HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY INSTRUCTIONS
History 4793 - Senior Seminar in History
Dr. Richard Voeltz

This paper is designed to give students practice in using the kinds of critical skills necessary for understanding and evaluating specific historical interpretations, and in many ways is more important than the research paper. In a paper of 6-7 pages (typed), answer the following sorts of questions about the works you read and use for your research paper:

1. What are the main historical themes or questions with which the authors are concerned? Do they define the questions in the same way?
2. What are the main points of agreement/disagreement? Are there important differences of emphasis?
3. What kinds of historical evidence is used by the authors? Is all the evidence necessary for a logical argument available? Consulted? What is overlooked? Does the evidence support the argument?
4. Are the apparent biases in the articles? Why?
5. How well written are the articles? What is the organizational logic? How clear is the presentation? How convincing?
6. What questions about this topic still remain in your mind? What questions should have been asked but were not? How might that affect your judgment of the quality of the work you read?
7. How have these articles/books been received by other historians and reviewers?
8. Do you detect any differences in the ways historians actually do history? Is there really such a thing as a "fact" or original source outside of interpretation?
9. How might the authors' background, character, nationality, etc., have influenced their respective arguments?
10. Did any conventions of research, exposition, or argument influence their findings?

More broadly your discussion concerning your topic and its larger context and significance should incorporate responses to the following questions:

11. Who emerged as the major historians and what are their interpretations?
12. What are the issues that became the central points of contention?
13. In what context did ideas and issues develop? (e.g., How did the Great Depression or Cold War influence interpretations?)
14. How have the major ideologies (e.g., Marxism) influence the debate?
15. What schools of thought developed?
16. What are the recent trends in scholarship?
17. What issues, themes and biographies have not yet been adequately addressed in the historical literature?

These are just some examples of the types of questions you should answer in your paper. But always remember this is an exercise in understanding and evaluating historical interpretations and sources, not just narrating a factual account of a person or event. You might very well have to consult other works on a similar topic to put these articles/books in historiographic context. The essay should be critically evaluative, exploring some of the strong and weak points of particular schools of thought, and briefly discussing which interpretations make sense and what issues remain to be resolved. This is an exercise in understanding "The Production of History" a frame of reference that augments conventional senses of the meaning of history and historiography to refer to the processing of the past in societies and historical settings all over the world and the struggles for control of voices and texts in innumerable settings which animate the processing of the past.