History 5700

Historiography paper

4000-5000 words (16-20 pages)

Read on reserve:

Brundage, Anthony, Going to the Sources: A Guide to Historical Research and Writing. Wheeling Ill.,: Harlan Davidson, 1997. Second Edition. Pp. 50-64.

For this paper, choose a topic that either you have written about in the past for some other course, or that you will be writing about for another history course this semester. [The point is, do not choose something that is entirely new to you or entirely unrelated to your course work.] The goal of this paper is to present a broad examination of the historical scholarhip on the topic you have chosen—that is, the historiography. This paper does not involve ANY research in primary sources; it is to be based SOLELY on the scholarly writings that form the secondary literature about your topic. Your paper should provide an overview of the scholarship on the topic, an overview that is analytical and broad but also focuses on particular points to illustrate what major differences.

How has the scholarship on your topic changed and developed over time? What analytical approaches have historians used to examine this topic? Have the central questions changed? Have new approaches brought out new answers? Is any historian more successful than others at answering the question “why?” concerning historical change?

You will want to make explicit reference in this essay to sections of The Houses of History that might help explain the theories that historians employ in the specific works that you are reading for your paper.