify and describe the various historiographical debates that your topic addresses. Again, your essay should open with a further revised two to three paragraph description of your research problem that will serve as the frame for your discussion of other historians work.

Historians generally disagree on how to interpret the issues that we study. Therefore, your analysis should reveal the approach and basic argument of these works (as they relate to your topic) and the points of conflict and/or agreement between them.

In other words, you will reconstruct appropriate aspects of the conversations that have gone on among scholars regarding your area of investigation over time. You should also position your research project amidst those debates, revealing where your topic and/or thesis fit into this conversation.

What are the key differences between a traditional “research” paper and a historiographical essay? The former, a research paper, focuses on actual events, processes, or questions. The later, the historiography, critically examines the scholarship on a given topic, historical period, or event. “Critically” means that you must not only identify but also critique the arguments about actual events, processes, or historical questions. In such a paper, you refer to events, periods, processes, only in relation to others’ interpretations of the past. In addition, the purpose of a historiographical essay is not to prove one or another approach as correct, but rather to identify and critique all, or at least the most significant, approaches.

You are likely to find that there are various levels of conversation that you will want to discuss. For example, we have already discussed the meanings of “Atlantic World History” from a historiographical perspective in class. You might then identify other sets of debates particular to your specific topic within that more general perspective. For clarity’s sake, you should identify multiple and potentially layered historiographical debates in this paper.

The historiography should be structured around arguments, debates, and/or approaches and not around individual authors. (If you historiography reads like an annotated bibliography in narrative form, you should consider restructuring it).

Hint and Warning:
The historiographical essay should be a good tool to assist you in writing your final paper. You should not, however, simply cut and paste significant sections of the historiography into your final paper. Doing so will adversely affect your grade.

In addition, you are required to append the historiographical essay to the final draft of your paper as an appendix. Final papers that do not have a historiographical essay attached will be treated as incomplete.

Primary Source Analysis #2 (5%)

See instructions above, follow same format as Primary Source Analysis 1.

The professor must approve the primary source(s) you plan to use in advance. Unless explicitly given permission to do otherwise, you should write on a different source than the one you analyzed in your first primary source analysis.

Full Draft - This must be a full, polished draft of your final paper.

On Thurs, April 16, class will meet to conduct peer-reviews of complete drafts. You will be asked to read a couple of pages out loud to the author (so they hear their own prose and writing style) and then to read and comment on the entirety of the draft during the class period. I will provide a general worksheet to assist you in this process during class.

Please bring two copies to class to share with your peer reviewers and upload a version of your paper to Canvas for grading.

Drafts graded on a full credit (+), ¾ credit (√+), half credit (√-) or no credit (0) basis.

To receive full credit you must have a full draft, with a well-identified historical question, an arguable and manageable hypothesis, which begins to grapple with the pertinent primary and secondary materials.

Presentations (7.5%) Per departmental policy, you will be required to provide a 10-minute presentation (with additional 5 minutes for Q&A) on your topic on Thurs, April 30 (10am-12noon). You should be able to address your primary questions, the primary sources you’ve employed to answer those questions, and your principle conclusions.

Treat this as a formal presentation – dress appropriately, and be prepared to field questions from the instructor, your classmates, and other faculty from the history department regarding your project.

I will be strict with the time limit. A good estimate is less than 5 typewritten pages will fill your 10 minutes. However, you would be better served to avoid reading your talk, and coming prepared to simply talk about your project.

I would recommend that you avoid the temptation to summarize your project but rather consider organizing your presentation around the following themes:

The strength of your own presentation and your participation, in terms of asking questions and making suggestions to fellow students during these presentations, will be included in your discussion grade for the course.

Non-exhaustive list of published primary sources that might serve as starting points for senior research***