Historiographic Essay Guidelines
These are the guidelines for what is the major project in this
course. This project will represent the summa as it were of your
achievements in History 4353. As such it is worth more than any
other component in the course and you will devote much more of your
time to it as well. Keep that in mind as you work on the project
for in focusing appropriately you will achieve the best results.
And now, on with the show!
First, the preliminaries. Each historiographic essay must be
between 12 and 15 typed, double-spaced pages and written in Times New
Roman font of 12-point pitch (all references to page-lengths that you
see below will use this standard). This may seem like a lot of
space to fill just now, but when you finish the project you may have a
different view. Time will tell. Also important to note is
that the style of the essays should be that of a formal compare and
contrast essay, which means that the language use should be of an
elevated nature, that you should minimize passive voice and first
person (though I do not forbid first person), and that you should
strive to identify and discuss similarities and differences that you
note in the historiographic field you analyze. Next, all papers
must be properly footnoted, which means that whenever you make use of
the ideas or a direct quote from one of the secondary sources you use
for your paper, you will need to cite it. It also means that you
must use the Chicago Manual of Style in formatting the footnotes (for
those unfamiliar with this style please see me). Please note, as
this is a historiographic essay, you will not use any primary sources
at all. Rather this is a sophisticated compare and contrast essay.
Now for the fine detail. Your
paper should have an introduction of no more than .75
pages. The introduction should accomplish three things.
First it should introduce the specific topic of your essay, which is to
say it should briefly describe the historiographic field on which you
are going to write. This description will be more topical in
nature, i.e. it will connect the historiographic field to a particular
historical context (i.e. a particular time and place). Second, it
should briefly provide an
overview of the various historiographic perspectives you will be
analyzing; I recommend no more than one sentence per perspective.
Third, it should close with your thesis, which should, as the
instructions for the research proposal indicated, encapsulate where
this
field of historical
scholarship has been, where it is going, and where it should go in your
view having evaluated the field. In a sense your thesis should
sum up a) the kinds of questions historians in the field have asked, b)
the kind they are now asking and c) the kind they ought to ask going
forward.
Choosing your sources... With
regard to selecting books and articles for your paper, I have
already provided extensive guidance in a number of cases in my comments
on people's paper proposals and in individual conversations about
people's topics that have occurred during office hours. Since
each
paper will be relatively unique that means that each person will follow
a different path in selecting books and articles for the paper and in
general guidelines such as these I cannot provide that level of
specificity. The conferences you will each have with me this week
(week 11) will be the next opportunity to continue (or begin) this
dialogue. If at any time you desire further guidance, though, let
me
know and I will make time for that conversation as this is an important
matter in framing a paper. In terms of how many articles and
books you
should use, I can state the following. Established perspectives
should be represented by a minimum of three different historians in
article or book format. Since you are responsible for a minimum
of three different perspectives in sections three and four of the essay
and, as you will see below, I recommend 2-3 monographs to help out with
section 2 of the essay, I would say that, at a bare minimum
you need to discuss 9 secondary sources for sections three and four and
make use of at least 2 monographs, but that a proper exploration of a
topic likely means consulting 18 to 20 pieces of secondary literature
at least 2 of which must be monographs.
In section two you need to
provide a historical overview of where the field has been of no less
than 2 but nor more than 3 pages in length. In order to do this I
strongly
recommend (though I do not require) consulting at least two but no more
than three monographs (single book-length studies) on your topic.
Why? The reason for this suggestion is that monographs almost
always have detailed introductions that are effectively minuature
historiographic essays with an eye towards the historical develop of a
given field.
The third section will consist
of your discussion of three to five
different, established historiographic perspectives in the field that
you have chosen to examine that should be no less than 4 but not more
than 5.5 pages in length. Here you will basically discuss what
people in this field are up to now, focusing on how one to three of the
following general issues: how they handle interpretation of historical
phenomena in the field (i.e. how they handle theories and ideas), how
they cope with the central facts of the field if those are in dispute
or at least debated, and how they deal with the challenges of primary
source material. Please note, you cannot discuss something if
historians are not bringing it up in their work as the point of this
section is to discuss what is being done by others. Also, please
note that if a perspective that was part of the founding of the field
remains current then you should discuss it here and in the previous
section. You may choose to organize this section by perspective
or thematically if you can identify a common set of issues that all of
the historians with whose work you are engaging seem to have identified
one. Also, please note that it is in this section that you should
address yourself to older works (though please nothing earlier than the
early 20th century without running it by me) that still influence the
field on which you are working. The ideas of, for example, Henri
Pirenne and Marc Bloch still influence medieval Europeanists even
though both wrote and practiced history in the first half of the 20th
century. This means that, depending on the field you cover, the
time span your essay addresses could be as short as several decades
(some aspects of women's history have only been covered since the 1960s
or 1970s for example) to as much as a century or so if you find that
there are influential works in your field going back to the early 1900s
(as is quite likely in the case of Thirty Years' War topics).
Wherever you begin, however, your essay must, as the next section will
show, follow the debates in your field up through the present.
The fourth section will consist
of a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the field you have
been examining that should conclude with some suggestions for future
research of no less than 4 and no more than 5.5 pages in length.
Basically you want to consider the core concerns you identified in
section three and ask yourself this simply question: do these concerns
adequately probe the phenomena the historians in question are trying to
understand? Insofar as the answer is yes, you can identify this
as a strength. Insofar as the answer proves to be no, you have
identified what, in your view, is a flaw and also a possible subject
for future research.
Presenting your evidence in the body
of the essay...Please note, that, with regard to the
presentation of evidence in the preceding two sections that comprise
the body of the essay, you should see secondary literature as your sole
source material. This means that you will generally be glossing
or quoting from secondary literature to illustrate or demonstrate
points that you wish to make. Sometimes your points will concern
a specific aspect of an argument in one person's work, and any
references to his or her work will merely show that your judgment of
their work is correct. In other cases your citations will be used
to support larger statements that you make about the field as a whole,
in which case you may want to cite more than one source. I would
not see your task as simply a matter of connecting the dots,
though. So you should not mention a point a historian makes,
quote him or her, and then explain the point. Rather, you want to
recreate the "conversation" between historians in the field you choose,
just as we do in our class discussions and just as you have seen
authors such as Van den Heuvel do in their work. Therefore, you
want to think about the larger point you wish to make in a given
paragraph and then ask yourself is this a local point (concerning one
author) or a global point (concerning several) and where does that
local or global point fit into the tapestry of viewpoints with which I
am grappling. In short, always try to have the "big picture"
before you as you write a historiographic essay.
The fifth and final section is
a conclusion of no more than .75 pages. Ideally the conclusion
should mirror what you say in the introduction, though you may expand a
bit on the implications of your findings in the body of the essay.