Constructing historical interpretations is what historians do.  Our secondary readings for this course are glorified research papers.  History majors should consider the assignment as preparation for the History 101 thesis.  But constructing historical interpretations is also what non-historians do.  You understand the present in part by imagining a trajectory that brought it into being.  If you do not do this for yourself, you allow others to do it for you.

How do you think the U.S. should respond to concerns of global warming?  That depends on how you imagine the history:  the history of American governance, of industrial development, of political mobilization and grass-roots social movements, of computer modeling and climate science.

What you will take from this assignment is twofold.  First, you will deal directly and in some depth with a particular episode or moment.  You should take away from it new knowledge of a topic that interests you, and also a sense for the ways in which the past was different from the present.  Second, you will have some experience with the construction of histories — the resistance and the openness of the raw materials, the power and the subjectivities of their interpretation.

Your subject matter must be historical, meaning there must be some issue of temporal context or development.  It should lie 25 or more years in the past.  You are strongly encouraged to explore farther back.  It is short-sighted to imagine that only recent phenomena are interesting or that the present is not informed by events more than a quarter-century old.

You will choose the paper topic yourself.  The third section of this website offers guidance.  You may focus on an individual (scientist or not), an institution, an event, a discipline, a policy, or some other topic that seizes your interest.  Your goal is to find something of your own to say, not to rehearse a story already known (to others, if not to you).

You should organize your paper around a thesis, developed from your materials and displaying the significance of your subject.  You need to support the thesis with concrete evidence (and respond to counterevidence).

Some things that are not theses:

• Scientist X was intelligent
• Development Y is interesting

A thesis is interpretive, but it is more than just an opinion;  your paper must be persuasive, which means backing up your analysis.  And since the paper is an argument, the narrative must serve that argument. Do not ignore this, and do not imagine it does not apply to your paper.

• Bernice Ng, "The Rise of the Laboratory Rat for Animal Research:  A Quest (or Pest) to Humanize"
• Anthony Darrouzet-Nardi, "Botany, Zoology, and the Institutionalization of Ecology in America During the 1910s"
• Michelle Van Buskirk, "The United States:  Owner of the Transuranium Monopoly"
• Nikolas Klein, "Going Up:  V-2 Rockets and Upper-Atmospheric Research"
• Nick Livingston, "The Jet Engine's Scientific Revolution"
• Joel Goldstein, "The Ernest American Scientist"

Examine how the papers delimit their topics, define their theses, and construct their arguments.  See if you can guess how the authors came to their particular topic.   Also look at the endnotes:  How do you think they found the sources?  Your first research paper assignment (due September 20) will include reflections on these questions.

On to:
Constructing a research paper
Finding a topic and sources
Moving towards the final paper (assignments)
 

Copyright © Cathryn Carson 2002