Survey of United States History to 1877 - Final Exam Guide

From the syllabus: Final Research Paper: (6-10 pages). Due Dec. 11, 5:00 pm.

This paper should contain the three elements that shape this course: a review of the literature (historiography), an analysis of the evidence, and a summary of how your research fits into the larger historical picture. It can be on any topic from the period between pre-contact to 1877, but should be as narrowly focused as possible. Worth 35 percent of your grade for the class.

Your proposal for your final (exam) project is due Friday, Oct 24. It should be a one-paragraph statement of what topic you wish to explore, the question you want to answer about that topic (e.g. why were the first factory workers women?), and a preliminary bibliography.

In this paper I expect you to be a historian. Using the skills you've learned in this class (i.e., thinking about the significance of context, as represented by social nexuses or timelines; thinking about interpretation, as represented by changes in historians understanding over time (historiography); finding and analyzing primary documents in comparison to each other and to historians' interpretations; using film, picture, and music as documents), write a history of some topic of your choice. Your history should be based on 10 secondary sources*, 10 primary sources*^, and (for the conclusion), ALL*~ the texts we've used in class.

* The key to finding relevant secondary sources is to do a bibliographic search on your topic (e.g. the Seven Years War or Women Factory Workers) first. Then look for the earliest history of your topic and the most recent history of your topic. Read both of them carefully. From them you can learn 3 things:

1. What the history was.

2. Whether or not historians are still interpreting the history the same way as they did originally. (You may not be able to find the very first history or the most recent one in Consort. Just get the earliest one and the most recent one available.)

3. What the names and locations of primary sourses are, and what the names of other (another 8) secondary sources are.

*^ You may be able to locate only one source for primary documents (e.g. a published volume of letters; a diary; newspapers), but you can use 10 excepts from that one source if others are unavailable. Newspapers are an excellent primary source. Our library has a number of newspapers from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, and they can always be counted on to give you some information about your topic.

*~Your conclusion should relate your findings to "the larger historical picture," which in this case is U.S. History. So the question you want to answer in your conclusion is, how does your topic help us to understand U.S. history from the perspective that we have addressed it in this course (i.e. that "history" is always changing because historians change it because of their own contexts.) Obviously, if you use EVERY text we've use in this class, your paper will be 20 pages long. What you need to do is categorize the texts according to the themes you are addressing: e.g. historians' interpretations, primary documents, race, class, gender, etc. Then you can discuss the category and refer to all the texts in that category, but you only have to quote the one that most specifically makes the point you want to make.