History Question

Specific requirements

• Begin with an introductory section that clearly states your research question, and provides a roadmap of how the paper will answer it.  Without this, it is very hard for me to respond usefully to what you are writing.
• Anything that is drawn from somewhere else — writing, ideas, facts — must be clearly sourced.  That means quotation marks or indented paragraphs to mark off other people’s writing from yours, and clear notes linked to the text (not just a bib at the end!) that makes clear where the quoted material is from.  You are also obliged to source material that you merely paraphrase.  This is an ethical requirement, and it’s also a basic part of the craft of writing a research paper.  The referencing style is up to you.  You can use footnotes, endnotes, or little parenthetical notes that are keyed to your bibliography.
• Include a complete bibliography with full references.  Again, please give complete references and not just urls.  You are welcome to reference non-scholarly material, but I do expect to see, here, a reasonable engagement with scholarly literature relevant to your research question.  I’ll drop at this point any requirement about the number of scholarly sources used, but I would expect to see several, and more importantly so see the kind of list that shows careful reading and searching.
• Use subheadings to divide the paper into parts. Subheads and separate sections are a good way to help you think about the paper as a question-answering machine, rather than a mass of words filling up pages.  You are also welcome to include pictures, diagrams, tables, and anything else relevant that you can get onto a sheet of paper.

Note on grading: The draft will receive full credit if it is handed in on time and meets the above requirements.  The final paper will be graded on the clarity and quality of its analysis.