Historiographer Review Essay

  1. Prepare a one paragraph prospectus and list of sources for your project,
    a research plan, briefly stating the topic you will write about in your essay. Use the Cunningham Library
    electronic databases (including JSTOR, and Academic Search Complete), to identify journal articles on the
    topic you have selected. Whenever possible, try to find recently published works (since 2010 if possible).
    Blogs, Wikipedia articles, Yahoo Answers pages, and other unpublished online sources are not appropriate for
    this assignment.
  2. Identify how these historians have written about the same topic in different ways. Your essay will be about
    the current state of research on your topic. Rather than summarizing your materials, you will need to analyze
    the work of the historians as we did during our book review exercise. Read carefully and think about how each
    writer has written about the same topic in different ways: what questions do they ask; what are their arguments;
    what sources do they use; what subtopics do they explore; what larger point are they trying to make with their
    research? Take careful notes as you read to help prepare your outline for the final paper.