HISTORIOGRAPHY ESSAYS

This assignment is designed to provide you with experience in critical reading and writing of a kind that is central to the discipline of history. There will be many instances in which you will think of detailed questions about precisely what to read and how to organize and analyze your materials, and you should not hesitate to consult with your instructor about such questions. However, no one can provide you with a "foolproof" step-by-step guide to thinking through, organizing, and composing your essay, because essay writing by its nature is a personal, individual, enterprise.  

Three challenges

The assignment is meant to be challenging in three ways. First, you have an opportunity to exercise individual initiative in using assigned readings on the syllabus, as well as additional sources depending on your interest and time available.  Second, you will be able to make judgments about the trends in professional history writing over the past half-century, especially in the past twenty years. Third, you have an opportunity to demonstrate originality in organizing your material to best advantage and in analyzing your material with as much sophistication as you are able to bring to the task.

Your historiography essay should aim to demonstrate an insightful and perceptive grasp of the subject of "New Perspectives in History." Your essay should therefore present a sound analysis based upon the material in the course syllabus and beyond the syllabus to the extent that is reasonable given the time constraints of the course. As in all academic essays, your thesis will reflect your personal assessment of how best to describe what you regard as the most important of the "new perspectives" in history, but you must ensure that your argument is analytically sound and is based upon relevant evidence. Please do not allow yourself to Become overwhelmed by the details of the particular field of history you are discussing to the point that you lose sight of the purpose of the essay.

Your essay title contains the key words "new perspectives." You must define this phrase explicitly in your essay and specifically discuss the particular concepts, methods, and theories you have selected as the most important that historians have utilized in their research and writing, particularly in the past
twenty years. Your essay requires analysis of "new perspectives" as exemplified in particular  fields of history, which may require you to attend particularly to one or more specific "new perspectives" you regard as especially pertinent to those fields. You will also want to discuss the issues associated with those new perspectives ("issue" here refers to a point in debate with affirmative and negative positions, not to the currently popular usage where issue is a synonym for grievance, e.g. "I have several issues with this course.")

The first step is to complete all of the reading that pertains to the topic, starting with the assigned works in the field that is identified in the subtitle of your essay. Use your syllabus references to help you to move on to material that you can find yourself using  the search facilities in the Leonard Library or in other libraries. Check the footnotes and bibliographies of books and articles, which have been especially useful. These can be invaluable sources to finding further material.

Then, think through all of the materials you are using and draw up your inventory of how the new perspectives, and the issues associated with them, are exemplified, or to what degree exemplified in the European, or United States, Latin American, or World History/ Gender in History works that you will be discussing. Then outline your materials and write your first draft.

Many students delay writing their essays because they feel they have not done enough reading and research and their essay will not be perfect. This is unreasonable, and it is dangerous. Investing too much time, effort and self-esteem in an essay can only lead to undue self-criticism and depression when the essay does not gain that mythical A+ mark. Your essay is treated by me within very clear parameters (see the syllabus and evaluation criteria below); so it should be by you.