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How to Research and Write a Compelling History Thesis

The Importance of Research for Writing a History Thesis

Just as history is more than a collection of facts about past events, an effective history thesis goes beyond simply sharing recorded information. Writing a compelling history thesis requires making an argument about a historical fact and, then, researching and providing a well-crafted defense for that position.

With so many sources available—some of which may provide conflicting findings—how should a student research and write a history thesis? How can a student create a thesis that’s both compelling and supports a position that academic editors describe as “concise, contentious, and coherent”?

Key steps in how to write a history thesis include evaluating source materials, developing a strong thesis statement, and building historical knowledge.

Compelling theses provide context about historical events. This context, according to the reference website ThoughtCo., refers to the social, religious, economic, and political conditions during an occurrence that “enable us to interpret and analyze works or events of the past, or even the future, rather than merely judge them by contemporary standards”.

The context supports the main point of a thesis, called the thesis statement, by providing an interpretive and analytical framework of the facts, instead of simply stating them. Research uncovers the evidence necessary to make the case for that thesis statement.

To gather evidence that contributes to a deeper understanding of a given historical topic, students should reference both primary and secondary sources of research.

Primary Sources

Primary sources are firsthand accounts of events in history, according to Professor David Ulbrich, director of Norwich University’s online Master of Arts in History program. These sources provide information not only about what happened and how it happened but also why it happened.

Primary sources can include letters, diaries, photos, and videos as well as material objects such as “spent artillery shells, architectural features, cemetery headstones, chemical analysis of substances, shards of bowls or bottles, farming implements, or earth or environmental features or factors,” Ulbrich says. “The author of the thesis can tell how people lived, for example, by the ways they arranged their material lives.”

Primary research sources are the building blocks to help us better understand and appreciate history. It is critical to find as many primary sources from as many perspectives as possible. Researching these firsthand accounts can provide evidence that helps answer those “what”, “how”, and “why” questions about the past, Ulbrich says.

Secondary Sources

Secondary sources are materials—such as books, articles, essays, and documentaries—gathered and interpreted by other researchers. These sources often provide updates and evaluation of the thesis topic or viewpoints that support the theories presented in the thesis.

Primary and secondary sources are complementary types of research that form a convincing foundation for a thesis’ main points.

How to Write a History Thesis

What are the steps to write a history thesis? The process of developing a thesis that provides a thorough analysis of a historical event—and presents academically defensible arguments related to that analysis—includes the following:

1. Gather and Analyze Sources

When collecting sources to use in a thesis, students should analyze them to ensure they demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the materials. A student should evaluate the attributes of sources such as their origin and point-of-view.

An array of primary and secondary sources can help provide a thorough understanding of a historical event, although some of those sources may include conflicting views and details. In those cases, the American Historical Association says, it’s up to the thesis author to determine which source reflects the appropriate point-of-view.

2. Develop a Thesis Statement

To create a thesis statement, a student should establish a specific idea or theory that makes the main point about a historical event. Scribbr, an editing website, recommends starting with a working thesis, asking the question the thesis intends to answer, and, then, writing the answer.

The final version of a thesis statement might be argumentative, for example, taking a side in a debate. Or it might be expository, explaining a historical situation. In addition to being concise and coherent, a thesis statement should be contentious, meaning it requires evidence to support it.

3. Create an Outline

Developing a thesis requires an outline of the content that will support the thesis statement. Students should keep in mind the following key steps in creating their outline:

• Note major points.
• Categorize ideas supported by the theories.
• Arrange points according to the importance and a timeline of events addressed by the thesis.
• Create effective headings and subheadings.
• Format the outline.

4. Organize Information

Thesis authors should ensure their content follows a logical order. This may entail coding resource materials to help match them to the appropriate theories while organizing the information. A thesis typically contains the following elements.

• Abstract —Overview of the thesis.
• Introduction —Summary of the thesis’ main points.
• Literature review —Explanation of the gap in previous research addressed by this thesis.
• Methods —Outline how the author reviewed the research and why materials were selected.
• Results —Description of the research findings.
• Discussion —Analysis of the research.
• Conclusion —Statements about what the student learned.

5. Write the Thesis

Online writing guide Paperpile recommends that students start with the literature review when writing the thesis. Developing this section first will help the author gain a more complete understanding of the thesis’ source materials. Writing the abstract last can give the student a thorough picture of the work the abstract should describe.

The discussion portion of the thesis typically is the longest since it’s here that the writer will explain the limitations of the work, offer explanations of any unexpected results, and cite remaining questions about the topic.

In writing the thesis, the author should keep in mind that the document will require multiple changes and drafts—perhaps even new insights. A student should gather feedback from a professor and colleagues to ensure their thesis is clear and effective before finalizing the draft.      

6. Prepare to Defend the Thesis

A committee will evaluate the student’s defense of the thesis’ theories. Students should prepare to defend their thesis by considering answers to questions posed by the committee. Additionally, students should develop a plan for addressing questions to which they may not have a ready answer, understanding the evaluation likely will consider how the author handles that challenge.

Developing Skills to Write a Compelling History Thesis

When looking for direction on how to write a history thesis, Norwich University’s online Master of Arts in History program can provide the needed skills and knowledge. The program’s tracks and several courses—taken as core classes or as electives in multiple concentrations—can provide a strong foundation for thesis work.

Master of Arts in History Tracks

In the Norwich online Master of Arts in History program, respected scholars help students improve their historical insight, research, writing, analytical, and presentation skills. They teach the following program tracks.

• Public History —Focuses on the preservation and interpretation of historic documents and artifacts for purposes of public observation.
• American History —Emphasizes the exploration and interpretation of key events associated with U.S. history.
• World History —Prepares students to develop an in-depth understanding of world history from various eras.
• Legal and Constitutional History —Provides a thorough study of the foundational legal and constitutional elements in the U.S. and Europe.

Master of Arts in History Courses

Norwich University’s online Master of Arts in History program enables students to customize studies based on career goals and personal interests through the following courses:

• Introduction to History and Historiography —Covers the core concepts of history-based study and research methodology, highlighting how these concepts are essential to developing an effective history thesis.
• Directed Readings in History —Highlights different ways to use sources that chronicle American history to assist in researching and writing a thorough and complete history thesis.
• Race, Gender, and U.S. Constitution —Explores key U.S. Supreme Court decisions relating to national race and gender relations and rights, providing a deeper context to develop compelling history theses.
• Archival Studies —Breaks down the importance of systematically overseeing archival materials, highlighting how to build historical context to better educate and engage with the public.

Start Your Path Toward Writing a Compelling History Thesis

For over two centuries, Norwich University has played a vital role in history as America’s first private military college and the birthplace of the ROTC. As such, the university is uniquely positioned to lead students through a comprehensive analysis of the major developments, events, and figures of the past.

Explore Norwich University’s online Master of Arts in History program. Start your path toward writing a compelling history thesis and taking your talents further.

Writing History: An Introductory Guide to How History Is Produced , American Historical Association     How to Write a Thesis Statement , Scribbr     The Importance of Historic Context in Analysis and Interpretation , ThoughtCo.     7 Reasons Why Research Is Important , Owlcation     Primary and Secondary Sources , Scribbr     Secondary Sources in Research , ThoughtCo.     Analysis of Sources , History Skills     Research Paper Outline , Scribbr     How to Structure a Thesis , Paperpile     Writing Your Final Draft , History Skills     How to Prepare an Excellent Thesis Defense , Paperpile

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Module 9: The New Deal (1932-1941)

Historical arguments and thesis statements, learning objectives.

• Evaluate historical claims and thesis statements

The Research Writing Process

In an earlier historical hack, we talked about the research writing process, as shown below:

• Understand the assignment
• Select a research topic/develop a research question
• Conduct research: find and evaluate sources
• Create your claim (make an argument)
• Synthesize evidence
• Put it together

These are guidelines to help you get started, but the process is iterative, so you may cycle through these steps several times while working towards your finished product. In this hack, we want to focus on the final three steps—once you’ve done your research and have a few ideas about what to say, how do you put it together to create your finished product?

Crafting Historical Arguments

In open-ended historical research assignments, you are almost always expected to create an argument (revisit the assignment prompt or ask your instructor if you’re unsure about this). Historical arguments are not like the arguments that you and your roommate might have about the best show on T.V. or an argument you’d have with the referee at a sporting event; historical arguments require you to pick a stance on an issue and defend it with supporting evidence.

Your objective is not to create an informal persuasive essay convincing others of your viewpoint based on your personal opinions, but an argumentative one, where you defend your stance on an issue by backing it with historical evidence. Argumentative writing is done for a formal, academic purpose— you have a compelling viewpoint on a topic, and you’ve conducted research. Now you are communicating that research and using evidence to back your claim. When you write an argumentative piece, you write as if you are the authority on the topic, a subject-matter expert.

The Differences Between Persuasive and Argumentative Writing

Check out the table below for a quick breakdown of the differences between persuasive and argumentative writing.

Sometimes it can be hard to tell a topic from an argument. If someone sees you reading an article and asks, “What’s that article about?” You might say, “It’s about photography during the Great Depression.” That’s a topic, not an argument. How do we know? You can’t disagree with “photography during the Great Depression.” An argument is something you could disagree with, like “Photography during the Great Depression was essential in bringing the realities of poverty into the public eye.”

Argumentative Statements

Understand the assignment.

Don’t forget the first step in approaching a research paper or assignment—to carefully understand what you are asked to do. Some assignments are more obviously arguments than others. They may ask you to pick an obvious side, like “Was the New Deal effective or ineffective?” Or “How do you think the government should address reparations for slavery? Or “Was the American Revolution really a revolution?”

Understanding Argumentative Statements

Other times the “argument” part is less obvious. The prompt may be more generic or broad. Let’s take a look at this option for a capstone assignment in this class:

Pick a reformer or activist involved with a social movement between 1877 and 1900. Evaluate and analyze the ideas, agenda, strategies, and effectiveness of the work done by your chosen reformer or activist. You can pick one aspect of the person’s involvement or significance to the movement to focus on in your research. You should make a claim in your final report that answers one of the questions below:

• What was the influence of your person on American life during their time period?
• What is their influence and legacy today?
• What changes came about as a direct result of their activism? 
• What obstacles stood in the way of this person from having a more significant impact on society?
• What activism methods used by your reformer were most effective, and why?
• How did their activism compare or contrast with other reform movements from the same time period?
• How are things different today because of their activism? In what ways are things the same?
• Why should people be aware of the work done by your chosen reformer?
• Can you draw any connections to a modern-day reform movement— what reform movement might they support today, and why?

With this prompt, you are tasked with creating an argument about the reformer or activist you chose. It is not simply a narrative or biography where you report about their lives, but you want to pick one of the listed questions to create an argument—something that shows your ability to take a stance (that could be debated by others) and support your view with evidence.

Activity #1

Give it a try—without even doing some research- what argumentative statement could you make about a 19th-century activist?

Let’s take a look at a more detailed example. For example, say that your chosen activist was  Bayard Rustin , a Black activist who was instrumental in organizing the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. What’s an argument you could make about Rustin?

Here is one option. “While you’ve heard of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream Speech” during the 1963 March on Washington, you may not have heard of Bayard Rustin, whose involvement in planning the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was essential in propelling Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the deputy director of the March, Rustin’s background in nonviolence and vision for the March led leaders to prioritize the civil rights movement and gave public backing to the federal law prohibiting racial discrimination.”

As you’ll learn in just a moment, this argument is what becomes the thesis statement.

Begin With a Thesis

The central claim you make in your argument is called the thesis statement . A thesis consists of a specific topic and an angle on the topic. All of the other ideas in the text support and develop the thesis.

Where in the Essay Should the Thesis Be Placed?

The thesis statement is often found in the introduction, sometimes after an initial “hook” or interesting story; sometimes, however, the thesis is not explicitly stated until the end of an essay, and sometimes it is not stated at all. In those instances, there is an implied thesis statement. You can generally extract the thesis statement by looking for a few key sentences and ideas.

Most readers expect to see the point of your argument (the thesis statement) within the first few paragraphs. This does not mean that it has to be placed there every time. Some writers place it at the very end, slowly building up to it throughout their work, to explain a point after the fact. For history essays, most professors will expect to see a clearly discernible thesis sentence in the introduction.

Characteristics of a Thesis Statement

Thesis statements vary based on the rhetorical strategy of the essay, but thesis statements typically share the following characteristics:

• Presents the main idea
• Most often is one sentence
• It tells the reader what to expect
• Is a summary of the essay topic
• Usually worded to have an argumentative edge
• Written in the third person

Crafting strong argumentative writing is a skill that teaches you how to engage in research, communicate the findings of that research, and express a point of view using supporting evidence.

Link to learning

For a few more examples of how to create arguments and thesis statements, visit this helpful writing guide .

What Makes a Good Claim?

Let’s take a closer look at this process by reviewing a worked example. For this example, we will use a topic you’ve studied recently—the FDR presidency and New Deal. Let’s imagine you’ve been assigned the following prompt:

• Did New Deal spending and programs succeed in restoring American capitalism during the Great Depression, and should the government have spent more money to help the New Deal succeed, or did the New Deal spend unprecedented amounts of money on relief and recovery efforts but ultimately fail to stimulate a full economic recovery?

You’ve already examined the prompt, selected a research topic, and conducted research, and now you are ready to make your claim. First, what claim do you want to make?

Identify the Claim

Let’s look at a sample introductory paragraph that responds to this prompt. Look for the central claim made in the argument.

Example ESSAY #1

Since the stock market crash and the onset of the depression, British economists John Maynard Keynes, Roy Harrod, and others had urged western governments to stop tinkering with monetary solutions and adopt an aggressive program of government spending, especially in the areas of public works and housing, to stimulate the economy during the depression. Keynes stressed these ideas when he met with President Roosevelt, who soon complained to labor secretary Frances Perkins: “He [Keynes] left a whole rigamarole of figures. He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.” Roosevelt’s comments about Keynes opened a window on one fundamental reason why the president’s New Deal, despite unprecedented federal spending, never achieved full economic recovery between 1933 and 1940. Although surrounded by critical advisers such as Federal Reserve chairman Marriner Eccles, who understood Keynes and his central message about the importance of government spending, Roosevelt did not grasp these ideas intellectually. He remained at heart a fiscal conservative, little different from Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt condoned government spending when necessary to “prime the pump” for recovery and combat hunger and poverty, but not as a deliberate economic recovery tool.

Let’s look at yet another example. This also responds to this same prompt which you can find again below for reference:

Example ESSAY #2

When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his inaugural address on March 4, 1933, America was in the midst of financial collapse. Banking holidays closed banks in 28 states, and investors traded their dollars for gold to have tangible wealth. The president reassured Americans” “This great Nation will endure as it has endured and will revive and will prosper.” He listed three goals to shore up capitalism through his New Deal: banking regulation, laws to curb speculation, and the establishment of a sound currency basis. Roosevelt shored up the financial sector through regulation to restore the public trust that mismanaged banks, and financial speculators had destroyed. His New Deal gave the federal government regulatory responsibility to smooth economic downturns. Over the next eight years, the New Deal’s economic practices and spending helped create recovery and restore capitalism.

Finding the Thesis Statement

You’ve found the central claims from each of these two sample essays. Quite often, the claim is the thesis statement. But sometimes, the thesis statement elaborates on the claim more by including the angle you’ll take about your claim. In the sample essay above, the thesis statement is written in reverse order, with the primary claim coming at the end, but if you read the sentences before that, you can see what the essay’s focus will be as well.”

• “Roosevelt shored up the financial sector through regulation to restore the public trust that mismanaged banks, and financial speculators had destroyed. His New Deal gave the federal government regulatory responsibility to smooth economic downturns. Over the next eight years, the New Deal’s economic practices and spending helped create recovery and restore capitalism”.”

Now we know that the rest of the essay will focus on how the New Deal’s economic practices and spending habits helped the recovery and also show 1) ways that Roosevelt shored up the financial sector and 2) gave the federal government regulatory responsibility.

Pick a reformer or activist involved with a social movement between 1877 and 1900. Pick two questions below and write a thesis statement explaining the main claim and angle you would take in an essay about the topic.

• What changes came about as a direct result of their activism?

Thesis statement #1:

Thesis statement #2:

thesis statement : a statement of the topic of the piece of writing and the angle the writer has on that topic

• Historical Hack: Crafting Historical Arguments. Authored by : Kaitlyn Connell for Lumen Learning. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Analyzing Documents Using the HAPPY Analysis. Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-ushistory2/chapter/analyzing-documents-using-the-happy-analysis/ . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Secondary source. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_source . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• What is an argument?. Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/englishcomp1coreq/chapter/introduction-to-what-is-an-argument/ . Project : English Composition I Corequisite. License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• Did the New Deal End the Great Depression?. Provided by : OpenStax. Located at : https://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]:WWZKMA1o@2/12-16-%F0%9F%92%AC-Did-the-New-Deal-End-the-Great-Depression . Project : Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]

Writing a Thesis and Making an Argument

Almost every assignment you complete for a history course will ask you to make an argument. Your instructors will often call this your "thesis"– your position on a subject.

What is an Argument?

An argument takes a stand on an issue. It seeks to persuade an audience of a point of view in much the same way that a lawyer argues a case in a court of law. It is NOT a description or a summary.

• This is an argument: "This paper argues that the movie JFK is inaccurate in its portrayal of President Kennedy."
• This is not an argument: "In this paper, I will describe the portrayal of President Kennedy that is shown in the movie JFK."

What is a Thesis?

A thesis statement is a sentence in which you state an argument about a topic and then describe, briefly, how you will prove your argument.

• This is an argument, but not yet a thesis: "The movie ‘JFK’ inaccurately portrays President Kennedy."
• This is a thesis: "The movie ‘JFK’ inaccurately portrays President Kennedy because of the way it ignores Kennedy’s youth, his relationship with his father, and the findings of the Warren Commission."

A thesis makes a specific statement to the reader about what you will be trying to argue. Your thesis can be a few sentences long, but should not be longer than a paragraph. Do not begin to state evidence or use examples in your thesis paragraph.

A Thesis Helps You and Your Reader

Your blueprint for writing:

• Helps you determine your focus and clarify your ideas.
• Provides a "hook" on which you can "hang" your topic sentences.
• Can (and should) be revised as you further refine your evidence and arguments. New evidence often requires you to change your thesis.
• Gives your paper a unified structure and point.

Your reader’s blueprint for reading:

• Serves as a "map" to follow through your paper.
• Keeps the reader focused on your argument.
• Signals to the reader your main points.
• Engages the reader in your argument.

Tips for Writing a Good Thesis

• Find a Focus: Choose a thesis that explores an aspect of your topic that is important to you, or that allows you to say something new about your topic. For example, if your paper topic asks you to analyze women’s domestic labor during the early nineteenth century, you might decide to focus on the products they made from scratch at home.
• Look for Pattern: After determining a general focus, go back and look more closely at your evidence. As you re-examine your evidence and identify patterns, you will develop your argument and some conclusions. For example, you might find that as industrialization increased, women made fewer textiles at home, but retained their butter and soap making tasks.

Strategies for Developing a Thesis Statement

Idea 1. If your paper assignment asks you to answer a specific question, turn the question into an assertion and give reasons for your opinion.

Assignment: How did domestic labor change between 1820 and 1860? Why were the changes in their work important for the growth of the United States?

Beginning thesis: Between 1820 and 1860 women's domestic labor changed as women stopped producing home-made fabric, although they continued to sew their families' clothes, as well as to produce butter and soap. With the cash women earned from the sale of their butter and soap they purchased ready-made cloth, which in turn, helped increase industrial production in the United States before the Civil War.

Idea 2. Write a sentence that summarizes the main idea of the essay you plan to write.

Main Idea: Women's labor in their homes during the first half of the nineteenth century contributed to the growth of the national economy.

Idea 3. Spend time "mulling over" your topic. Make a list of the ideas you want to include in the essay, then think about how to group them under several different headings. Often, you will see an organizational plan emerge from the sorting process.

Idea 4. Use a formula to develop a working thesis statement (which you will need to revise later). Here are a few examples:

• Although most readers of ______ have argued that ______, closer examination shows that ______.
• ______ uses ______ and ______ to prove that ______.
• Phenomenon X is a result of the combination of ______, ______, and ______.

These formulas share two characteristics all thesis statements should have: they state an argument and they reveal how you will make that argument. They are not specific enough, however, and require more work.

As you work on your essay, your ideas will change and so will your thesis. Here are examples of weak and strong thesis statements.

• Unspecific thesis: "Eleanor Roosevelt was a strong leader as First Lady."  This thesis lacks an argument. Why was Eleanor Roosevelt a strong leader?
• Specific thesis: "Eleanor Roosevelt recreated the role of the First Lady by her active political leadership in the Democratic Party, by lobbying for national legislation, and by fostering women’s leadership in the Democratic Party."  The second thesis has an argument: Eleanor Roosevelt "recreated" the position of First Lady, and a three-part structure with which to demonstrate just how she remade the job.
• Unspecific thesis: "At the end of the nineteenth century French women lawyers experienced difficulty when they attempted to enter the legal profession."  No historian could argue with this general statement and uninteresting thesis.
• Specific thesis: "At the end of the nineteenth century French women lawyers experienced misogynist attacks from male lawyers when they attempted to enter the legal profession because male lawyers wanted to keep women out of judgeships."  This thesis statement asserts that French male lawyers attacked French women lawyers because they feared women as judges, an intriguing and controversial point.

Making an Argument – Every Thesis Deserves Its Day in Court

You are the best (and only!) advocate for your thesis. Your thesis is defenseless without you to prove that its argument holds up under scrutiny. The jury (i.e., your reader) will expect you, as a good lawyer, to provide evidence to prove your thesis. To prove thesis statements on historical topics, what evidence can an able young lawyer use?

• Primary sources: letters, diaries, government documents, an organization’s meeting minutes, newspapers.
• Secondary sources: articles and books from your class that explain and interpret the historical event or person you are writing about, lecture notes, films or documentaries.

How can you use this evidence?

• Make sure the examples you select from your available evidence address your thesis.
• Use evidence that your reader will believe is credible. This means sifting and sorting your sources, looking for the clearest and fairest. Be sure to identify the biases and shortcomings of each piece of evidence for your reader.
• Use evidence to avoid generalizations. If you assert that all women have been oppressed, what evidence can you use to support this? Using evidence works to check over-general statements.
• Use evidence to address an opposing point of view. How do your sources give examples that refute another historian’s interpretation?

Remember -- if in doubt, talk to your instructor.

Thanks to the web page of the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Writing Center for information used on this page. See writing.wisc.edu/handbook for further information.

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Thesis Statements

Every paper must argue an idea and every paper must clearly state that idea in a thesis statement.

A thesis statement is different from a topic statement.  A topic statement merely states what the paper is about.  A thesis statement states the argument of that paper.

Be sure that you can easily identify your thesis and that the key points of your argument relate directly back to your thesis.

Topic statements:

This paper will discuss Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima.

The purpose of this paper is to delve into the mindset behind Truman’s decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima.

This paper will explore how Harry Truman came to the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima.

Thesis statements:

Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima was motivated by racism.

The US confrontation with the Soviets was the key factor in Truman’s decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima.

This paper will demonstrate that in his decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, Truman was unduly influenced by hawks in his cabinet.

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Handbook for Historians

• Choosing a Paper Topic

What is a Thesis Statement?

How to develop a thesis statement.

• Find Primary Sources
• Finding Secondary Sources
• Formatting References
• Writing an Annotated Bibliography
• Sample Papers
• Research Paper Checklist

The thesis statement summarizes the central argument of your paper. It is placed at the top of the outline page, and appears again in the opening paragraph. A clearly stated thesis performs three functions:

• it provides a focus for your research, helping to prevent time wasting digressions
• it furnishes an organizational theme for the paper, which then becomes easier to write
• it gives the reader precise knowledge of what the paper will argue, thereby making it easier to read

You cannot formulate a thesis statement until you know a great deal about your subject.  It is often wise to begin your research in pursuit of the answer to a question about your topic  - but this question is not a thesis statement. A helpful web site that can advise you on how to formulate a thesis is:  http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/thesis-statements/

Guidelines for formulating the thesis statement are as follows:

• The thesis must focus on a single contention. You cannot list multiple reasons for the “truth” of your contention because the paper must follow a unified line of reasoning; a multifaceted thesis statement prevents this.
• The thesis must be precisely phrased and coherent . Generalizations and a failure to define terms results in vagueness and lack of direction in argumentation.
• The thesis must be a declarative statement. The object of your research was to answer a question; when you found the answer, you embodied it in your thesis statement. Hence a thesis can never be a question.

Here are some examples of thesis statements that strive to incorporate these recommendations...

POOR : Miguel Hidalgo’s uprising in 1810 led to a long war for independence in Mexico.    WHY: The above-stated thesis is a statement of fact that provides no clue about what you plan to do with that fact in your paper. Since there is no argument here, this is not a thesis. Improved : Miguel Hidalgo’s 1810 uprising mobilized poor and native Mexicans whose violence frightened elites and prolonged the war for independence. WHY: The above-stated thesis very specifically explains why the uprising resulted in a long war for independence. What’s more, it is debatable, since there may be other explanations for the war’s length. 

POOR : The creation of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza created great tension between the Israelis and  Palestinians for numerous reasons. WHY : The above-stated thesis is poor because it is too general and it deals with the obvious – that there is tension between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. It needs to explain what the “numerous reasons” are; focus on one of them; and drop the reference to the obvious. Remember: a thesis statement makes a specific argument and here only a vague reference to multiple reasons for tension is provided. Improved : The creation of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza was both an expression of Zionist expansionism and a means to isolate Palestinian population centers. WHY : The above-stated thesis is much better because it explains what the “numerous reasons” are and focuses on one of them. Now an argument has been created because a concrete explanation has been stated. Also,  this statement removes the obvious fact that tension exists between the two ethnic groups.

POOR : Louis XIV was a strong king who broke the power of the French nobility. WHY : The above-stated thesis contains a vague judgment about Louis XIV; that he was “strong.” In addition, it fails to specify exactly how he broke the nobles’ power. Improved : The Intendant System was the most effective method used by Louis XIV to break the power of the French nobility. WHY : The above-stated thesis eliminates the vague word “strong” and specifies the mechanism Louis XIV used to break the nobles’ power. Moreover, since this  was not the only policy Louis XIV used in his efforts to control the nobles, you have shown that your paper will defend a debatable position.

POOR : Gandhi was a man of peace who led the Indian resistance movement to British rule. WHY : The above-stated thesis does not clarify what about Gandhi made him a man of peace, nor does it specify anything he did to undermine British rule. Improved : Gandhi employed passive non-resistance during his Great Salt March and that enabled him to organize the Indian masses to resist British rule. WHY : The above-stated thesis specifies what has caused Gandhi to be remembered as a man of peace (his promotion of passive non-resistance to oppression) and it names one of the protests he organized against British rule. In addition, since it suggests that the technique of passive non-resistance is what made the Indian  populace rally behind him, it is debatable; there were other reasons why the poor in particular were ready to protest the British monopoly on salt.

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HIST H270 What is History?

• Finding Books
• Finding Articles
• Primary Source Databases
• Other Primary Sources at IU
• Develop a Research Question
• Primary Sources
• Cite Sources
• Scholarly vs Popular
• Thesis Statements

What Is a Thesis?

A  thesis  is the main point or argument of an information source. (Many, but not all, writing assignments, require a thesis.)

A strong thesis is:  

• Arguable:  Can be supported by evidence and analysis, and can be disagreed with.

•  Unique:  Says something new and interesting.

•  Concise and clear:  Explained as simply as possible, but not at the expense of clarity.

•  Unified:  All parts are clearly connected. •  Focused and specific:  Can be adequately and convincingly argued within the the paper, scope is not overly broad.

•  Significant:  Has importance to readers, answers the question "so what?"

Crafting a Thesis

Research is usually vital to developing a strong thesis. Exploring sources can help you develop and refine your central point.

1. Conduct Background Research.

A strong thesis is specific and unique, so you first need knowledge of the general research topic. Background research will help you narrow your research focus and contextualize your argument in relation to other research. 

2. Narrow the Research Topic. 

Ask questions as you review sources:

• What aspect(s) of the topic interest you most?
• What questions or concerns does the topic raise for you?   Example of a general research topic:  Climate change and carbon emissions Example of more narrow topic:  U.S. government policies on carbon emissions

3. Formulate and explore a relevant research question.  

Before committing yourself to a single viewpoint, formulate a specific question to explore.  Consider different perspectives on the issue, and find sources that represent these varying views. Reflect on strengths and weaknesses in the sources' arguments. Consider sources that challenge these viewpoints.

Example:  What role does and should the U.S. government play in regulating carbon emissions?

4. Develop a working thesis. 

• A working thesis has a clear focus but is not yet be fully formed. It is a good foundation for further developing a more refined argument.   Example:  The U.S. government has the responsibility to help reduce carbon emissions through public policy and regulation.  This thesis has a clear focus but leaves some major questions unanswered. For example, why is regulation of carbon emissions important? Why should the government be held accountable for such regulation?

5. Continue research on the more focused topic.

Is the topic:

• broad enough to yield sufficient sources and supporting evidence?
• narrow enough for in-depth and focused research?
• original enough to offer a new and meaningful perspective that will interest readers? 

6. Fine-tune the thesis.

Your thesis will probably evolve as you gather sources and ideas. If your research focus changes, you may need to re-evaluate your search strategy and to conduct additional research. This is usually a good sign of the careful thought you are putting into your work!

Example:   Because climate change, which is exacerbated by high carbon emissions, adversely affects almost all citizens, the U.S. government has the responsibility to help reduce carbon emissions through public policy and regulation. 

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A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing Historical Research [without getting hysterical!] In addition to being a scholarly investigation, research is a social activity intended to create new knowledge. Historical research is your informed response to the questions that you ask while examining the record of human experience. These questions may concern such elements as looking at an event or topic, examining events that lead to the event in question, social influences, key players, and other contextual information. This step-by-step guide progresses from an introduction to historical resources to information about how to identify a topic, craft a thesis and develop a research paper. Table of contents: The Range and Richness of Historical Sources Secondary Sources Primary Sources Historical Analysis What is it? Who, When, Where, What and Why: The Five "W"s Topic, Thesis, Sources Definition of Terms Choose a Topic Craft a Thesis Evaluate Thesis and Sources A Variety of Information Sources Take Efficient Notes Note Cards Thinking, Organizing, Researching Parenthetical Documentation Prepare a Works Cited Page Drafting, Revising, Rewriting, Rethinking For Further Reading: Works Cited Additional Links So you want to study history?! Tons of help and links Slatta Home Page Use the Writing and other links on the lefhand menu I. The Range and Richness of Historical Sources Back to Top Every period leaves traces, what historians call "sources" or evidence. Some are more credible or carry more weight than others; judging the differences is a vital skill developed by good historians. Sources vary in perspective, so knowing who created the information you are examining is vital. Anonymous doesn't make for a very compelling source. For example, an FBI report on the antiwar movement, prepared for U.S. President Richard Nixon, probably contained secrets that at the time were thought to have affected national security. It would not be usual, however, for a journalist's article about a campus riot, featured in a local newspaper, to leak top secret information. Which source would you read? It depends on your research topic. If you're studying how government officials portrayed student activists, you'll want to read the FBI report and many more documents from other government agencies such as the CIA and the National Security Council. If you're investigating contemporary opinion of pro-war and anti-war activists, local newspaper accounts provide a rich resource. You'd want to read a variety of newspapers to ensure you're covering a wide range of opinions (rural/urban, left/right, North/South, Soldier/Draft-dodger, etc). Historians classify sources into two major categories: primary and secondary sources. Secondary Sources Back to Top Definition: Secondary sources are created by someone who was either not present when the event occurred or removed from it in time. We use secondary sources for overview information, to familiarize ourselves with a topic, and compare that topic with other events in history. In refining a research topic, we often begin with secondary sources. This helps us identify gaps or conflicts in the existing scholarly literature that might prove promsing topics. Types: History books, encyclopedias, historical dictionaries, and academic (scholarly) articles are secondary sources. To help you determine the status of a given secondary source, see How to identify and nagivate scholarly literature . Examples: Historian Marilyn Young's (NYU) book about the Vietnam War is a secondary source. She did not participate in the war. Her study is not based on her personal experience but on the evidence she culled from a variety of sources she found in the United States and Vietnam. Primary Sources Back to Top Definition: Primary sources emanate from individuals or groups who participated in or witnessed an event and recorded that event during or immediately after the event. They include speeches, memoirs, diaries, letters, telegrams, emails, proclamations, government documents, and much more. Examples: A student activist during the war writing about protest activities has created a memoir. This would be a primary source because the information is based on her own involvement in the events she describes. Similarly, an antiwar speech is a primary source. So is the arrest record of student protesters. A newspaper editorial or article, reporting on a student demonstration is also a primary source. II. Historical Analysis What is it? Back to Top No matter what you read, whether it's a primary source or a secondary source, you want to know who authored the source (a trusted scholar? A controversial historian? A propagandist? A famous person? An ordinary individual?). "Author" refers to anyone who created information in any medium (film, sound, or text). You also need to know when it was written and the kind of audience the author intend to reach. You should also consider what you bring to the evidence that you examine. Are you inductively following a path of evidence, developing your interpretation based on the sources? Do you have an ax to grind? Did you begin your research deductively, with your mind made up before even seeing the evidence. Historians need to avoid the latter and emulate the former. To read more about the distinction, examine the difference between Intellectual Inquirers and Partisan Ideologues . In the study of history, perspective is everything. A letter written by a twenty- year old Vietnam War protestor will differ greatly from a letter written by a scholar of protest movements. Although the sentiment might be the same, the perspective and influences of these two authors will be worlds apart. Practicing the " 5 Ws " will avoid the confusion of the authority trap. Who, When, Where, What and Why: The Five "W"s Back to Top Historians accumulate evidence (information, including facts, stories, interpretations, opinions, statements, reports, etc.) from a variety of sources (primary and secondary). They must also verify that certain key pieces of information are corroborated by a number of people and sources ("the predonderance of evidence"). The historian poses the " 5 Ws " to every piece of information he examines: Who is the historical actor? When did the event take place? Where did it occur? What did it entail and why did it happen the way it did? The " 5 Ws " can also be used to evaluate a primary source. Who authored the work? When was it created? Where was it created, published, and disseminated? Why was it written (the intended audience), and what is the document about (what points is the author making)? If you know the answers to these five questions, you can analyze any document, and any primary source. The historian doesn't look for the truth, since this presumes there is only one true story. The historian tries to understand a number of competing viewpoints to form his or her own interpretation-- what constitutes the best explanation of what happened and why. By using as wide a range of primary source documents and secondary sources as possible, you will add depth and richness to your historical analysis. The more exposure you, the researcher, have to a number of different sources and differing view points, the more you have a balanced and complete view about a topic in history. This view will spark more questions and ultimately lead you into the quest to unravel more clues about your topic. You are ready to start assembling information for your research paper. III. Topic, Thesis, Sources Definition of Terms Back to Top Because your purpose is to create new knowledge while recognizing those scholars whose existing work has helped you in this pursuit, you are honor bound never to commit the following academic sins: Plagiarism: Literally "kidnapping," involving the use of someone else's words as if they were your own (Gibaldi 6). To avoid plagiarism you must document direct quotations, paraphrases, and original ideas not your own. Recycling: Rehashing material you already know thoroughly or, without your professor's permission, submitting a paper that you have completed for another course. Premature cognitive commitment: Academic jargon for deciding on a thesis too soon and then seeking information to serve that thesis rather than embarking on a genuine search for new knowledge. Choose a Topic Back to Top "Do not hunt for subjects, let them choose you, not you them." --Samuel Butler Choosing a topic is the first step in the pursuit of a thesis. Below is a logical progression from topic to thesis: Close reading of the primary text, aided by secondary sources Growing awareness of interesting qualities within the primary text Choosing a topic for research Asking productive questions that help explore and evaluate a topic Creating a research hypothesis Revising and refining a hypothesis to form a working thesis First, and most important, identify what qualities in the primary or secondary source pique your imagination and curiosity and send you on a search for answers. Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive levels provides a description of productive questions asked by critical thinkers. While the lower levels (knowledge, comprehension) are necessary to a good history essay, aspire to the upper three levels (analysis, synthesis, evaluation). Skimming reference works such as encyclopedias, books, critical essays and periodical articles can help you choose a topic that evolves into a hypothesis, which in turn may lead to a thesis. One approach to skimming involves reading the first paragraph of a secondary source to locate and evaluate the author's thesis. Then for a general idea of the work's organization and major ideas read the first and last sentence of each paragraph. Read the conclusion carefully, as it usually presents a summary (Barnet and Bedau 19). Craft a Thesis Back to Top Very often a chosen topic is too broad for focused research. You must revise it until you have a working hypothesis, that is, a statement of an idea or an approach with respect to the source that could form the basis for your thesis. Remember to not commit too soon to any one hypothesis. Use it as a divining rod or a first step that will take you to new information that may inspire you to revise your hypothesis. Be flexible. Give yourself time to explore possibilities. The hypothesis you create will mature and shift as you write and rewrite your paper. New questions will send you back to old and on to new material. Remember, this is the nature of research--it is more a spiraling or iterative activity than a linear one. Test your working hypothesis to be sure it is: broad enough to promise a variety of resources. narrow enough for you to research in depth. original enough to interest you and your readers. worthwhile enough to offer information and insights of substance "do-able"--sources are available to complete the research. Now it is time to craft your thesis, your revised and refined hypothesis. A thesis is a declarative sentence that: focuses on one well-defined idea makes an arguable assertion; it is capable of being supported prepares your readers for the body of your paper and foreshadows the conclusion. Evaluate Thesis and Sources Back to Top Like your hypothesis, your thesis is not carved in stone. You are in charge. If necessary, revise it during the research process. As you research, continue to evaluate both your thesis for practicality, originality, and promise as a search tool, and secondary sources for relevance and scholarliness. The following are questions to ask during the research process: Are there many journal articles and entire books devoted to the thesis, suggesting that the subject has been covered so thoroughly that there may be nothing new to say? Does the thesis lead to stimulating, new insights? Are appropriate sources available? Is there a variety of sources available so that the bibliography or works cited page will reflect different kinds of sources? Which sources are too broad for my thesis? Which resources are too narrow? Who is the author of the secondary source? Does the critic's background suggest that he/she is qualified? After crafting a thesis, consider one of the following two approaches to writing a research paper: Excited about your thesis and eager to begin? Return to the primary or secondary source to find support for your thesis. Organize ideas and begin writing your first draft. After writing the first draft, have it reviewed by your peers and your instructor. Ponder their suggestions and return to the sources to answer still-open questions. Document facts and opinions from secondary sources. Remember, secondary sources can never substitute for primary sources. Confused about where to start? Use your thesis to guide you to primary and secondary sources. Secondary sources can help you clarify your position and find a direction for your paper. Keep a working bibliography. You may not use all the sources you record, but you cannot be sure which ones you will eventually discard. Create a working outline as you research. This outline will, of course, change as you delve more deeply into your subject. A Variety of Information Sources Back to Top "A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension." --Oliver Wendell Holmes Your thesis and your working outline are the primary compasses that will help you navigate the variety of sources available. In "Introduction to the Library" (5-6) the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers suggests you become familiar with the library you will be using by: taking a tour or enrolling for a brief introductory lecture referring to the library's publications describing its resources introducing yourself and your project to the reference librarian The MLA Handbook also lists guides for the use of libraries (5), including: Jean Key Gates, Guide to the Use of Libraries and Information Sources (7th ed., New York: McGraw, 1994). Thomas Mann, A Guide to Library Research Methods (New York: Oxford UP, 1987). Online Central Catalog Most libraries have their holdings listed on a computer. The online catalog may offer Internet sites, Web pages and databases that relate to the university's curriculum. It may also include academic journals and online reference books. Below are three search techniques commonly used online: Index Search: Although online catalogs may differ slightly from library to library, the most common listings are by: Subject Search: Enter the author's name for books and article written about the author. Author Search: Enter an author's name for works written by the author, including collections of essays the author may have written about his/her own works. Title Search: Enter a title for the screen to list all the books the library carries with that title. Key Word Search/Full-text Search: A one-word search, e.g., 'Kennedy,' will produce an overwhelming number of sources, as it will call up any entry that includes the name 'Kennedy.' To focus more narrowly on your subject, add one or more key words, e.g., "John Kennedy, Peace Corps." Use precise key words. Boolean Search: Boolean Search techniques use words such as "and," "or," and "not," which clarify the relationship between key words, thus narrowing the search. Take Efficient Notes Back to Top Keeping complete and accurate bibliography and note cards during the research process is a time (and sanity) saving practice. If you have ever needed a book or pages within a book, only to discover that an earlier researcher has failed to return it or torn pages from your source, you understand the need to take good notes. Every researcher has a favorite method for taking notes. Here are some suggestions-- customize one of them for your own use. Bibliography cards There may be far more books and articles listed than you have time to read, so be selective when choosing a reference. Take information from works that clearly relate to your thesis, remembering that you may not use them all. Use a smaller or a different color card from the one used for taking notes. Write a bibliography card for every source. Number the bibliography cards. On the note cards, use the number rather than the author's name and the title. It's faster. Another method for recording a working bibliography, of course, is to create your own database. Adding, removing, and alphabetizing titles is a simple process. Be sure to save often and to create a back-up file. A bibliography card should include all the information a reader needs to locate that particular source for further study. Most of the information required for a book entry (Gibaldi 112): Author's name Title of a part of the book [preface, chapter titles, etc.] Title of the book Name of the editor, translator, or compiler Edition used Number(s) of the volume(s) used Name of the series Place of publication, name of the publisher, and date of publication Page numbers Supplementary bibliographic information and annotations Most of the information required for an article in a periodical (Gibaldi 141): Author's name Title of the article Name of the periodical Series number or name (if relevant) Volume number (for a scholarly journal) Issue number (if needed) Date of publication Page numbers Supplementary information For information on how to cite other sources refer to your So you want to study history page . Note Cards Back to Top Take notes in ink on either uniform note cards (3x5, 4x6, etc.) or uniform slips of paper. Devote each note card to a single topic identified at the top. Write only on one side. Later, you may want to use the back to add notes or personal observations. Include a topical heading for each card. Include the number of the page(s) where you found the information. You will want the page number(s) later for documentation, and you may also want page number(s)to verify your notes. Most novice researchers write down too much. Condense. Abbreviate. You are striving for substance, not quantity. Quote directly from primary sources--but the "meat," not everything. Suggestions for condensing information: Summary: A summary is intended to provide the gist of an essay. Do not weave in the author's choice phrases. Read the information first and then condense the main points in your own words. This practice will help you avoid the copying that leads to plagiarism. Summarizing also helps you both analyze the text you are reading and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses (Barnet and Bedau 13). Outline: Use to identify a series of points. Paraphrase, except for key primary source quotations. Never quote directly from a secondary source, unless the precise wording is essential to your argument. Simplify the language and list the ideas in the same order. A paraphrase is as long as the original. Paraphrasing is helpful when you are struggling with a particularly difficult passage. Be sure to jot down your own insights or flashes of brilliance. Ralph Waldo Emerson warns you to "Look sharply after your thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear...." To differentiate these insights from those of the source you are reading, initial them as your own. (When the following examples of note cards include the researcher's insights, they will be followed by the initials N. R.) When you have finished researching your thesis and you are ready to write your paper, organize your cards according to topic. Notecards make it easy to shuffle and organize your source information on a table-- or across the floor. Maintain your working outline that includes the note card headings and explores a logical order for presenting them in your paper. IV. Begin Thinking, Researching, Organizing Back to Top Don't be too sequential. Researching, writing, revising is a complex interactive process. Start writing as soon as possible! "The best antidote to writer's block is--to write." (Klauser 15). However, you still feel overwhelmed and are staring at a blank page, you are not alone. Many students find writing the first sentence to be the most daunting part of the entire research process. Be creative. Cluster (Rico 28-49). Clustering is a form of brainstorming. Sometimes called a web, the cluster forms a design that may suggest a natural organization for a paper. Here's a graphical depiction of brainstorming . Like a sun, the generating idea or topic lies at the center of the web. From it radiate words, phrases, sentences and images that in turn attract other words, phrases, sentences and images. Put another way--stay focused. Start with your outline. If clustering is not a technique that works for you, turn to the working outline you created during the research process. Use the outline view of your word processor. If you have not already done so, group your note cards according to topic headings. Compare them to your outline's major points. If necessary, change the outline to correspond with the headings on the note cards. If any area seems weak because of a scarcity of facts or opinions, return to your primary and/or secondary sources for more information or consider deleting that heading. Use your outline to provide balance in your essay. Each major topic should have approximately the same amount of information. Once you have written a working outline, consider two different methods for organizing it. Deduction: A process of development that moves from the general to the specific. You may use this approach to present your findings. However, as noted above, your research and interpretive process should be inductive. Deduction is the most commonly used form of organization for a research paper. The thesis statement is the generalization that leads to the specific support provided by primary and secondary sources. The thesis is stated early in the paper. The body of the paper then proceeds to provide the facts, examples, and analogies that flow logically from that thesis. The thesis contains key words that are reflected in the outline. These key words become a unifying element throughout the paper, as they reappear in the detailed paragraphs that support and develop the thesis. The conclusion of the paper circles back to the thesis, which is now far more meaningful because of the deductive development that supports it. Chronological order A process that follows a traditional time line or sequence of events. A chronological organization is useful for a paper that explores cause and effect. Parenthetical Documentation Back to Top The Works Cited page, a list of primary and secondary sources, is not sufficient documentation to acknowledge the ideas, facts, and opinions you have included within your text. The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers describes an efficient parenthetical style of documentation to be used within the body of your paper. Guidelines for parenthetical documentation: "References to the text must clearly point to specific sources in the list of works cited" (Gibaldi 184). Try to use parenthetical documentation as little as possible. For example, when you cite an entire work, it is preferable to include the author's name in the text. The author's last name followed by the page number is usually enough for an accurate identification of the source in the works cited list. These examples illustrate the most common kinds of documentation. Documenting a quotation: Ex. "The separation from the personal mother is a particularly intense process for a daughter because she has to separate from the one who is the same as herself" (Murdock 17). She may feel abandoned and angry. Note: The author of The Heroine's Journey is listed under Works Cited by the author's name, reversed--Murdock, Maureen. Quoted material is found on page 17 of that book. Parenthetical documentation is after the quotation mark and before the period. Documenting a paraphrase: Ex. In fairy tales a woman who holds the princess captive or who abandons her often needs to be killed (18). Note: The second paraphrase is also from Murdock's book The Heroine's Journey. It is not, however, necessary to repeat the author's name if no other documentation interrupts the two. If the works cited page lists more than one work by the same author, include within the parentheses an abbreviated form of the appropriate title. You may, of course, include the title in your sentence, making it unnecessary to add an abbreviated title in the citation. > Prepare a Works Cited Page Back to Top There are a variety of titles for the page that lists primary and secondary sources (Gibaldi 106-107). A Works Cited page lists those works you have cited within the body of your paper. The reader need only refer to it for the necessary information required for further independent research. Bibliography means literally a description of books. Because your research may involve the use of periodicals, films, art works, photographs, etc. "Works Cited" is a more precise descriptive term than bibliography. An Annotated Bibliography or Annotated Works Cited page offers brief critiques and descriptions of the works listed. A Works Consulted page lists those works you have used but not cited. Avoid using this format. As with other elements of a research paper there are specific guidelines for the placement and the appearance of the Works Cited page. The following guidelines comply with MLA style: The Work Cited page is placed at the end of your paper and numbered consecutively with the body of your paper. Center the title and place it one inch from the top of your page. Do not quote or underline the title. Double space the entire page, both within and between entries. The entries are arranged alphabetically by the author's last name or by the title of the article or book being cited. If the title begins with an article (a, an, the) alphabetize by the next word. If you cite two or more works by the same author, list the titles in alphabetical order. Begin every entry after the first with three hyphens followed by a period. All entries begin at the left margin but subsequent lines are indented five spaces. Be sure that each entry cited on the Works Cited page corresponds to a specific citation within your paper. Refer to the the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (104- 182) for detailed descriptions of Work Cited entries. Citing sources from online databases is a relatively new phenomenon. Make sure to ask your professor about citing these sources and which style to use. V. Draft, Revise, Rewrite, Rethink Back to Top "There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed." --John Kenneth Galbraith Try freewriting your first draft. Freewriting is a discovery process during which the writer freely explores a topic. Let your creative juices flow. In Writing without Teachers , Peter Elbow asserts that "[a]lmost everybody interposes a massive and complicated series of editings between the time words start to be born into consciousness and when they finally come off the end of the pencil or typewriter [or word processor] onto the page" (5). Do not let your internal judge interfere with this first draft. Creating and revising are two very different functions. Don't confuse them! If you stop to check spelling, punctuation, or grammar, you disrupt the flow of creative energy. Create; then fix it later. When material you have researched comes easily to mind, include it. Add a quick citation, one you can come back to later to check for form, and get on with your discovery. In subsequent drafts, focus on creating an essay that flows smoothly, supports fully, and speaks clearly and interestingly. Add style to substance. Create a smooth flow of words, ideas and paragraphs. Rearrange paragraphs for a logical progression of information. Transition is essential if you want your reader to follow you smoothly from introduction to conclusion. Transitional words and phrases stitch your ideas together; they provide coherence within the essay. External transition: Words and phrases that are added to a sentence as overt signs of transition are obvious and effective, but should not be overused, as they may draw attention to themselves and away from ideas. Examples of external transition are "however," "then," "next," "therefore." "first," "moreover," and "on the other hand." Internal transition is more subtle. Key words in the introduction become golden threads when they appear in the paper's body and conclusion. When the writer hears a key word repeated too often, however, she/he replaces it with a synonym or a pronoun. Below are examples of internal transition. Transitional sentences create a logical flow from paragraph to paragraph. Iclude individual words, phrases, or clauses that refer to previous ideas and that point ahead to new ones. They are usually placed at the end or at the beginning of a paragraph. A transitional paragraph conducts your reader from one part of the paper to another. It may be only a few sentences long. Each paragraph of the body of the paper should contain adequate support for its one governing idea. Speak/write clearly, in your own voice. Tone: The paper's tone, whether formal, ironic, or humorous, should be appropriate for the audience and the subject. Voice: Keep you language honest. Your paper should sound like you. Understand, paraphrase, absorb, and express in your own words the information you have researched. Avoid phony language. Sentence formation: When you polish your sentences, read them aloud for word choice and word placement. Be concise. Strunk and White in The Elements of Style advise the writer to "omit needless words" (23). First, however, you must recognize them. Keep yourself and your reader interested. In fact, Strunk's 1918 writing advice is still well worth pondering. First, deliver on your promises. Be sure the body of your paper fulfills the promise of the introduction. Avoid the obvious. Offer new insights. Reveal the unexpected. Have you crafted your conclusion as carefully as you have your introduction? Conclusions are not merely the repetition of your thesis. The conclusion of a research paper is a synthesis of the information presented in the body. Your research has led you to conclusions and opinions that have helped you understand your thesis more deeply and more clearly. Lift your reader to the full level of understanding that you have achieved. Revision means "to look again." Find a peer reader to read your paper with you present. Or, visit your college or university's writing lab. Guide your reader's responses by asking specific questions. Are you unsure of the logical order of your paragraphs? Do you want to know whether you have supported all opinions adequately? Are you concerned about punctuation or grammar? Ask that these issues be addressed. You are in charge. Here are some techniques that may prove helpful when you are revising alone or with a reader. When you edit for spelling errors read the sentences backwards. This procedure will help you look closely at individual words. Always read your paper aloud. Hearing your own words puts them in a new light. Listen to the flow of ideas and of language. Decide whether or not the voice sounds honest and the tone is appropriate to the purpose of the paper and to your audience. Listen for awkward or lumpy wording. Find the one right word, Eliminate needless words. Combine sentences. Kill the passive voice. Eliminate was/were/is/are constructions. They're lame and anti-historical. Be ruthless. If an idea doesn't serve your thesis, banish it, even if it's one of your favorite bits of prose. In the margins, write the major topic of each paragraph. By outlining after you have written the paper, you are once again evaluating your paper's organization. OK, you've got the process down. Now execute! And enjoy! It's not everyday that you get to make history. VI. For Further Reading: Works Cited Back to Top Barnet, Sylvan, and Hugo Bedau. Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing: A Brief Guide to Argument. Boston: Bedford, 1993. Brent, Doug. Reading as Rhetorical Invention: Knowledge,Persuasion and the Teaching of Research-Based Writing. Urbana: NCTE, 1992. Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Gibladi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 4th ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 1995. Horvitz, Deborah. "Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved." Studies in American Fiction , Vol. 17, No. 2, Autum, 1989, pp. 157-167. Republished in the Literature Research Center. Gale Group. (1 January 1999). Klauser, Henriette Anne. Writing on Both Sides of the Brain: Breakthrough Techniques for People Who Write. Philadelphia: Harper, 1986. Rico, Gabriele Lusser. Writing the Natural Way: Using Right Brain Techniques to Release Your Expressive Powers. Los Angeles: Houghton, 1983. Sorenson, Sharon. The Research Paper: A Contemporary Approach. New York: AMSCO, 1994. Strunk, William, Jr., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 3rd ed. New York: MacMillan, 1979. Back to Top This guide adapted from materials published by Thomson Gale, publishers. For free resources, including a generic guide to writing term papers, see the Gale.com website , which also includes product information for schools.

Introductions & Conclusions

The introduction and conclusion serve important roles in a history paper.  They are not simply perfunctory additions in academic writing, but are critical to your task of making a persuasive argument.

A successful introduction will:

• draw your readers in
• culminate in a thesis statement that clearly states your argument
• orient your readers to the key facts they need to know in order to understand your thesis
• lay out a roadmap for the rest of your paper

A successful conclusion will:

• draw your paper together
• reiterate your argument clearly and forcefully
• leave your readers with a lasting impression of why your argument matters or what it brings to light

How to write an effective introduction:

Often students get slowed down in paper-writing because they are not sure how to write the introduction.  Do not feel like you have to write your introduction first simply because it is the first section of your paper.  You can always come back to it after you write the body of your essay.  Whenever you approach your introduction, think of it as having three key parts:

• The opening line
• The middle “stage-setting” section
• The thesis statement

“In a 4-5 page paper, describe the process of nation-building in one Middle Eastern state.  What were the particular goals of nation-building?  What kinds of strategies did the state employ?  What were the results?  Be specific in your analysis, and draw on at least one of the scholars of nationalism that we discussed in class.”

Here is an example of a WEAK introduction for this prompt:

“One of the most important tasks the leader of any country faces is how to build a united and strong nation.  This has been especially true in the Middle East, where the country of Jordan offers one example of how states in the region approached nation-building.  Founded after World War I by the British, Jordan has since been ruled by members of the Hashemite family.  To help them face the difficult challenges of founding a new state, they employed various strategies of nation-building.”

Now, here is a REVISED version of that same introduction:

“Since 1921, when the British first created the mandate of Transjordan and installed Abdullah I as its emir, the Hashemite rulers have faced a dual task in nation-building.  First, as foreigners to the region, the Hashemites had to establish their legitimacy as Jordan’s rightful leaders.  Second, given the arbitrary boundaries of the new nation, the Hashemites had to establish the legitimacy of Jordan itself, binding together the people now called ‘Jordanians.’  To help them address both challenges, the Hashemite leaders crafted a particular narrative of history, what Anthony Smith calls a ‘nationalist mythology.’  By presenting themselves as descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, as leaders of the Arab Revolt, and as the fathers of Jordan’s different tribal groups, they established the authority of their own regime and the authority of the new nation, creating one of the most stable states in the modern Middle East.”

The first draft of the introduction, while a good initial step, is not strong enough to set up a solid, argument-based paper.  Here are the key issues:

• This first sentence is too general.  From the beginning of your paper, you want to invite your reader into your specific topic, rather than make generalizations that could apply to any nation in any time or place.  Students often run into the problem of writing general or vague opening lines, such as, “War has always been one of the greatest tragedies to befall society.”  Or, “The Great Depression was one of the most important events in American history.”  Avoid statements that are too sweeping or imprecise.  Ask yourself if the sentence you have written can apply in any time or place or could apply to any event or person.  If the answer is yes, then you need to make your opening line more specific.
• Here is the revised opening line: “Since 1921, when the British first created the mandate of Transjordan and installed Abdullah I as its emir, the Hashemite rulers have faced a dual task in nation-building.”
• This is a stronger opening line because it speaks precisely to the topic at hand.  The paper prompt is not asking you to talk about nation-building in general, but nation-building in one specific place.
• This stage-setting section is also too general.  Certainly, such background information is critical for the reader to know, but notice that it simply restates much of the information already in the prompt.  The question already asks you to pick one example, so your job is not simply to reiterate that information, but to explain what kind of example Jordan presents.  You also need to tell your reader why the context you are providing matters.
• Revised stage-setting: “First, as foreigners to the region, the Hashemites had to establish their legitimacy as Jordan’s rightful leaders.  Second, given the arbitrary boundaries of the new nation, the Hashemites had to establish the legitimacy of Jordan itself, binding together the people now called ‘Jordanians.’  To help them address both challenges, the Hashemite rulers crafted a particular narrative of history, what Anthony Smith calls a ‘nationalist mythology.’”
• This stage-setting is stronger because it introduces the reader to the problem at hand.  Instead of simply saying when and why Jordan was created, the author explains why the manner of Jordan’s creation posed particular challenges to nation-building.  It also sets the writer up to address the questions in the prompt, getting at both the purposes of nation-building in Jordan and referencing the scholar of nationalism s/he will be drawing on from class: Anthony Smith.
• This thesis statement restates the prompt rather than answers the question.  You need to be specific about what strategies of nation-building Jordan’s leaders used.  You also need to assess those strategies, so that you can answer the part of the prompt that asks about the results of nation-building.
• Revised thesis statement: “By presenting themselves as descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, as leaders of the Arab Revolt, and as the fathers of Jordan’s different tribal groups, they established the authority of their regime and the authority of the new nation, creating one of the most stable states in the modern Middle East.”
• It directly answers the question in the prompt.  Even though you will be persuading readers of your argument through the evidence you present in the body of your paper, you want to tell them at the outset exactly what you are arguing.
• It discusses the significance of the argument, saying that Jordan created an especially stable state.  This helps you answer the question about the results of Jordan’s nation-building project.
• It offers a roadmap for the rest of the paper.  The writer knows how to proceed and the reader knows what to expect.  The body of the paper will discuss the Hashemite claims “as descendants from the Prophet Muhammad, as leaders of the Arab Revolt, and as the fathers of Jordan’s different tribal groups.”

If you write your introduction first, be sure to revisit it after you have written your entire essay.  Because your paper will evolve as you write, you need to go back and make sure that the introduction still sets up your argument and still fits your organizational structure.

How to write an effective conclusion:

Your conclusion serves two main purposes.  First, it reiterates your argument in different language than you used in the thesis and body of your paper.  Second, it tells your reader why your argument matters.  In your conclusion, you want to take a step back and consider briefly the historical implications or significance of your topic.  You will not be introducing new information that requires lengthy analysis, but you will be telling your readers what your paper helps bring to light.  Perhaps you can connect your paper to a larger theme you have discussed in class, or perhaps you want to pose a new sort of question that your paper elicits.  There is no right or wrong “answer” to this part of the conclusion: you are now the “expert” on your topic, and this is your chance to leave your reader with a lasting impression based on what you have learned.

Here is an example of an effective conclusion for the same essay prompt:

“To speak of the nationalist mythology the Hashemites created, however, is not to say that it has gone uncontested.  In the 1950s, the Jordanian National Movement unleashed fierce internal opposition to Hashemite rule, crafting an alternative narrative of history in which the Hashemites were mere puppets to Western powers.  Various tribes have also reasserted their role in the region’s past, refusing to play the part of “sons” to Hashemite “fathers.”  For the Hashemites, maintaining their mythology depends on the same dialectical process that John R. Gillis identified in his investigation of commemorations: a process of both remembering and forgetting.  Their myth remembers their descent from the Prophet, their leadership of the Arab Revolt, and the tribes’ shared Arab and Islamic heritage.  It forgets, however, the many different histories that Jordanians champion, histories that the Hashemite mythology has never been able to fully reconcile.”

This is an effective conclusion because it moves from the specific argument addressed in the body of the paper to the question of why that argument matters.  The writer rephrases the argument by saying, “Their myth remembers their descent from the Prophet, their leadership of the Arab Revolt, and the tribes’ shared Arab and Islamic heritage.”  Then, the writer reflects briefly on the larger implications of the argument, showing how Jordan’s nationalist mythology depended on the suppression of other narratives.

Introduction and Conclusion checklist

When revising your introduction and conclusion, check them against the following guidelines:

Does my introduction:

• draw my readers in?
• culminate in a thesis statement that clearly states my argument?
• orient my readers to the key facts they need to know in order to understand my thesis?
• lay out a roadmap for the rest of my paper?

Does my conclusion:

• draw my paper together?
• reiterate my argument clearly and forcefully?
• leave my readers with a lasting impression of why my argument matters or what it brings to light?

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Resources for My Subject

History: writing a history dissertation.

• Writing a History Dissertation
• Referencing and Style Guide
• Literature Search Plan
• American History

Starting a Literature Search

Conducting a literature search is a great way to find a viable topic and plan your research. It will also give you the opportunity to look for primary and secondary resources that can support the arguments you make in your dissertation. 

Starting your literature search early will help you plan your dissertation and give you an overview of all the resources you might want to consult. Below are examples of how you can start this process and how they can help.

Dissertation Books

Define your Topic

Start your search by identifying a broad subject area, such as a country, period, theme or person. You might do this by looking at reference works, such as a Very Short Introduction , Cambridge Histories , or Oxford Handbooks . These books will give you an insight into the many areas you can investigate in greater depth and they will also provide references to peer-reviewed material on more defined topics. 

Next , look at material which focuses more on the area you have identified from reference works. These might be books, chapters or articles which focus on a more defined area of the subject you have identified. Use these to formulate questions that you can answer in your research.

Then ,  read resources that will help you form your argument and answer the questions you have set. This material should focus on the topic you have chosen and help you explain what has been written on this area before.

Search for Secondary Resources

In order to successfully search for resources relevant to your study, you will need to use search-terms which will retrieve the best results. The tips below will help you do this:

Terms you have found in your reading

Keep a note of terms you have seen when you have been identifying your topic. This could be anything relevant your topic, including: places, people, jobs, religions, institutions, objects, periods, or events. Also, take note of terms that are related to your topic and had an impact on the area you are studying. Write down all the terms which relate to your topic and note which ones provide the most relevant results.

It can also be useful to keep a note of what you are not looking at so that you stay focused on your topic and do not retrieve too many results.

Authors who are written about the topic

You will start to notice that some authors are mentioned as specialists on the topic you are researching. Search a variety of catalogues to find what they have written on the subject in different formats. They might have contributed to edited works, written articles, given presentations to conferences or annotated works. They also might lead you to others who have written about your topic or research groups which are relevant to your studies.

Use subject searches

Most secondary resources have been indexed according to their subject. Through using these subject terms you can search catalogues more efficiently and find relevant resources without just searching the title or author. 

If you find a useful resources, try looking at its catalogue record. See if any of the subject headings look useful and note what terminology they use as this will be consistent across most databases. When you have found a useful term, copy and paste it into a subject search (or select the link) and see what other resources are available.

You can also use an online thesaurus to find search terms. The most commonly used terms are the Library of Congress Subject Headings  which provide uniform terms across international databases.

Use databases

The University subscribes to many databases that focus on different countries and topics. These will provide a comprehensive guide to what has been written in your area and may use different subject headings. Reference databases and bibliographies can be especially useful for finding citations of everything that has been written on a certain area of history. Biographical databases can also help find information about individuals and institutions. For a complete list of all the databases the University subscribes to, look at the A-Z of databases . 

Search for Primary Resources

There are plenty of primary resources that can be used in your dissertation. The University subscribes to many databases that provide access to primary resources and some of our libraries hold special collections which can be used in your research. Below are some examples:

The University subscribes to many newspapers from the past and present. They can be a really useful tool for finding contemporary accounts of events and provide more than just articles (including: advertisements, illustrations, family notices, sports, arts, court cases). Many newspaper databases will also include related content, such as pamphlets and newsbooks.

The University Library has a collection of print newspapers which can be consulted on site. The University also subscribes to electronic databases of national and local newspapers across the world. More information about the newspaper databases we subscribe to is available on our  dedicated website .

Special Collection Material

Many libraries and archives provide access to rare, unique and specialised collections of books and manuscripts. The University Library, for example, provides access to Manuscripts and Rare Books Departments , as do some of the colleges. Some of the more frequently used and important material is also available as part of an online library, such as Cambridge's CUDL .

Official Publications (Government Documents)

Documents produced by governmental and intergovernmental bodies can provide an insight into their decision making and governance. Several libraries in Cambridge have received official publications material and a lot of material is now available online. More information about the official material in Cambridge libraries is available on our Official Publications LibGuide .

Data and Statistics

Figures can be used to help illustrate a point and provide evidence as you answer the central question in your dissertation. You might chose to refer to census data, crime statistics, trade figures, or any other data set that relates to your area of history. This sort of information can be found in databases and replicated in secondary resources. 

Private Papers

If you are researching an individual (or someone who played a prominent role in the area you are focusing on) it is a good idea to see if they have deposited private papers in an archive. These might includes diaries, letters, draft works, or anything else that was kept and not published. These works are normally kept in an archive, so a good starting point is to look at a catalogue that might show where relevant papers are held (such as Archives Hub )

These can include maps, cartoons, paintings and photographs. Images are available both in print and online, but you need to be cautious of the copyright restrictions of images before you use them (check the information given by the source). Some databases will allow you to search images, like ARTstor , so use them as a good starting point for your search. 

Audio-Visual

Similarly to images, the University provides access to a variety of audio-visual resources, including interviews, recordings, radio and films. If there is a particular DVD you would like to use, try searching the title in iDiscover. For example, " Interviews with Historians " will take you to a comprehensive collection of DVDs available at the Seeley. Many films are also available online, such as British Pathe .

Organise and Save Your Research

You will be able to do a comprehensive and efficient literature search if you keep a record of what you have read, where you read it and what each item means to your research. The best way to achieve this is to:

1. Record the key ideas, themes and quotes from what you have read. Try to find a uniform way to do this as it will make it easier to find information when you come to write your dissertation. Some formats are freely available on the internet, such as the Cornell Note Taking System .

2. Save citations you have looked at so you do not struggle to find them again. Also, this will help you when you come to do your references. There are many reference managers available to help you store this information and create a fully formatted bibliography.

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M.A. Thesis: What is it and what does it need to do?

The purpose of a M.A. thesis is to demonstrate a student’s capacity to develop an original historical argument based on original research . Given the significant amount of work and effort that—beyond classwork—goes into completing and defending a thesis, students on the thesis track should seriously consider why is it that they want to write a thesis and discuss their reasons (and their intellectual and professional trajectory more broadly) with the History or Public History advisor early on, preferably during their first year in the program. Students should start thinking about possible topics and committee members (one chair and two readers) early on as well.

The Thesis “Pipeline” Students generally start developing their thesis topic during the third semester, as they enroll in the General Research Seminar (GRS) and Thesis A (see the Graduate Student Handbook for details). In consultation with the instructor of record and the History or Public History general advisors, they will select a paper advisor for the course, knowledgeable in the student’s field, who will very likely fulfill the role of thesis director and committee chair for the student after the GRS. During the Seminar, students will be working on research, methodology, and historiography which will serve as the basis of the thesis. To get credit for Thesis A, moreover, students will have to defend a thesis proposal (5-8 pages) before a committee, which will recommend that the student continues with the project or switches to the Comps track.

Scope Students must be able to assess the value of their source base—which can include textual primary sources, material culture, the built environment, oral interviews and oral histories, digital media, musical examples, and visual images—demonstrating the ability to critically evaluate and engage with several archival and non-archival sources. Students then must place their research into conversation with the existing literature on the topic. They must show their ability to summarize the recent historiographical trends on the subject, and then must illustrate the ways that their research contributes to, contends with, or challenges current trends. In other words, the original research needs to be put into a larger intellectual framework. This framing involves the skill to utilize the research of other scholars to help build students’ argument and analysis. Since the historical profession is built on acknowledging the contributions of other scholars, it is vital that the M.A. thesis integrate existing scholarship throughout the thesis.

Another feature of a thesis is that, although the thesis can be structured chronologically or thematically, the argument must address change over time . To effectively do this, the M.A. student must first set up the historical context, thereby establishing the “problem” that will be solved. Lastly, an M.A. thesis must comply with the academic conventions of historical writing . This includes using the Chicago/Turabian citation method, offering a clear and effective organization, and writing in a clear, concise, and readable style.

Public History students must incorporate a Public History component in their thesis. Types of components are categorized and described, with accompanying examples, in a separate guide.

Format M.A. History theses are typically comprised of an Introduction (~10 pages), 2-3 chapters (~20-25 pages each) organized chronologically or thematically, and a conclusion (~10 pages). To form an idea of the Department’s expectations, students are encouraged to peruse previous theses at the library’s website . Students are also encouraged to consult the Graduate College Guide to Preparing and Submitting a Thesis BEFORE beginning the writing process, as the guide provides templates with the proper formatting that will make the final submission a much easier endeavor.

Alternatively, and with the approval of the thesis committee and/or the History or Public History advisor, preferably before taking Thesis B (see the Graduate Student Handbook for details), students can opt for an article-length thesis, which will include a 9000-to-12,000-word standalone article chapter of publishable quality and, to satisfy Graduate College requirements, a thorough introduction chapter and a comprehensive conclusion chapter. Students considering a Ph.D. in History are particularly encouraged to discuss this option with their advisors, for an article chapter would provide a strong writing sample, which will enhance the student’s chances of gaining admission. In consultation with the thesis committee, students working on an article-length thesis should identify suitable publication venues and keep their scope and formatting guidelines in mind during the writing process, so that they can submit their work for consideration after the defense.

As with all M.A. History theses, the committee is the sole arbiter of the quality, scope, and length of all parts of the document.

Ver. 01/15/21

HistoryProfessor.Org

Insights from zachary schrag, author of the princeton guide to historical research, a thesis statement template.

January 2007. Revised June 2011 and March 2022.

Thesis statements —the presentation of a thesis in the introduction of a work—can take many forms, so long as they pose a question and offer an interpretive answer. [1] Though I do not want to confine my students to formulas, here is one that may help them remember the key elements:

Why did [person/persons] [do/say/write something surprising]? [Plausible explanation], but in fact [better or more complete explanation].

Consider this passage example from Gail Radford:

Conventional wisdom suggests that Americans never would have abandoned their cherished dream of owning their own home, preferably a free-standing, single-family house in the suburbs. Yet some scholars have argued that this seemingly transhistorical commitment to homeownership in the United States was considerably strengthened if not actually created in its pres.. ent form during the interwar period. Also, evidence from the case studies of the PWA housing developments in this book suggests that many Americans might well have enjoyed living at least some part of their lives in good quality, economical garden apartment buildings or rowhouses surrounded by attractive landscaping and generously provided with recreational opportunities and social services within easy walking distance. In fact, Americans were never given such a choice, so it is impossible to tell how they would have reacted. Only some of the PWA developments that were built successfully embodied much of the spirit of the modern housing idea, and few Americans ever saw one of these. Encouraged by the housing industry, conservative forces in Congress made sure that there would be no federal support for this policy direction in the permanent legislation that ultimately emerged from the turmoil of the 1930s. As we will see, this vision for American housing had limitations and ambiguities. Yet, the problems it sought to solve have not disappeared, and many of the ideas it put forward could help us today as we try to craft solutions to our contemporary dilemmas. [2]

Rephrased it template form, it looks like this:

Why did Americans reject public housing except as an option of last resort? Given the popularity of homeownership today, one might think that Americans have always insisted on owning their own homes. But in fact, some Americans preferred quality public housing to home ownership, and only strong efforts by the housing industry and conservative politicians foreclosed this option.

Or, this, from David Mindell:

Hampton Roads drew such an energetic and lasting public response that the battle became a familiar icon of popular culture. The Monitor symbolized American technology, and success in military technology meant strength in commercial technology as well. A typical promotion proclaimed: “The fight settled the fate of the ‘Wooden Walls’ of the World and taught all nations that the War Ship of the future must be-like the McCormick Harvester-a Machine of Steel”. Official sources, expressed in congressional commendations, newspaper reports, and traditional histories, reflected a similar view. All touted the revolution in naval warfare, the new American standing on the international stage, and the maturity of industrial technology. Even today, the battle between the Monitor and the Virginia forms the most mythic and the most technological image of the Civil War. But, for Herman Melville, Hampton Roads conveyed another message. Both broader in its implications and more personal in its effects Melville’s reading of the ironclads illuminates a fundamental but elusive characteristic of technological change: the human experience that accompanies new machinery. His poem anticipates the rise of a cold, calculated, and distanced way of fighting, possibly reducing human grandeur in war. His poems on the Monitor, from his Battle Pieces collection on the Civil War, explore the paradoxical implications of mechanical warfare: like the Monitor, machines protect, but they also dehumanize. Melville wrote Battle Pieces during the war and published it soon after. Even without the advantage of hindsight he saw in the Monitor metaphors and conflicts hidden behind the public rhetoric of victorious new weapons. [3]

Here’s the template version:

What did Herman Melville mean when he wrote that “warriors/ Are now but operatives”? Official sources, newspaper accounts, and subsequent histories have presented the USS Monitor solely as a symbol of American technological success, but Melville understood machinery’s ability to dehumanize warfare.

Finally, here’s one from Adam Rome, in which the second part of the template appears nearly verbatim:

The Bulldozer in the Countryside does not merely fill gaps in the historical literature on environmentalism. The argument here recasts or revises a number of well-accepted conclusions about the movement’s roots, evolution, and limits. Six points stand out. Though a growing concern about the loss of wilderness ob­viously contributed to the rise of environmentalism, the movement also was a response to environmental change at the edges of the nation’s cities. [4]

To make it fit the template, we need only make Rome’s question more explicit:

Why did Americans become more concerned about the environment in the decades after World War II? Though a growing concern about the loss of wilderness obviously contributed to the rise of environmentalism, the movement also was a response to environmental change at the edges of the nation”s cities.

I even found an essay that uses the form almost exactly as it appears here:

How did Syria come to this pass? While some observers see in recent events a parallel with 1989, with the break-up of the East European–style system introduced by the Baathists in the 1960s, this is no velvet revolution, nor is Syria like Jaruzelski’s Poland. The regime’s violence is not ideological. It is far from being the result of an emotional or philosophical commitment to a party that long ago abandoned its agenda of promoting secular Arab republican values and aspirations. The regime’s ruthless attachment to power lies in a complex web of tribal loyalties and networks of patronage underpinned by a uniquely powerful religious bond. [5]

(For more examples, see  The Princeton Guide to Historical Research , 285-286)

Let’s take a look at the components of this form: 1. Why? History theses answer the question, why, or, occasionally, how. Who, what, where, and when are important too, but why and how make an argument. [6] 2. Person/persons. History is about people. Abstract nouns (capitalism, war, society, etc.) are important, but a thesis without people lacks life. 3. Something surprising. The function of any scholarship is to explore the unknown and the mysterious. Challenge yourself with difficult questions. 4. Plausible explanation. A good way to know that you have formed a good question is if it forces you to choose among interpretations. The question, who wrote “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor”s Fight”? has only one right answer (Herman Melville). The question, why did Melville write “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor”s Fight”? has many plausible answers. Like the second example, the most thorough theses note exactly who believes or believed an alternative explanation. 5. Better or more complete explanation. Not all answers are equally good. Some are plain wrong; they cannot be supported with evidence (Melville was trying to impress Adah Isaacs Menken ). Others account for some, but not all, of the available evidence (Americans were impressed by the power of the Monitor ). The task of a thesis is to show that your explanation explains words or deeds that were not explained before. Not all good thesis statements need to take this particular form, but most good theses present all of these elements. Show that your argument can explain more evidence than can a rival, and you have yourself a thesis.

For more on developing a thesis, see “ Elements of a Thesis Statement ” and “ Dialectical Thesis Statements .” [1] For all their classroom talk of concise thesis statements , academic historians generally spread the statement of their own theses over several paragraphs at the start of an article or several pages of the introduction of a book. Thus, if you want to find a compact thesis statement, you are better off reading historiographical essays or book reviews that summarize the arguments of other works. Here I have borrowed the idea of a thesis-statement template from the “magic thesis” presented by the UCLA Office of Instructional Development, http://write.oid.ucla.edu/handouts/Thesis_statement_history.rtf (August 8, 2006). [2] Adapted from Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 6. [3] Adapted from David A. Mindell, “’The Clangor of That Blacksmith”s Fray”: Technology, War, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor,” Technology and Culture 36 (April 1995), 242-245. [4] The second sentence is a direct quotation from Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 7. It is one of six thesis statements Rome presents in his introduction (pages 7-12), each beginning with the word “though” and taking the form of a weighing of two alternative explanations. [5] Malise Ruthven, “ Storm Over Syria ,” New York Review of Books , 9 June 2011. [6] A remaining question—what is to be done?—is of great interest in other disciplines, but historians answer it only under duress. Others want to change the world; our task is to interpret it.

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• Researching
• 7. Hypothesis

How to write a hypothesis

Once you have created your three topic sentences , you are ready to create your hypothesis.

What is a 'hypothesis'?

A hypothesis is a single sentence answer to the Key Inquiry Question  that clearly states what your entire essay is going to argue.

It contains both the argument and the main reasons in support of your argument. Each hypothesis should clearly state the ‘answer’ to the question, followed by a ‘why’.

For Example:  

The Indigenous people of Australia were treated as second-class citizens until the 1960’s (answer) by the denial of basic political rights by State and Federal governments (why) .

How do you create a hypothesis?

Back in Step 3 of the research process, you split your Key Inquiry Question into three sub-questions .

Then at Step 6 you used the quotes from your Source Research to create answers to each of the sub-questions. These answers became your three Topic Sentences .

To create your hypothesis, you need to combine the three Topic Sentences into a single sentence answer.

By combining your three answers to the sub-questions , you are ultimately providing a complete answer to the original Key Inquiry Question .

For example:

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History Thesis Topics: List of 69 Outstanding Ideas

Unless you plan to go for a Ph.D. in history, a thesis will be the most significant academic writing of your life. It shows your in-depth knowledge of a subject, your ability to think logically, creatively, and originally. Besides, it’s a great way to demonstrate how good your writing is.

But finding an appropriate title for your thesis is a challenging task. You may feel unsure about any idea until you see the rest of them. So, what can help you?

A history thesis topics list, of course. In this article, you’ll consider a wide variety of ideas about historical events and figures. There are some tips on picking the right one for you. With a little explanation of the basics, you’ll differentiate the Bachelor’s thesis from the Master’s one in a second.

• ☝️ How to Choose?
• ⭐ Top-12 Thesis Ideas
• 🚀 American History
• ⚔️ European History
• 🎨 Art History
• 📚 MA Thesis Topics
• 🦉 MPhil Thesis Ideas
• 👨‍🏫 Thesis vs. Dissertation

☝ How to Choose a History Thesis Topic?

Before picking a topic about history, you have to understand what you’re looking for. Take into account that you’re going to spend plenty of time writing your thesis. So, you need to find an idea that engages you and is worthy of your time. Don’t go for a random history topic that you do not feel passionate about.

Searching for an idea, follow the tips below:

• Find a topic that interests you . You’ll most probably write your thesis for a whole semester or even longer. That’s why you should determine something that doesn’t bore easily. At least those countless hours in the library will be spent with pleasure. The more the idea challenges and intrigues you, the less you’ll procrastinate and suffer from writing. No one can tell you what to write about. Your advisor can help you specify the topic, but it is up to you what to write about.
• Look for a topic that creates a trajectory for further research . You may not pursue it later, but having an opportunity to do so is a significant advantage. If you decide to pursue a further degree, you will already be familiar with the topic well. Take a look at available works in a free essays database to get a clearer picture of what can be further explored.
• Find a professor who will become your thesis advisor . Bring some thesis ideas up and see what your instructor suggests. It’s a good thing to have several research topics in mind—the instructor can help you determine the best one.
• Think beyond the graduation date . Whether you are going to start a career or continue your studies, your thesis should help you in achieving your goals. What may your employer look for in your paper? What do you need to be successful in your job or further research? It’s good to approach the issue with some level of practicality. See if you can apply the skills and information you’ve acquired to your professional life.
• Strive for originality but stay within your studies context . Try to make your title unique to grasp attention and intrigue from the get-go. At the same time, don’t fall outside the scope of your field. Before picking a topic, do some research to understand the field deeper. This way, you’ll see what exactly you would like to address.
• Make sure your title fits the requirements . Open your university guidelines for the thesis work and find this out before anything else. Ask your thesis advisor as well to give you honest feedback.

⭐ Top-12 History Thesis Ideas

• Civil War — the role of women.
• The Watergate Scandal.
• Contemporary art history.
• The Napoleonic Wars.
• Causes of World War 2.
• Impact of the Black Plague.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis.
• Japanese-American conflict.
• The Vietnam anti-war protests.
• Origins of the Great Famine in Ireland.
• The French Revolution.
• The rule of Elizabeth I.

📝 History Thesis Topics for Bachelor’s Degree

Usually, American Universities don’t require students to write a Senior Thesis. However, you still have an option to choose one. You can write a thesis as a part of your program completion. It will take a lot of time, energy, and effort. But, in the end, you will be able to produce a prime piece of academic writing.

Strive to write anywhere from 60 to 100 pages. You will also dedicate a lot of time writing and polishing it afterward. Make sure to leave enough time for that too.

What’s the first step?

Look for a thesis advisor you know you will enjoy working with. Consider all the professors you’ve interacted with at your university and pick several. Approach them and see if they are accepting new students for thesis supervision.

Make sure to choose a history thesis paper topic that your advisor knows a lot about. At some point, you will become very knowledgeable about the history thesis topic you chose. It will be crucial to have someone who can direct you.

There are several reasons why you should consider writing a thesis for a Bachelor’s Degree in history:

• It provides you with essential experience in writing, researching, and brainstorming ideas. It can later help you in your academic or professional life.
• You can deeply understand a subject that interests you.
• You can improve your reading skills.
• If you have to use foreign sources, you can also increase your foreign language skills.

Are you still wondering what historical thesis ideas are appropriate? Then, this list is perfect for you.

🚀 American History Thesis Topics

• African American history in the United States : disfranchisement and segregation in 1890-1900
• Early American History and the lost colony of Roanoke
• The construction of race in American culture and history. It’s not a secret that race is a social construct. In American culture and history, it plays a critical role. In the thesis, you will have a chance to research the mechanisms through which the race was constructed. Movies, literary representations, articles, what else? It’s up to you to find out what can be relevant.
• World War 2 through personal letters and diaries . This thesis can be personal and will not leave people indifferent. Examination of diaries, notes, and personal accounts can be fascinating. You won’t be bored doing historical research. Maybe you even have some in your own family? Worth checking it out.
• Guilt over Slavery in the United States: a historical examination
• Gender equality in American education . A comparative study of Germany, Russia, The United States
• New York City and its historical geography. NYC is one of the captivating American cities. Writing a thesis about its historical geography is not an easy task. Gladly, you have tons of information available to you.

• Rocket Science as one of the most significant innovations of the 20th century
• Examining the Role of Privilege within the Ivy League Universities
• Role of American Public Health in a Post-9/11 World

⚔ European History Thesis Topics

• Formation and development of the European Union during the 20th century
• Feminist perspective on the representation of women in Roman Art
• Religion and Nation in Europe in the 19th century
• Construction of National Identity in Post-Soviet Latvia. What did contribute to developing a national identity of post-soviet Latvia? First of all, its independence and belonging to the European Union. In this thesis, talk about colonization and colonial identity. Consider the policies Latvian government implemented to build a Latvian character. What is it? What are the essential characteristics of it?
• Composition and religious hierarchy in The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci
• Representation of Jews in Late Medieval Period in Europe
• Problems of political leadership in Athens of 404-355 BCE
• The French Renaissance Court and its structural hierarchy. This topic is interesting yet complex. Its complexity comes not from the name but the nature of the French Renaissance Court. You need to have a clear idea of how the royal court is built and is operating. Find relevant historians of that time, and, hopefully, you can speak some French.
• Immigrational Politics of the United Kingdom. The problem of multiculturism at the beginning of 1960-1980.
• Orientalism or the Middle East through the prism of Western scholars in the XIX century. In this thesis, start by exploring the notion of Orientalism. Edward Said will be a good point of departure and one of the most fundamental works to cite and read. You can agree with his argument or disagree with it. Nevertheless, find the relevant evidence for your point of view.

🎨 Art History Thesis Topics

• Medicine in Ancient Rome with a focus on surgeries through paintings. This thesis topic is rich. Numerous Ancient Roman paintings depict surgeries and medical treatments. Find the most interesting ones and talk about innovations in medicine. What was the point of recording medical procedures in art? Truly a topic that can captivate anyone.
• Vincent Van Gogh: A phycological analysis of the artist’s last years . In this thesis, examine his artworks together with the personal letters. Look at the words he used, as well as the images he painted. You need it to comprehend what was happening in Vincent’s life in his last years. Some art therapists claim that the artist had bipolar disorder. Examine those views. However, be careful not to give any medical diagnosis yourself.

• Plato on Punishment and Vice: the notion of punishment in The Republic. You cannot get a degree without reading the most fundamental text of the Western Academy, The Republic . In this thesis, you should simply focus on the ideas of punishment and vice. Plato wrote a lot regarding the morals and the laws. Try to discern what exactly he meant. Extract his views regarding capital punishment and punitive justice.
• Modern Art in Europe, with a specific focus on Italy
• Trade in Medieval Europe with a focus on Africa through art
• The erotism of art of Ancient Rome
• Synthesis of sculpture and paintings in Spanish art of the 17th century
• Neoclassicism in French art of the 1900s-1910s
• Surrealism in Art as the quintessence between realism and hyper-realism

📋 History Thesis Topics for Master’s Degree

In the United States, to enter a graduate degree in history, a bachelor’s degree is required. Most of the time, students will have to submit several recommendation letters. Plus, they need GRE scores and writing samples. Add to this several essays explaining the purpose of going to university again, and there you have it.

It is common to have several completion requirements. They can include basic courses, language tests, and a master’s thesis at the end of the program. However, it depends on the department and the university.

Keep in mind that there are several credits that students should obtain to get a degree. It differs from university to university as well. In most of the programs throughout the United States, they are required to complete 30-32 credits to get an M.A. degree. This number usually corresponds to 8-9 classes.

If you are pursuing an M.A., you’re in luck. There is an excellent chance that you will be able to choose if you would like to write a thesis or not. If you are pursuing an M.Phil., then you will have to write your thesis because it’s a research degree.

No matter if you are pursuing an M.A. or an M.Phil., this historical thesis ideas can help you find a title:

📚 MA Thesis Topics in History

• Apotheosis of the Philippine Historical Political Tradition
• Kerala History: Syrian Christians in the region in the 18th century
• History of Modern India with a focus on women’s rights
• The history of theater in the American South and the main characteristics of the Southern Drama. This thesis includes a lot of aspects starting from playwriting in Charleston to drama in New Orleans. Then there are War Drama, Black Drama, etc. Try to find a good balance to fit all of the main characteristics of the Southern Drama and theater.
• New Deal and its impacts on events leading to the Great Depression
• Mistakes of the Soviet side in WW2. WWII was the deadliest military conflict of the 20th century. In this thesis, talk about the biggest mistakes the Red Army made during the war. Some of those can include signing to the Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler. Plus, there were anti-tank dogs and the Molovot-Ribbentrop Pact.

• Military strategies that allowed Napoleon to win crucial battles
• Mussolini & Hitler : connection along with its consequences for Italy
• Queen Victoria’s politics and the way it has changed British history
• The Development of Strategic Bombing Doctrine Between the World Wars
• Historical Creation of a Black Elite in the United States
• Through Imperial Eyes: Race and British Reactions to the American Slavery Question
• Gertrude Bell’s Influence in the Formation of Iraq. Gertrude Bell is a crucial figure in Islamic studies. She contributed a lot to the formation of Iraq. In this thesis, explore her unique contribution and approach to building a modern state of the country. She was highly trusted by British politicians and by Arab leaders.
• Baptist church history as a way to escape slavery

🦉 MPhil Thesis Topics in History

• Investigating the impact of WWI on trade blocks. A case study of the European Union
• Women in WWII: sexual objectification of women through magazines and advertisement. Women played an integral part in WWII. In this thesis, explore the role of sexual imagery in the advertising industry during the war.
• Sudan-American relationships in 1989-2000: US Foreign Policy and Genocide in Sudan
• Criticism of the war on drugs during the Ronald Reagan administration
• The political evolution of the Southern States during the Reconstruction Era
• Everest Expeditions in British Popular Culture, 1920-1960. Explore how Everest Expeditions were depicted in British movies. Analyze the subject via comics, journals, and visual art in the first part of the 20th century.
• Impact of Otto von Bismarck on German Liberalism

• Discrimination of German immigrants in the USA during WW2
• The Fourth International and the Spanish Civil War
• Political and economic aspects of the crisis in Venetian Diplomacy in the 1500s
• The connection between institutionalized racism and police violence in the United States. There are several dimensions to racism. In this thesis, look for a connection between structural racism and police violence in the US. Compare the numbers, look at the stories. See if this data exposes any hidden bias.
• An image of the Medieval Period in Post Modern Art
• A comparative analysis of the Four Quran English Translation. In this thesis, discuss why and how the Quran can be translated. Also, you should look at the four translations. Try to determine which one is the closest. To do that, you need to have an advanced level of Arabic.
• The psychological effect of war on American soldiers in Vietnam

👨‍🏫 Differences between a Thesis and Dissertation

Understanding the difference between a thesis and a dissertation is essential. Would you like to obtain a master’s and a doctoral degree? Then read attentively. In the United States, both thesis and dissertation are vital for this purpose.

The prominent differences that you have to realize are the following:

• A dissertation is required to graduate with a doctoral degree. A thesis is a culmination of a master’s program.
• A dissertation is written to add a new piece of knowledge to the field. A thesis is to show that you have enough knowledge about the field.
• A dissertation usually takes several semesters, sometimes even years, to complete. A thesis does not require this amount of time. It can be finished within months.
• A dissertation can be seen as an academic book. A master’s thesis is a long research paper.

Let’s see the main characteristics of a bachelor’s thesis, a master’s thesis, an MPhil’s thesis, and a dissertation:

• A Bachelor’s Thesis (honors thesis). It’s a research-based paper that allows undergraduate students to put their knowledge into practice. The paper is usually 40-60 pages long. It includes an introduction, main body, conclusion, and bibliography.
• A Master’s Thesis. It’s a piece of original scholarly work. A mater’s thesis is written under the close supervision of an academic advisor. It attempts to bring some fresh look or a new perspective to a field of study. The length of a master’s thesis can vary. Usually, it doesn’t go beyond 100 pages.
• An MPhil’s Thesis (Master of Philosophy). It’s a specific type of thesis. As it was stated earlier, most American Universities don’t grant this degree. A few schools give it under specific circumstances. Doctoral students should accomplish all the course work and pass their exams. Then, this degree can be granted to them. A more colloquial way to call this degree is “all but dissertation.” In other cases, this degree is granted to students who are doing their postgraduate research.
• A Dissertation. It’s a major piece of academic writing. It’s independent, shows critical and thinking ability. A dissertation is meant to illustrate academic knowledge, originality of work, and research skills. The length usually stays within 200-300 pages.

Any thesis or dissertation is a monumental work. Choose a topic that you are passionate about. Make sure it’s researchable and clear, but at the same time memorable. Spend time writing, proofreading, editing, and talking to your advisor about your ideas and academic goals.

Remember that it is okay to get frustrated and tired at times. If it happens to you, stop working for a bit and relax. Good luck and congratulations on your soon to be graduation! We hope this article was helpful. Share it with those who may need a history thesis topic or a piece of advice.

🔗 References

• MPhil in History: University of Oxford
• How to Pick a Masters Thesis Topic: Peter Campbell for Medium
• How Do I Choose A Thesis Topic: Grad School Hub
• Writing a Senior Thesis: Undergraduate Program, Department of History, Brandeis University
• The Bachelor’s Thesis, Bachelor EE: University of Twente
• Guidelines for the Preparation of Your Master’s Thesis: the Office of Graduate Studies and Research: University of Nebraska at Kearney
• Guidelines for Writing a Master’s Thesis for MA Degree: Jeremy Bailey, Susan Scarrow, University of Houston
• What is a dissertation? How it is different from an essay: The Royal Literary Fund
• What is the Difference Between a Thesis and a Dissertation: The Best Master’s Degrees
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Department of History

Yale history dissertations.

During the late 1800’s, only a trickle of dissertations were submitted annually, but today, the department averages about 25 per year. See who some of those intrepid scholars were and what they wrote about by clicking on any of the years listed below.

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Sample Thesis Proposals

Lanfranc of Bec: Confrontation and Compromise Imperial Expansion and the Evolution of the South and Southeast Asian economies Nantucket’s Role in the War of 1812 Letters Home: Records of the Experiences of Common Soldiers in the American Civil War Writing for Stalin: American Journalists in the USSR, 1928-1941 Dismal Scientists, Diplomats, and Spooks: Bissell, Milliken, and Rostow and Their Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy Media Reflections of Western Public Opinion in the Suez Crisis The Implications, Effects, and Uses of Media in the Emmett Till Lynching Cromwell Lives while Mason Stalks: Irish Nationalism and Historical Memory during the Troubles ‘My broken dreams of peace and socialism’: Youth propaganda, personality, and selfhood in the GDR, 1979-1989.

Lanfranc of Bec: Confrontation and Compromise

The ecclesiastical history of Europe in the 11th century revolves around the investiture conflict and the Gregorian reform effort. These two issues forced their way into religious lives around the continent. Even in England, on the edge of the world, Anglo-Saxon and Norman reformers grappled with these challenges to the construction of a “universal church.” I would like to enter into this world through the case study of Lanfranc of Bec. Lanfranc is an apt choice for this intensive focus because of the apparent philosophical paradoxes that dominated his life.

Early in his career, Lanfranc was a staunch supporter of Pope Leo IX in the Eucharistic controversy with Berengar of Tours. The doctrine of transubstantiation was, however, less important to Lanfranc than the idea of “the universal church.” Significantly, this new church was to be united under the stronger and more demanding popes in Rome who were early supporters of the young Italian monk. Lanfranc’s transformation began when was appointed abbot of St. Etienne, Caen in 1063 under the direct patronage of William the Conqueror. This relationship continued with Lanfranc’s promotion to Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070. In this role, Lanfranc severed all most traditional ties with Rome. He did command the right to supervise and veto any papal synods planned for England. In addition, Lanfranc even skipped the mandatory pilgrimage to Rome to receive the pallium, a tradition for English bishops that dated back to Gregory the Great and the 6th century.

Traditional scholarship has tended to portray this break as pragmatic. Lanfranc’s new master, William, demanded a more present loyalty than the faraway Church of St. Peter’s. Loyalty in turn led to advancement and a place in religious governance of countless souls in England. To justify these mercenary considerations scholars described the admittedly conservative Lanfranc as a Carolingian bishop, a relic of an empire then dead for two centuries. The Carolingian era was a time of dramatic expansion for the church, largely under the protections of its secular Christian protector, Charlemagne. It is easy to see parallels, at least from the Norman point of view, between the conquest of England in 1066 and the forceful conversion of the Saxons in 8th century. Both these invasions brought subject peoples in line with a new, larger Christendom. Historians have written about Lanfranc as a player within this system of sacred reform spearheaded by the secular.

In my study I plan to reexamine this view. Although the Archbishop did abandon Gregory VII at the time of his greatest need, the investiture conflict, Lanfranc’s role in the English reform need not be seen as driven by Normandy rather than Rome. For example, William’s concern for the piety of his new subjects was at best secondary to an interest in appointing bishops who would maintain order on the tumultuous island in place of the absentee king. Thus it was with a relatively free hand that Lanfranc directly reformed both Canterbury and England as a whole. Some of these changes, like his emphasis on clerical celibacy, were directly in line with the Gregorian reforms that he had supposedly renounced upon his arrival. In other instances, Lanfranc was more open minded to the religious practices that preceded him. Unlike other Norman bishops that arrived after the conquest, the Archbishop was far more accommodating to both local English saints and the institution of monastic cathedrals. These examples create a far more complex picture of Lanfranc. It is clear that he was more loyal to the Gregorian reform movement than to any particular pontiff occupying the See of St. Peter. At the same time, his syncretistic approach would have been at odds with any of the uncompromising popes that he had dealings with. These incongruous details suggest the need to revise traditional interpretations of Lanfranc’s life. Within a wider scope, I hope to demonstrate how the clergy positioned themselves in the larger conflict between the church and state at this time.

In pursuing this topic I want to integrate traditional and less traditional sources in an attempt to create a fresh portrayal. Any study of medieval political and ecclesiastical history will rely heavily on the chroniclers. Specifically I will use the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Eadmer’s Vita Anselmi for the Anglo-Saxon perspective. For the Norman point of view I will use chronicles by William of Jumièges and Gilbert Crispin. To supplement these more formally produced histories, I will read Lanfranc’s own works including his major treatise on the Eucharist, the Liber Corpore et Sanguine Domini, which I fail to believe he so easily abandoned on his arrival to England. In addition, his personal correspondence and monastic constitutions, both of which have been recently republished, will be usefully in understanding his own views, whether they be practical or theological. Lastly, I want to use architectural analyses of the church that Lanfranc built at Canterbury and studies of relic worship surrounding the remains of local saints like Dunstan and Theodore. These less traditional sources, while harder to obtain, will, I hope, provide new insight into Lanfranc’s life and, at the very least, provide social and cultural context for this specific period. The result will be a study that uses the analysis of Lanfranc to address larger question concerning the orientation of individuals within 11th century conflicts.

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Imperial Expansion and the Evolution of the South and Southeast Asian economies

The arrival of Vasco De Gama in 1498 on the beaches of modern-day Calicut marked the beginning of the intensification of economic relations between East and West, and the first encounter of Europeans with an ancient and complex commercial network reaching by land and sea from Europe to China, handling trade and traffic of far greater value than anything known in the West. Luxury products from China, silk and precious metals from Iran, the cotton textiles of India, the gold and ivory of East Africa, and the spices of Indonesia were all connected through highly advanced and dense trading networks. While the Indian economy is often represented as having stagnated under the weight of European intrusions, it is clear that particularly in coastal areas, a brisk and dynamic coastal trade flourished under the aegis of European rule. The creation of a world market in commodities such as rice gold, silver, spices, textiles and other raw materials occurred simultaneous with displacement of local markets as European imperial reach was extended over an increasingly wide part of the globe.

By the mid 18th century, the two great chartered companies, the British East India Company and the VOC (Dutch East India Company) had transformed from mere commercial trading ventures to entities that dominated economic relationships with Asian economies and began to acquire auxiliary governmental and military functions. By 1765 the British East India Company was effectively the de facto sovereign in Bengal by virtue of its overwhelming military power in the region, and its acquisition of the diwani, or the right to collect territorial revenues. For both the Dutch and British East India Companies, it is clear that the acquisition of territorial empires and quasi-governmental functions had profound effects upon the nature, scope, and distribution of investment within the Companies from Europe, but also upon the character of the relationship between indigenous traders, merchants, and financiers, and Europeans. Lakshmi Subramanian, a historian who has published some of the most important works dealing with the relationship of the Marathas and the British in Bombay, mentions how Law de Lauriston, the ex-Governor General of French India, “recognized the local banking community in 1777 as the decisive factor in any future alliance of the French and Indian States against their inveterate antagonist the English East India Company.” In a recent paper Chaudhury asserts how the local credit markets of eastern India, particularly Bengal, were seminal in rescuing financially several of the European Companies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries from chronic shortages of working capital, yet with victory at Plessy and the transformation of the British role in Bengal, the nature of the relationship between local creditors and European merchants changed dramatically.

This project will comparatively look at the Dutch and British East India Companies and their relationships with groups such as the Marathas, the Chettiars, and the Chinese banking and mercantile families, and will draw upon resources that deal with the relationships of other European powers with indigenous merchants and financiers. By examining the interaction of indigenous financial institutions and capital with Europeans in Asia, particularly South and Southeast Asia, I am hoping to explore many aspects of the Asian economies of the 17th-19th century under the aegis of this broader topic, such as the different development paths between European and Asian societies, the dynamics of the extension of European power in south and southeast Asia, and the radically different financial and economic structures that characterized Asian societies prior to the expansion of Europe, and how the imposition of colonial rule altered (or didn’t) the dynamics of indigenous capital. This project will look at the relationship from the European perspective by utilizing Dutch and British East India Company records. Particularly in recent years, several historians have sought to expand our understanding of the relationship between European traders and Indian merchants and financiers, and this project will attempt to both build upon their work and form a more global and far-reaching conclusion about the role of indigenous capital in imperial expansion by looking at the phenomenon from a comparative perspective.

The chief question I am seeking out to answer is to define and delineate the nature of the relationship between indigenous credit institutions and imperial expansion; effectively, examine the relationship between native bankers, financiers, and traders, and the Europeans who came to trade and later colonize. Above all, I hope to posit a link between these economic relationships, and changes to the political and economic map of Asia.

Nantucket’s Role in the War of 1812

I am a junior history major currently studying abroad at the Williams-Exeter in Oxford Programme. Since August, I have been casually researching the whaling industry on Nantucket during the late 18th to mid-19th century. I am committed to Nantucket as a general topic not only because its history is exceedingly interesting to me but also because there is a wealth of primary data. For example, the Nantucket Historical Association boasts 5000 volumes (ship logs, diaries, legal documents, etc.) that are accessible to scholars.

Although I have explored a number of topics within Nantucket history, I find myself returning again and again to the whaling industry. In particular, I am intrigued by Nantucket’s role in the 1812 war. Nantucket was the only US territory to seek and receive a truce with Great Britain, formally withdrawing from the war in 1814. The islanders were motivated to pursue neutrality because of the importance of the whaling industry as the island’s livelihood and the British fleet’s threat to Nantucket ships. Furthermore, the US government not only offered little to no protection for the islanders but also alienated them by taxing them heavily. In order to understand the1814 treaty, I anticipate needing to research two other areas that I believe are connected: first, how did Nantucket’s experiences in the American Revolution inform and shape its course of action in 1812? During the Revolution, the island declared neutrality, probably because Nantucket whalers did not care which side was victorious, so long as the whaling industry survived the war. The whalers had appealed to other Quakers in England and won an amendment to the parliamentary motion to restrict whaling in New England. However, because the law was not enforced properly, the island fell into economic depression. British naval ships not only prevented Nantucket whalers from selling spermaceti oil to London, its biggest market, but also captured many of their ships. Any threat to the whaling industry would be a true moment of crisis because most of the island was directly or indirectly involved in whaling, and many of the islanders were not rich enough to relocate their families to the mainland. Certainly, there were members of the community in 1812 who would have remembered this treatment by the British and the economic depression.

The second issue that I anticipate addressing pertains to Nantucket’s sense of identity: how “American” did they feel? The circumstances under which the island declared neutrality makes the issue of patriotism more oblique because the “betrayal” of the US can be explained by the need for economic stability without addressing the issue of identity. In these early stages of nationhood, the island seems to have acted very differently from other whaling communities in the US. Socially and politically, Nantucket seemed to be more liberal than the mainland, especially in terms of the role of women and the political (but not always social) equality of African Americans. For example, racial segregation in schools was banned in the 1850s in a legal case that resembles Brown vs. Board of Education. As I have mentioned above, American policies also sometimes alienated the islanders. In the first two years of the 1812 war, Nantucket whaling was almost exclusively threatened not by the British fleet but by American policy, as Congress placed an embargo on trade with Britain; unfortunately, only days after Congress lifted the embargo, Britain enforced is own against New England. During the American Revolution, Nantucket toyed with the idea of becoming either an independent or a British territory. Did it face the same choices in 1812?

Primary Sources :

A Selection from the Nantucket Historical Society Manuscripts Collection:

Allen Family Papers, 1790-1930. Banks on Nantucket, 1804-1985. Barker Family Papers, 1720-1853. Benevolent Society’s Papers, 1814-1976. Carey Family Papers, 1809-1894. Citizens News Room Record. Charles Congdon Collection, 1671-1844. Clapp Family Papers, 1804-1896. Margaret Coffin Papers/Small Collection, 1761-1913. Mary M Coffin Collection, 1806-1865. William Coffin Letter Book, 1811-1833. Coleman Family Papers, 1729-1873. Crosby Family Papers. 1812-1893. Ewer Family Papers, 1813-1875. Fish Family Papers, 1708-1916. Paddock Family Papers, 1755-1853, Phebe Coffin Hanaford Papers, 1848-1929. Jones Family Papers, 1817-1868. Joy Family Papers, 1806-1880. Keziah Coffin Fanning Papers, 1775-1812. Macy Family Papers/ Cloyes Collection, 1812-1869. Myrick Family Papers, 1796-1863. Nantucket Censuses Collection, 1796-1900. Nantucket Monthly Meeting of Friends’ Papers, 1664-1889. Nantucket Monthly Meeting of Friends’ Records, 1672-1944. Ray Family Papers, 1776-1844. Starbuck Family Papers, 1662-1973. Worth Family Papers, 1743-1912. Henry Barnard Worth Collection, 1641-1905.

(I’ve only gone through half of the list of available manuscripts, so I expect that there should be a lot more sources of interest from the Nantucket Historical Society collection. Information about Nantucket Historical Society archives found on www.nha.org)

Annals of Congress, 13th Congress, 2d session. Hutchinson, Thomas. History of Massachusetts, Vol. II, Boston: Thomas & Andrews, 1767. Journal of Samuel Swain, 1813-1837. “Keziah Coffin Fanning’s Diary,” Historical Nantucket 6 (July 1958). Macy, Obed. The History of Nantucket (New York: Research Reprints, 1970 [1835]). Napier, Henry Edward. New England Blockaded in 1814: The Journal of Henry Edward Napier, Lieutenant in H.M.S ‘Nymphe,’ ed. Walter Muir Whitehill. Salem, MA: Peabody Museum, 1939. “Notes on Nantucket. August 1st 1807,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 3 (1815). Scoresby, William. History and Description of the Northern Whale Fisheries, Vol. II. Edinburgh, 1820.

Secondary :

Anderson, Florence Bennet. Through the Hawse-Hole: The True Story of a Nantucket Whaling Captain. New York: Macmillan Co., 1932. Byers, Edward. The Nation of Nantucket: Society and Politics in an Early American Commercial Center, 1660-1820. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987. Graham, Gerald S. “The Migrations of the Nantucket Whale Fishery: An Episode in British Colonial Policy.” The New England Quarterly 8, no. 2 (Jun. 1935):179-202. Davis, Ralph. The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London: David & Charles, 1972. Hegarty, Reginald B. Returns of Whaling Vessels Sailing from American Ports: A Continuation of Alexander Starbuck’s “History of the American Whale Fishery” 1876-1928. New Bedford, MA: Old Dartmouth Historical Society and Whaling Museum, 1959. Hickey, Donald R. “American Trade Restrictions during the War of 1812.” Journal of American History 68, no. 3 (Dec. 1981): 517-538. Hohman, Elmo Paul. The American Whaleman: A Study of the Life and Labor in the American Whaling Industry. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1928. Horsman, Reginald. “Nantucket’s Peace Treaty with England in 1814.” New England Quarterly 54, no. 2 (Jun. 1981): 180-198. Horsman, Reginald. The War of 1812. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. Johnson, Robert. “Black-White Relations on Nantucket.” Historical Nantucket (Spring 2002). Taken from www.nha.org. Kugler, Richard C. “The Whale Oil Trade, 1750-1775,” Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1980. Main, Jackson Turner. The Social Structure of Revolutionary America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. McDevitt, Joseph L. The House of Rotch: Whaling Merchants of Massachusetts, 1734-1828. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1986. Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1979. Tower, Walter. A History of an American Whalefishery, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1907. Starbuck, Alexander. History of Nantucket, Boston: C. E. Goodspeed Co.,1924. ______. History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876. Repr., 2 vols., with preface by Stuart C. Sherman. New York: Argosy Antiquarian, 1964. Vickers, Daniel Frederick. “Maritime Labor in Colonial Massachusetts: A Case Study of the Essex County Cod Fishery and the Whaling Industry of Nantucket, 1630-1775.” Ph.D. Thesis, Princeton University, 1981.

Letters Home: Records of the Experiences of Common Soldiers in the American Civil War

The idea for my honors thesis project is inspired by my work last summer in the Chapin Library of Rare Books at Williams. I spent the summer reading and organizing the library’s collection of Civil War soldiers’ letters—a group of about one thousand letters written by men in army camps to the loved ones they left behind at home. Besides a cursory chronological arrangement, no one before me had touched these letters since the library acquired them. For me they represented a vast untapped historical resource—they were sitting in a closet waiting to be discovered, and I was the first to explore their possibilities. I found myself completely absorbed, squinting at line after line of cramped, faded script and imagining the words flowing haltingly from the authors’ pens as they crouched by the light of a sputtering campfire, the booming of cannon fire echoing in the distance. It fascinated me how these young men portrayed their experiences to family members back home—reassuring them of their safety and expressing enthusiasm for their causes while also betraying paralyzing fear and devastating homesickness. In one particularly memorable series of letters a Union soldier continued to write home to his wife from the battlefield during a siege of a Confederate fort, knowing that no mail was running and suspecting that the days he spent crouching under fire in the brush of a Louisiana forest would be his last. But somehow his letters did get through, and the final letter in the sequence told of his harrowing escape to a field hospital, giving me the hope that he and his wife were reunited soon afterwards.

The words of letters like these haunted me after I left work everyday, and stayed with me even after I left Williams for the year. As I started thinking about my plans for my honors thesis, I knew that I wanted to work closely with the letters in the Chapin collection. In my thesis, I plan to explore the average soldier’s experience of the war, using Union and Confederate sources in the form of the letters soldiers sent home to their families and friends. The Chapin Library’s collection is mainly made up of Union letters, so the Union side will be heavily based upon that resource. For the upcoming summer, I have been granted a summer research fellowship from Williams. My plan for this project is to gather resources from the Confederate side, visiting facilities in Virginia that hold extensive collections of Confederate letters. I am deeply interested in letting the authors of the letters speak for themselves so I will be comparing and contrasting specific experiences related by specific soldiers in relation to broader questions such as what reasons Union and Confederate soldiers gave for fighting, whether the views they express in their letters aligned with the professed views of their respective causes, what they knew—if anything—about these causes, and what they thought of one another. Perhaps most of all I would like to use these primary documents to emphasize how the soldiers on opposing sides were alike—how they commonly identified with certain ‘American’ values and ambitions, and how their views on the War were shaped significantly by the coincidence of which side of the divided country they happened to be born on.

I believe letters like these offer historians an invaluable means for stepping inside the minds of the actors who participated in historical events. And the particular set of letters I will examine in my project is important because it does not tell the ‘great man’ version of the Civil War, governed by figures like Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. Instead, it gives us a broader sense of the common man’s—in this case the common soldier’s—experiences of events that fundamentally shaped the American past. This is a version of the past that is often inaccessible to us, so it is important for historians to take advantage of resources like those housed in the Chapin Library. It is impossible for me to encompass all the perspectives and experiences offered by surviving Civil War letters, which is why I have chosen to focus my research closely on the Chapin collection, which is manageably sized and within convenient proximity to me for research during the academic year. After working with those letters for several months, I feel that I have a general sense of what they have to offer—a representative sample of the experiences of the common soldier in the war. In my research in the South this summer, I plan to supplement the Chapin collection with more Confederate examples. I also plan to draw inspiration from secondary sources, a small collection of which I have listed below. Many scholars have worked from Civil War soldier’s letters in the past, and they have even infiltrated popular culture to a considerable extent—most famously through Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. These authors will help me to get a sense of wider patterns in the experiences of soldiers, but I will rely upon my reading of primary sources to draw out specific examples.

The most exciting thing about my proposed thesis for me is that I really do not know what I will find or where my research will take me. I suspect that there are an inexhaustible number of topics that may be drawn out from Civil War soldiers’ letters, and I am confident I will find many things in my research that will inspire me. I am deeply committed to approaching history through contact with authentic documents and artifacts, and I look forward to the opportunity to do this over the course my project next year.

Preliminary Bibliography :

Primary sources: I will rely heavily upon the collection of approximately one thousand Civil War letters in the collection of the Chapin Library of Rare Books at Williams for the Union perspective. For the Confederate point of view, I will use collections of letters held by the Virginia Historical Society, the Museum of the Confederacy, and the Library of Virginia, all in Richmond, as well as the library of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. There are also collections of letters accessible online, in particular The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries at http://solomon.cwld.alexanderstreet.com/.

Secondary sources :

Barton, Michael, and Larry M. Logue, eds. The Civil War Soldier: A Historical Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. McPherson, James M. The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. ______. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. ______. What they Fought For, 1861-1865, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. ______, ed. The Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. ______ and William J. Cooper, Jr., eds. Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Mitchell, Reid. Civil War Soldiers, New York: Viking, 1988. ______. The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Rosenblatt, Emil & Ruth, eds. Hard Marching Every Day: The Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk, 1861-1865, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. Sheehan-Dean, Aaron. The View From the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers, Wiley, Bell I. The Life of Billy Yank. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. ______. The Life of Johnny Reb, the Common Soldier of the Confederacy. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943. ______. The Plain People of the Confederacy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.

Writing for Stalin: American Journalists in the USSR, 1928-1941

“There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be.” So wrote the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times, Walter Duranty, on November 15, 1931. By the end of 1933, between six and eight million Soviet citizens, at least half of them Ukrainians, had perished in the wake of consecutive failed harvests and official repression, in one of the worst man-made famines in history. Duranty won his Pulitzer Prize a year before the end of the famine. Duranty was not alone in his whitewashing of the Soviet Union in general and Stalinist policy in particular. Journalists from all over the world writing from the USSR depicted a land of noble struggle, where the working class, guided by leader and Party, were forging a utopia free from the injustice and squalor of capitalism. Why did so many Western visitors to the USSR allow themselves to become mouthpieces for the Soviet regime, with evidence of political repression and hideous suffering all around them, while only a few observers spoke out against the communist regime? What was the appeal of Stalinism in this age of the great crisis of capitalism? The 1930s were a time of uncertainty for liberal democracy, with the Great Depression causing misery across the world and calling into question the old liberal creeds of free market capitalism, while democracy itself was under siege from totalitarianisms of the left and right. To attempt to encompass this immense crisis in an entire book, let alone a thesis, would be a daunting task. Instead, I propose to probe this crisis through the microcosm of the men and women who visited the Soviet Union hoping to find a workers’ utopia. Many Westerners came to the USSR at the invitation of the regime, as journalists, technical experts, and travel writers who left behind an impressive body of news reports, diaries, letters, and memoirs. My thesis project will examine a particular subset of these visitors—the American journalists writing for US papers like The Nation, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times, or English-language publications in the USSR like The Moscow News. The time frame discussed will open with the launch of the first Five Year Plan in 1928, and conclude with the entry of both the Soviet Union and the United States into the Second World War in 1941. I will further focus my project on the coverage of two particular events: the much-denied famine taking place in the Ukraine, and Stalin’s Purge-era show trials, where many observers wrote either that those on trial really were saboteurs and agents of foreign powers, or that their guilt or innocence was of little consequence in the grand historical drama that was unfolding. I choose these two events because they represent indictments of the Soviet system’s claim to legitimacy—its ability to feed all its people, and its claim to be a truly fair society. The gymnastics of fact and logic undertaken by the regime’s apologists on these points are thus of particular significance.

So far, the question of what it was about most journalists visiting the USSR in this period, and what it was about Soviet communism, that made most reporters toe the Party line has not been addressed in particularly great depth. Today, those who favored the regime, like Walter Duranty, Maurice Hindus, and Anna Louise Strong, tend to be dismissed as ideological hacks, either willfully ignorant or purposely lying in the service of socialism. Those who see through the regime’s cloud of deception are by contrast heroic truth-tellers. A certain amount of work has been done on official Soviet efforts to win over liberal-minded Westerners in this period, and the Duranty Pulitzer Prize controversy has generated a number of articles and books in recent years, most notably S.J. Taylor’s Stalin’s Apologist. However, the historiography leaves open a number of questions. Were the journalists reluctant to speak against the regime because they could lose their access to the leadership, because their families might be targeted (many married in Russia), or similar, practical causes? To what extent did the practical intersect with the ideological as reporters sympathized with the official ideology and goals of the regime, and were prepared to forgive a little gangsterism on the part of the leadership if it would bring about a genuinely fair and equal society? As Duranty put it in his article of May 14th, 1933, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Was there something about the generally well-meaning liberalism of the American journalists that led them in droves to whitewash the crimes of Stalinism in service of some genuinely laudable social projects like universal literacy and the welfare state, as well as a powerful vision of a society that could come to be? Moreover, how were these journalists’ points of view informed by the society that produced them? What, if any, were the differences in the attitudes of those who were foreign-born, like Duranty and Hindus, and those like Strong who were natural-born citizens? To what extent did the reporters’ experience of Depression-era America, with all its hunger and inequality, influence their perception of the Soviet Union, which claimed to eliminate all such evils of capitalism?

In seeking an explanation of why so many American reporters upheld the Stalinist line in this period, I plan to explore three distinct sets of sources. First, I will examine the actual newspaper reports produced by these journalists. Americans reporting from Moscow were well aware that they were virtually the only source of information about events inside the USSR available to Americans, and their articles naturally give a great deal of insight into how they hoped to explain the Soviet system to the American public. Next I will consider more private sources like the reporters’ diaries and letters, which may shed light on the internal thoughts, goals, motivations, and reservations of the journalists, and include thoughts that were left out of their news articles or later memoirs. Finally, I will consider the memoirs that many journalists wrote during or directly after this period about their experiences in the USSR. The memoirs that I have read so far are extremely rich sources, raising a number of important questions of methodology. How far can we trust these reporters, who often wrote several years after the events they witnessed? Were the memoirs published before or after the Soviet Union had become engaged in the battle against fascism, either indirectly in Spain, or directly after 1941? Are these memoirs little more than cases of special pleading by journalists hoping to prop up both the great idea of communism and their own reputations? The memoirs by those reporters like Eugene Lyons who defied the safe consensus of their colleagues and wrote against Stalinism (often at the price of their careers) present a fascinating set of outliers. Can we trust such former sympathizers to report the truth as they saw it, or do conversions from fellow traveler to anticommunist attack dog represent swings between extremes of endorsement and repulsion, implying unreliability? These sources, both the ones I encountered and wrote about in my tutorial last term with Robert Service, as well as those I have come across since, will constitute a very rich base for my research.

Using this source material, I am seeking to tie together the grand political and ideological debates of the 1930s and the personal lives of the journalists in question to explain why so many of these men and women embraced Stalinism, while a few wrote furious condemnations of the Soviet system. This project will in many ways be an exploration of the crisis of capitalism and seeming rise of socialism in microcosm, driven by the particular nuances and intricacies of my particular material. In 2010, it seems all too obvious to us that Stalinism was a nightmare for millions of Soviet citizens, but eighty years ago, it was still very much an open question whether the future belonged to capitalism or communism. Those who made excuses for Stalinism sometimes did so for the best of reasons. However, that so many people could be so wrong about Stalinism demands an explanation.

Dismal Scientists, Diplomats, and Spooks: Bissell, Milliken, and Rostow and Their Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy

As the current global economic crisis shakes countries around the world, its effects resonate beyond the realms of financial regulators, central banks, and finance ministries. This crisis has created a number of foreign policy challenges for the United States government, and Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair recently declared to the Senate intelligence committee, “The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications.” Blair, however, is not the first representative of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, or even the foreign policy-making establishment of the country as a whole, to advocate for incorporating economics into the conduct of U.S. foreign relations.

Richard Bissell, Max Milliken, and Walt Rostow share a number of similarities; all three, born in the beginning of the twentieth century, graduated from Yale University, became economics professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later worked as researchers at a number of the same think tanks. More remarkably, all three of these men wandered from academia and into influential roles in the foreign policy-making establishment of the U.S. government during the early Cold War. Between them, these former economists developed strong ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the White House during the formative years of the United States’ as a global hegemon.

This commonality opens a number of interesting questions. What motivated their decisions to become economists and then to transition from academics to Cold Warriors? Was their overlap coincidental or does some common thread or societal trend connect their journeys? And, most important and relevant to questions at hand today, what role did these social scientists see for economic theory and analysis in the planning and practice of foreign policy? I plan to explore how world events shaped the career decisions and ideologies of these men, and, in turn, what effect their ideas and contributions had on the development of U.S. foreign policy.

I expect to mainly explore their ideas on economic intelligence, especially with regard to Milliken and Bissell, who both spent significant periods in the CIA, and modernization theory, for which both Rostow and Milliken served as strong advocates to the White House and State Department. With current debates in the U.S. on rebuilding our economic intelligence capacities, correctly using foreign aid, and coping with the current financial crises, the insights gleaned from these former scholars and Cold Warriors could shed light on contemporary issues.

As sources for my investigation, I plan on utilizing the papers of Max Milliken and Walt Rostow, which are both available at the John F. Kennedy Library. Bissell’s memoir and several oral interviews in which he participated are also publicly available. Furthermore, several working papers, which these men produced as officials of the U.S. government and as researchers at numerous think tanks, are known to exist. And, finally, I plan to utilize the rich existing scholarship on modernization theory and its role in U.S. foreign policy.

Bibliography

Central Intelligence Agency On-line Library. Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room. Personal Papers of Max Millikan (1913-1969), John F. Kennedy Library. Walt W. Rostow (#8.24), John F. Kennedy Library. Wilson, Theodore A. and Richard D. McKinzie. “Oral History Interview with Richard M. Bissell, Jr.” Harry S. Truman Library. Works by all three at various think tanks, including one collaboration between Bissell and Milliken at the Center for International Studies (CENIS). Bissell, Jr., Richard M. Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Fialka, John J. War by Other Means: Economic Espionage in America. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999. Latham, Michael. Modernization as Ideology. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Light, Jennifer S. From Warfare to Welfare. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pearce, Kimber Charles. Rostow, Kennedy, and the Rhetoric of Foreign Aid. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001.

Media Reflections of Western Public Opinion in the Suez Crisis

In the years following the Second World War, the global balance of power shifted significantly; following conflict amongst the traditional Great Powers, a bipolar power struggle emerged between the United States and the Soviet Union. The military and financial costs of the Second World War made it extremely difficult for European powers to hold their colonial empires, the loss of which compounded their economic downfall and ensured their decline as world powers. These material conditions were certainly a major factor in determining the new balance of power, as was the relative strength of the U.S.’s economic position, but less quantifiable factors were also importantly at play, namely the ability of each of the new and old powers to reconceptualize its role in the world and adapt its attitudes toward other nations accordingly. As decolonization occurred and Cold War conflicts began to arise across the globe, the Cold War powers and the traditional Great Powers were facing novel foreign policy challenges, mostly in the vein of trying to establish influence overseas when using force to do so was no longer feasible or morally acceptable. Thus each nation contending for global influence was forced to reassess its identity as a player on the world stage. Government officials developing policy carried out this reassessment as a conscious process, but it also occurred spontaneously within national populations responding to the obvious shifts in global power dynamics, begging the question: how well did government reconceptions of identity reflect public attitudes in the early Cold War era? The emergence of many new nations and nationalisms in the postwar world created ample cases which exemplify how modern national self-perceptions developed on different levels and how that led to the consolidation of a new world order. My thesis will focus on the 1956 Suez Crisis, due to its location in the strategically important and materially rich Middle East, which resulted in the involvement of many countries, and within that conflict, on the Western powers involved, for whom government was supposedly representative- England, France, and the United States.

Despite historiographical debates about precipitating and intermediate causes, the Suez Crisis of 1956 can be traced at least in part to the joint U.S.-British decision to discontinue their planned funding for the Egyptian government’s Aswan High Dam project, leaving the Egyptians in need of ready money, which served to justify Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. The proposed Aswan High Dam project was exemplary of the new state of relations between Egypt and the western powers following the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. The new Egyptian leadership was anti-colonial, but not opposed to productive relations with the Western world. Thus, it hoped cooperative projects like the construction of the Aswan High Dam could usher in a new type of relationship between Egypt and the West. For Britain, this would mean relations based on voluntary economic cooperation rather than exploitation by force, while for the U.S. the change of policy consisted not in promoting an anti-colonial position but in doing so quite actively, as opposed to its former stance of relative isolationism. Britain and the U.S. tried to advance anti-colonial economic relations as per Egyptian requirements in order to maintain and create, respectively, a presence in the region, which was important in order to protect financial interests in the Middle East that were highly dependent on access to the Suez Canal, and to keep the Soviets from establishing rival influence there.

However, when the U.S. and Britain ultimately deemed the Aswan High Dam project inopportune and Nasser nationalized the canal in the summer of 1956, the ensuing Suez Crisis featured the British, influenced by the French, playing a traditional colonial imperialist role, while the U.S. took on a novel modern role, acting as an international arbitrator in pursuit of its own Cold War related interests. That Britain aligned with France rather than U.S. during the Suez Crisis is not entirely surprising given each nation’s recent history in international relations; careful study has reflected the extent to which French and British politicians were misguided in their political calculations by thought processes that were still largely driven by outmoded colonial considerations. There is also debate about the extent to which they based their policies on false assumptions about the U.S. position. The leaders involved in the Suez Crisis based their decisions about how best to serve their material interests without losing political capital not only on analysis of other nations’ official positions but also on their reading of public opinion at the time. No Western government wanted to act against national will and lose popularity with its constituents over Suez. It is therefore natural to wonder to what degree the western leadership’s gauge of popular thought was skewed by historicism, or conversely, how closely public attitudes in Britain, France, and the U.S. towards the developing crisis in the Middle East actually tended to match official ones in judging what action each nation should take.

For my thesis, I would like to examine this question: to what extent were policy-influencing perceptions of public opinion about the Suez Crisis in Britain, France, and the U.S. accurate? To fill out the high command side of the picture I would use mostly secondary sources, and when necessary the primary documents they are based upon (such as sources available in the U.S. National Archives, British Public Records Office, and French Foreign Ministry Archives), focusing my original research on French, British, and U.S. newspaper and perhaps radio coverage as indicative of trends within the field of public opinion in each country. To manage the scope of this study, I intend to concentrate on the two most publicly controversial time periods within the months of the Suez Crisis, the week after the canal was nationalized on July 26, 1956 (up to and including August 2) and the week after Israel invaded Egypt on October 29, 1956 (up to and including November 6). By analyzing the straight news coverage of, and the range of editorial responses to, the decision taken by Nasser to nationalize the canal, the decision of Israel to invade Sinai, and the subsequent statements and actions taken by France, Britain, and the U.S., I hope to determine the tenor of each national discourse about the crisis, and to place all three within a comparative framework in order to determine the relative degree to which elite and mass perceptions corresponded over the appropriate role for each Western power to play in Suez. The degree to which the press (on a national and local level, across the full spectrum of political stances), condoned and encouraged official decisions taken during the Suez Crisis will hopefully illuminate how well the political development of the crisis matched mainstream contemporary attitudes not merely about the situation, but about where the world powers now stood as arbiters of international relations and, thereby, how far long-serving leaders with deeply rooted beliefs about the role of their nations in the world were able to conform to the demands of a world in which the ideological as well as material environment had recently undergone major changes.

Preliminary Reading List :

Relevant Primary Sources to be located through:

The Times online archives, at http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/tol/archive/ British Library Integrated Catalogue: Newspapers, at http://catalogue.bl.uk ProQuest Historical Newspapers (US) including The New York Times, at http://proquest.umi.com French sources through Gallica, the French National Library’s Digital Browser, at http://gallica.bnf.fr/?&lang=FR

Azar, Edward E. “Conflict Escalation and Conflict Reduction in an International Crisis: Suez, 1956.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 16 (1972): 183-201. Cockett, R. “The Observer and the Suez Crisis.” Contemporary British History 5, no.1 (Summer 1991): 9-31. Gorst, Anthony, and Lewis Johnman. The Suez Crisis. London: Routledge, 1997. Louis, Wm. Roger, and Roger Owen. Suez 1956: The Crisis and its Consequences. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Lucas, W. Scott. Divided We Stand: Britain, the United States and the Suez Crisis. Sevenoaks: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991. Negrine, Ralph. “The Press and the Suez Crisis: A Myth Re-Examined.” Historical Journal 25, no. 4 (1982): 975-983. Oneal, John R., Brad Lian, and James H. Joyner, Jr. “Are the American People ‘Pretty Prudent’? Public Responses to U.S. Uses of Force, 1950-1988.” International Studies Quarterly 40, no. 2 (Jun., 1996): 261-279. Owen, Jean. “The Polls and Newspaper Appraisal of the Suez Crisis.” Public Opinion Quarterly 21 (1957): 350-354. Parmentier, Guillaume. “The British Press in the Suez Crisis.” Historical Journal 23, no. 2 (1980): 435-448. Rawnsley, G. D. “Cold War Radio in Crisis: the BBC Overseas Services, the Suez Crisis and the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.” Historical Journal of Radio and Television 16, no.2 (Jun., 1996): 197-219. ______. “Overt and Covert: The Voice of Britain and Black Radio Broadcasting in the Suez crisis, 1956.” Intelligence and National Security 11, no. 3 (July, 1996): 497-522. Shaw, Tony. Eden, Suez and the Mass Media: Propaganda and Persuasion During the Suez Crisis. London: Tauris, 1996.

The Implications, Effects, and Uses of Media in the Emmett Till Lynching

I propose to write an Honors Thesis in History during the xxxx academic year. After researching topics that interest me and consulting with Professor xxxx, I have developed a project that analyzes the uses and effects of media during the Civil Rights Movement. More specifically, my project will investigate how children, and the American media’s depiction of them, greatly impacted the American consciousness of the Civil Rights Movement. Children were a part of some of the most widely televised and reported Civil Rights events such as the lynching of Emmett Till, the use of water cannons and police dogs on children, the deaths of four black girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, the desegregation of Central High School, and the Selma marches where children were trampled by police horses.

Taking on a project with all these events would be beyond the scope of a senior thesis, so Professor Long and I have narrowed our focus to the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955. To briefly summarize this event, after allegedly whistling at a white woman, fourteen year old Emmett Till was shot and his body thrown in the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi by a group of white men. Emmett’s great-uncle identified two of these men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, as those who had forced Emmett into their car the night he was killed. The trial lasted a mere five days, and the all-white jury acquitted both men of Emmett’s death in about an hour.

Media coverage served very important roles in Emmett Till’s death. In The Chicago Defender, Emmett’s hometown newspaper, the first articles on Emmett Till include pictures of his inconsolable mother being held upright by family members in front of Emmett’s casket. The newspaper articles focusing on Emmett also refer to the recent lynchings of black voting rights activists and the recent Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. In effect, these articles attached a name, face, and picture to individuals affected by racist violence in the South while incorporating and increasing the visibility of large-scale race issues. Television crews broadcast Emmett’s mutilated face at his open-casket funeral, sparking outrage and horror throughout the country. Viewing these images in white America’s living room made the Jim Crow South more visible across white America. Media coverage of Emmett’s death further motivated black America to take a stand against white supremacy, all the more so after both white men confessed to Emmett’s murder in Look Magazine. This event raises myriad questions regarding race relations in the South, but I want to focus my efforts on a few that interest me most. I want to explore the reasons, implications, and effects of Emmett’s mother’s decision to display Emmett’s mutilated and decomposed face at his open-casket funeral. This investigation leads to the history, reasons, and importance of open-casket funerals in the African-American community. My project will also analyze the response of the white community in the immediate area where Emmett was murdered. His murder has been well documented in television coverage, newspaper articles, and magazine interviews; however, very little research has examined the media’s impact on the regional, national, and international levels. I want to examine how these communities responded to Emmett’s death and how the white South was viewed as a result of different reactions according to race and location.

Furthermore, Emmett Till’s murder raises questions regarding white masculinity and femininity and their relationship to black masculinity. Another aspect to this project may include how the image of Emmett Till has been remembered and reconstructed by the media more recently in the form of television series and movies. I seek to investigate these issues primarily through primary sources such as photographs, television coverage, newspaper articles, and interviews of individuals. Secondary resources, particularly in the field of media studies will be helpful to my project. Overall, my project will become part of a greater dialogue that explores the media’s perception of the white response to black life and culture in the Jim Crow South.

Since the summer after my sophomore year at Williams, I have laid the foundation for this project. My independent research through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship has allowed me to develop my research skills, work closely with a professor, and read over a dozen seminal primary and secondary sources in the field of race relations in the United States. I have already written two research papers, (with a third on the way) about these books.

I am interested in writing an Honors Thesis in History for many reasons. Most importantly, I want the opportunity to immerse myself in a subject that greatly interests me while contributing to a larger body of academic work in the field. Writing a thesis is also important because it will allow me to dedicate an extended period of time to a very specific subject. I enjoy historical research and want the satisfaction of knowing that I thoroughly understand the intricacies and nuances of a particular topic, even though it may be a small fraction of a larger whole. Additionally, I want to complete a large historical project to show history graduate schools of my seriousness in pursuing a Ph.D. in American History.

Cromwell Lives while Mason Stalks: Irish Nationalism and Historical Memory during the Troubles

In my proposed thesis I want to ask how significant perceptions of Irish history were in perpetuating the Troubles. Often, the pieces of history that get retold vindicate the present. I believe that perceptions of Irish history are significant in perpetuating the conflict in Northern Ireland because both Unionists and Nationalists created their own versions of history which they use to give legitimacy to their political visions for the future. Within the communities, different interest groups manipulate and re-manipulate history and each separate reading of the past justifies the present actions of its perpetuators. In this sense, the issue of history is an issue of legitimacy, and legitimacy is directly linked to political power. In their book The Northern Ireland Conflict: Consociational Engagements, John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary write that Northern Ireland is “a site of competing analogies and norms. Neither of its communities… have been able to achieve hegemonic legitimacy. This is one reason why the conflict continues.” It’s a trope that history is written by the winners, and in Northern Ireland, both sides are trying to write themselves as winners. Far from just an intellectual debate, the separate readings of history are crafted to justify political action, perpetuating the conflict.

Partition is a classic example of how Unionists and Nationalists use history to justify their current political positions. The Unionists perception of history accentuates the continuity of partition as a social force. Historian A.T.Q. Stewart uses the election of 1886 to emphasize the innate nature of partition. In it, seventeen out of thirty-three Ulster members of parliament elected were for Home Rule. That emphasized to Protestants that they were characteristically different from the rest of the inhabitants of Ireland. Stewart writes, “from 1886 to 1920, Ulster Protestants were a minority under threat.” By stressing the deep, cultural roots of partition, Stewart justifies it as a logical action and just solution that was a long time coming.

In contrast, the general Nationalist reading of the same period of history frames partition as “the arbitrary division of the country”, to quote the New Ireland Forum Report. “In the period immediately after 1920,” the Report continues, “many saw partition as transitory.” Nationalists tend to blame British imperialism or other exogenous factors as the cause of the conflict. In this way, they are able to represent partition an illegitimate action imposed on Ireland. The emphasis on exogenous factors allows Nationalists to imply that partition is the problem. Generally, they argue that by removing it and restoring the territorial integrity of Ireland, the conflict would be solved.

Both Unionists and Nationalists construct elaborate historical myths that legitimate their claim to the territory of Northern Ireland. Andy Tyrie, the supreme commander of the Ulster Defense Association in the early 1980s, broke from the traditional Unionist position of supporting union with Great Britain and advocated for an independent Ulster in the early 1980s. He created historical justification for his position by arguing that the areas of Scotland where Ulster Protestants came from were originally colonized by tribesmen from Ulster in the early middle ages—so in a sense Ulster Protestants were just returning to their ancestral homeland when they re-colonized in the seventeenth century. “Many people are convinced that the Protestants arrived here in 1607,” he said. “But their ancestors arrived here long before that. The Ulster people have always been here.”

Tyrie’s myth about Ulster was designed to compete with the traditionally Republican version of history of centuries of Irish resistance to British imperial rule. The Nationalist myth, as summarized by Padraig O’Malley, begins with the invasion of Ireland by England 800 years ago. In it, O’Malley writes, “history is linear. Thus, Ireland was subdued by superior arms and resources, but not beaten; the struggle to re-establish a free and united Ireland was carried forward from generation to generation.” The H-Block Song, written for the Republican prisoners in the maze perpetuates this view of events. The song ends with the question, “Does Britain need a thousand years of protest, riot, death, and tears?” emphasizing the long history of Irish oppression at the hands of British invaders. Lines like “Black Cromwell lives while Mason stalks” create a sense of the historical continuity of the fight against British imperialism, linking Oliver Cromwell with Roy Mason, the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland when the H-Block song was written in 1976.

Both of these “ancestral tribe” myths are designed to support current claims to the island. Neither one is particularly valid historically, but the point is not historical accuracy. These myths are designed to create legitimacy for current political claims. Thus, history has become a tool allowing each side to perpetuate and justify their view of the conflict.

In my proposed thesis I’d ask the significance of perceptions of Irish history in perpetuating the Troubles. Much of the scholarship that I’ve read concentrates on specific historical occurrences and doesn’t directly investigate Irish historiography, or the link between historical memory and political action. I’d begin with a definition and explanation of the Nationalist myth of unbroken struggle. I’d draw on the writings of Irish Nationalists such as Padraig Pearse, as well as later scholarship by historians such as Padraig O’Malley. I’d also study how this historical myth has been created and perpetuated both inside Ireland and also abroad. On the international front, I’d specifically focus on how Irish Nationalists draw historical analogies to oppressed-native minority/settler-oppressor conflicts such as comparing their situation to the struggle over apartheid in South Africa. I’d study memoirs and interviews, like Adrian Kerr’s book Perceptions: Cultures in Conflict, and scholarship, such as Adrian Guelke’s book on comparative politics, Northern Ireland: An International Perspective. I’d also draw on art and propaganda: music, street murals, accounts of parades, 1916 commemoration posters issued by Sinn Fein and other Republican groups, and films, such as the 1980 documentary The Patriot Game, which gives a Nationalist account of the Troubles.

The well-established historical myth of Nationalist struggle presupposes an almost inevitable pattern to history: “Ireland unfree will never be at peace.” Therefore, I’d next investigate how the Nationalist reading of Irish history has affected political events during the Troubles. I’d focus on two important historical occurrences, the 1974 Ulster Worker’s Council strike that brought down the Sunningdale power-sharing agreement and the 1981 Republican hunger strikes. According to the strike bulletins, the main reason the UWC wanted to stop Sunningdale was because of the provisions it made to involve the Irish Free State in Northern Ireland’s affairs, which it characterizes as “the main danger.” I’d investigate if this anti-Irish attitude was affected by the striker’s perceptions of Ulster history and the North’s relationship to the South.

With the hunger strikes, I’d research the connection between the strikers’ experiences and Irish history. I’d specifically ask if the hunger strikers appealed to historically Irish motifs of martyrdom in an attempt to gain political legitimacy for the Provisional IRA. My hunch is that the Nationalist movement consciously used history as a practical tool in order to get political status for their prisoners, but it would take further research to figure this out. Not Meekly Serve My Time, the remembrances of Republican H-Block prisoners and hunger strikers would be invaluable, as would the diaries of Bobby Sands and the writings of Gerry Adams, as well as the memoirs of SDLP party leader John Hume.

Through these two specific incidents, I’d study how perceptions of Irish history affected the politics of Northern Ireland during the 1970s and early 1980s and also investigate how Nationalists and Unionists used interpretations of history to generate political legitimacy.

Adams, Gerry. Selected Writings. Kerry: Brandon, 1994. Bew, Paul and Patterson, Henry. The British State and the Ulster Crisis. New York: Verso, 185. Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie. The Provisional IRA. Aylesbury: Corgi Books, 1989. Campbell, Brian, Laurence McKeown, and Felim O’Hagan, ed. Not Meekly Serve My Time: The H Block Struggle 1976-1981. Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 1998. Farrell, Michael. Northern Ireland: The Orange State. London: Pluto Press Limited, 1976. Gallagher, AM. “Majority Minority Review 2: Employment, Unemployment and Religion in Northern Ireland.” CAIN Web Service, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/csc/reports/mm210.htm. Guelke, Adrian. Northern Ireland: An International Perspective. New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Hepburn, A.C., ed. The Conflict of Nationality in Modern Ireland. London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1980. Hume, John. Personal views, Politics, Peace and Reconciliation in Ireland. Dublin: Town House, 1996 Kerr, Adrian, ed. Perceptions: Cultures in Conflict. Derry: Guildhall Press, 1996. McAllister, Ian. The Northern Ireland Social Democratic and Labor Party. London: Unwin Brothers Ltd., 1977. MacDonagh, Oliver. States of Mind. London: Pimlico, 1992. McGarry, John and Brendan O’Leary. Explaining Northern Ireland. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. ______. The Northern Ireland Conflict: Consociational Engagements. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Mulchaly, Aogan. “Claims-Making and the Construction of Legitimacy: Press Coverage of the 1981 Hunger Strikes.” Social Problems 42, No. 4 (Nov. 1995): 467-499. “The New Ireland Forum Report,” CAIN Web Service, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ issues/politics/nifr.htm. O’Malley, Padriag. Biting at the Grave. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1990. ______. The Uncivil Wars. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1983. O’Neill, Terence. Ulster at the Crossroads. Faber and Faber: London, 1969. Rose, Richard. Governing without Consensus. London: Faber and Faber, 1971. Sands, Bobby. Writings from Prison. Cork: Mercier Press, 1998. Stewart, A.T.Q. The Narrow Ground: The Roots of the Conflict in Ulster. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. “Strike Bulletins of the Ulster Worker’s Council Strike, No 1.” CAIN Web Service. http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/uwc/uwc-pdfs/one.pdf. Sweeney, George. “Irish Hunger Strikes and the Cult of Self-Sacrifice.” Journal of Contemporary History 28, No. 3 (Jul. 1993): 421-437. Wichert, Sabine. Northern Ireland Since 1945. London: Longman, 1999.

‘My broken dreams of peace and socialism’: Youth propaganda, personality, and selfhood in the GDR, 1979-1989.

“I was a young citizen in a young nation, and it was my duty to advance the cause of socialism,” writes Jana Hensel in her memoir of childhood during East Germany’s final decade of socialism. The molding of youth and children like Hensel into healthy “socialist personalities” desirous of political stability and unity had been the object of the Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) most ardent ideological efforts ever since the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949. By the 1980’s, however, when the GDR could no longer rely on brute force to secure the loyalty of its subjects, the very survival of the Communist East German regime had come to depend on the success of the socialist mentality building project. To urge the new generations of East Germans to develop personal qualities essential for the advancement of socialism, the SED mobilized all of its resources: the school system, youth organizations, mass events, and leisure time activities. Unlike the youth of the 1960’s, however, “Honecker’s children” turned out to be much more concerned with personal matters than with the fulfillment of their social and political obligations. Moreover, with the assimilation of new psychological models and concepts of individuality throughout the 1980’s, the anachronism and absurdity of SED’s personality building project became increasingly apparent.

In my Honors thesis, I plan to examine the manifold ways in which the ideological prescriptions disseminated by the SED during the 1980’s actually shaped the lived experience and affected the sense of selfhood of young members of East German society. I also wish to reflect on the lasting effects of GDR’s preoccupation with character building on the sense of identity of “Honecker’s children” twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. My work thus aims to complement current historical literature on the politics of the GDR’s youth project with a thorough investigation of the cultural, psychological, and sociological aspects of socialist character building in the GDR. To this end, I plan to relate my investigation of the ways in which the youth responded to new ideas about the socialist East German self to sociological and anthropological works on identity and selfhood, as well as to psychological theory on childhood and memory. By examining the ideas about selfhood lying at the very heart of East German youth policies and focusing on the ways in which the youth understood them and responded to them, I hope to challenge current understandings of the overarching roles of culture and ideology in postwar German history.

I will begin my research by examining official documents printed by the GDR Ministry of Education, to reveal how state-sanctioned ideas about selfhood were engendered and promoted by the East German school system throughout the 1980’s. I will then explore the inner workings of mass youth organizations such as the Free German Youth (FDJ) to trace the manifestation of these ideas in party-monitored extracurricular and leisure time activities. By investigating children’s letters to relatives, diaries, and anthologies of poems, I plan to shed light on the kinds of interpretive categories that children and youth were using in turn to make sense of their own experiences and evolving personalities. I will then examine memories of GDR’s personality building project in their natural context by conducting interviews with the protagonists of my research during my stay in Berlin and Jena this summer.

Among the secondary sources central to my research are the works of social historians such as Anna Saunders, Alan McDougall, John Rodden, and Alan Nothnagle, who have previously explored the dynamics of youth policy in the GDR and delineated the evolution of propaganda techniques employed by communist youth organizations and schools to communicate Marxist-Leninist values and ideology. Equally significant are the works of Alon Confino and Daphne Berdahl, which examine the consequences of the rigorous program of socialist patriotic education in the GDR on the sense of national and personal identity of the youth before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. My research aims to respond to debates that have concerned not only German historians, but also scholars of international youth politics. Some of the questions I will be asking are: how much autonomy did the East German youth of the 1980’s have in shaping their sense of self, in what ways were they influenced by the personality models put forward by the SED, how did they conceive of themselves as historical subjects before and after the collapse of the East German regime, and what may explain their reactions to the personality building project?

Agee, Joel. 1981. Twelve years: an American boyhood in East Germany. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Andresen, Sabine. 2006. Sozialistische Kindheitskonzepte: politische Einflüsse auf die Erziehung. München: Ernst Reinhardt. Annen, Niels, Björn Böhning, Kai Burmeister, and Sven Frye. 2007. 100 years of International Socialist Youth: struggle for peace and equality in the world. Internationale Politik (Vorwarts Buch (Berlin, Germany)). Berlin: Vorwärts Buch. Baehr, Vera-Maria. 1990. Wir denken erst seit Gorbatschow: Protokolle von Jugendlichen aus der DDR. Recklinghausen: G. Bitter. Berdahl, Daphne. 1999. Where the world ended: re-unification and identity in the German borderland. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press. Berdahl, Daphne. 2000. Altering states: ethnographies of transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. Confino, Alon, and Peter Fritzsche. 2002. The work of memory: new directions in the study of German society and culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Confino, Alon. 2006. Germany as a culture of remembrance: promises and limits of writing history. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Franke, Klaus, and Gerhard Krause. 1976. Kommunisten und Jugend in der DDR. ABC des Marxismus-Leninismus. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Freie Deutsche Jugend. 1987. Fragen und Antworten zum Programm der SED. Berlin: Dietz. Friedrich, Walter. 1975. Jugend, FDJ [i.e. Freie Deutsche Jugend], Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur sozialistischen Persönlichkeitsentwicklung junger Arbeiter und Studenten in der DDR. Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben. Fulbrook, Mary. 2005. The people’s state: East German society from Hitler to Honecker. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hellbeck, Jochen. 2006. Revolution on my mind: writing a diary under Stalin. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Hensel, Jana. 2004. After the Wall: confessions from an East German childhood and the life that came next. New York: Public Affairs. Intertext, Fremdsprachendienst der DDR. 1985. Free German youth, the GDR’s all-embracing youth organization. Berlin: Panorama DDR. Jahnke, Karl Heinz. 1986. Partei und Jugend: Dokumente marxistisch-leninistischer Jugendpolitik. Berlin: Dietz. Jarausch, Konrad Hugo. 1994. The rush to German unity. New York: Oxford University Press. Jarausch, Konrad Hugo. 1999. Dictatorship as experience: towards a socio-cultural history of the GDR. New York: Berghahn Books. Leiby, Richard A. 1999. The unification of Germany, 1989-1990. Greenwood Press “Guides to historic events of the twentieth century”. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. Leidecker, Gudrun, Dieter Kirchhöfer, and Peter Güttler. 1991. Ich weiss nicht, ob ich froh sein soll: Kinder erleben die Wende. Stuttgart: Metzler. Macleod, David I. 1983. Building character in the American boy: the Boy Scouts, YMCA, and their forerunners, 1870-1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Maier, Charles S. 1997. Dissolution: The crisis of Communism and the end of East Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. McAdams, A. James. 1993. Germany divided: from the wall to reunification. Princeton studies in international history and politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. McDougall, Alan. 2004. Youth politics in East Germany: the Free German Youth Movement, 1946-1968. Oxford historical monographs. Oxford: Clarendon. Meier, Andreas. 1998. Jugendweihe–JugendFEIER: ein deutsches nostalgisches Fest vor und nach 1990. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Michalzik, Martin. 1994. An der Seite der Genossen–: offizielles Jugendbild und politische Sozialisation im SED-Staat : zum Scheitern der sozialistischen Erziehung in der DDR. Melle: Knoth. Mothes, Jörn. 1996. Beschädigte Seelen: DDR-Jugend und Staatssicherheit : mit 136 Dokumenten und einer Audi-CD mit Original-Tonunterlagen. Bremen: Edition Temmen. Nothnagle, Alan L. 1999. Building the East German myth: historical mythology and youth propaganda in the German Democratic Republic, 1945-1989. Social history, popular culture, and politics in Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Pelka, Anna. 2008. Jugendmode und Politik in der DDR und in Polen: eine vergleichende Analyse 1968-1989. Osnabrück: Fibre. Pence, Katherine, and Paul Betts. 2008. Socialist modern: East German everyday culture and politics. Social history, popular culture, and politics in Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rodden, John. 2002. Repainting the little red schoolhouse: a history of Eastern German education, 1945-1995. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press. Rodden, John. 2006. Textbook reds: schoolbooks, ideology, and Eastern German identity. University Park, Pa: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Rodden, John. 2008. The walls that remain: Eastern and Western Germans since reunification. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Saunders, Anna. 2007. Honecker’s children: youth and patriotism in East(ern) Germany, 1979-2002. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schmemann, Serge. 2006. When the wall came down: the Berlin Wall and the fall of Soviet communism. Boston: Kingfisher. Schneider, Gisela. 1980. Jugendbrigaden, Bahnbrecher des Neuen. Berlin: Verlag Tribüne. Solms, Wilhelm. 1992. Begrenzt glücklich: Kindheit in der DDR. Marburg: Hitzeroth. Thomson-Wohlgemuth, Gaby. 2009. Translation under state control: books for young people in the German Democratic Republic. New York: Routledge. Turner, Henry Ashby. 1987. The two Germanies since 1945. New Haven: Yale University Press. Urban, Detlef, and Hans Willi Weinzen. 1984. Jugend ohne Bekenntnis?: 30 Jahre Konfirmation und Jugendweihe im anderen Deutschland 1954-1984. Berlin: Wichern-Verlag. Walter, Michael. 1997. Die Freie Deutsche Jugend: ihre Funktionen im politischen System der DDR. Freiburg im Breisgau: Arnold Bergstraesser Institut. Weyer, Jochen. 1974. Youth in the GDR: everyday life of young people under socialism. Berlin: Panorama DDR. Zahra, Tara. 2008. Kidnapped souls: national indifference and the battle for children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zilch, Dorle. 1994. Millionen unter der blauen Fahne: die FDJ : Zahlen, Fakten, Tendenzen : Mitgliederbewegung und Strukturen in der FDJ-Mitgliedschaft von 1946 bis 1989 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Funktionäre. Rostock: Norddeutscher Hochschulschriften Verlag.