History 467 Research Paper Assignment

Due: Friday, April 6, before 5:00 p.m.

Location: Your GSI's mailbox in the history department mailroom located across the hallway from 1029 Tisch Hall.

Late papers: Leave in the drop box located right outside the mailroom, with the time and date of submission written on the paper.

Length: 10 pages (maximum), double-spaced, typed/word processed, 12-point font, one-inch margins.

Guidelines: Papers should conform to the History 467 Style Guide. You must use footnotes or endnotes for documentation of sources—no exceptions. Make sure to document not only direct quotations but also any source from which you draw specific facts or ideas, even if you paraphrase instead of quote the material. If your footnotes/endnotes are comprehensive, you do not need to include a separate bibliography. If you consult sources that do not appear in your notes, however, you should cite them on a separate bibliographic page. In addition, you may not submit a paper that is identical to, or substantially similar to, a paper that you have already written or are currently working on for any other course. Failure to provide adequate documentation and failure to submit an original paper representing your work for this class alone are serious violations of academic standards, with proportionate consequences. If you are unsure about any of these guidelines, please consult your GSI or the professor.

Topic Approval: Submit your research topic in writing to your GSI on or before Friday, March 9. Include a one-paragraph topic description and a preliminary bibliography with separate listings of the primary and secondary sources that you have identified. We understand that your research is likely to be very much in the beginning stages at this point. The purpose of this early deadline is twofold—to encourage you to begin thinking about the research paper before the last minute, and to allow us to give you feedback on the topic and potential sources. You are also welcome to communicate with the professor about your research paper.

Assignment: Research and write about a topic that falls within the broad boundaries of post-1945 U.S. history. Choose a research topic of interest to you and of relevance to the themes of History 467, a topic that allows you to investigate a particular issue in detail and then to provide your own analysis within a broader historical framework.  You may choose to pursue in greater depth an event or theme discussed in the lectures or readings, or you may choose to investigate a specific area related to but not explicitly covered in the course.  Feel welcome to be creative in your approach. Select a topic that is broad enough to be of general importance, and for which sufficient sources are available, but also narrow enough to allow you to research the issue in depth. 

The best way to narrow down a topic is either geographically, chronologically, or thematically. If you choose to write about the civil rights movement, for example, you might want to narrow the focus to the voting rights campaign in Selma, or the open-housing battles in Chicago, or the Black Power conflicts in Oakland. But the local story you tell should be integrated into the broader national story of the trajectory of the civil rights era. If you choose to write about the Vietnam antiwar movement, you might want to research the 1967 March on the Pentagon, or the Chicago convention showdown, or the Kent State episode, or the activity at a particular campus. If you choose to write about a social movement or a cultural trend, such as feminism or conservatism or consumerism, narrow the topic by focusing on a specific time frame, a specific place, or specific episodes in political culture or popular culture.

A topic that takes a cultural history approach is certainly appropriate for this class. If you choose to research an element of television, film, fiction, music, or any other cultural form, however, you must place your topic in historical and political context. Generally this means analyzing the cultural document for insights into particular issues that mattered during the era in which it appeared; researching the newspaper/magazine reviews and other mass media discussions about the cultural document when it appeared; and seeking to link fictional themes or popular cultural representations to historical themes and political issues. The books by Tom Engelhardt, Glenn Altschuler, and Bruce Schulman provide good examples of how to integrate cultural documents into a broader historical framework. If you choose a current or relatively recent cultural topic, then the task of providing historical context is trickier but no less essential. This can be accomplished through a variety of strategies: comparison and contrast to previous cultural trends in the same genre (e.g. what do Eminem and Elvis have in common?), analysis for insights into contemporary issues in politics and policy and society (for example, how are recent films or television shows about Iraq related to broader political debates?), and so forth.

Requirements: Research papers must draw from a minimum of ten primary sources and a minimum of two secondary sources (including at least one secondary source from outside the class syllabus). Different articles from the same magazine or newspaper, such as Newsweek or the New York Times, can count as separate primary sources. In general, the broader your primary source base, the better the paper.

1. Secondary Sources. While the main narrative of the paper should be drawn from primary research, the analysis and conclusions of the paper should be located within a thematic framework enhanced through consultation with secondary sources. Secondary sources are works by scholars that use primary documents to analyze and interpret the past. Every assigned book on the syllabus, except the Tim O'Brien novel and the William Finnegan work of journalism, is a secondary source. So are the articles by Rhodes, Cuordileone, and Henriksen. Berkeley in the Sixties is a secondary source because it is a documentary that reconstructs the past. The list of books at the bottom of each lecture outline is designed to provide students with ideas for secondary sources on particular topics.

The requirement to use two secondary sources in this research paper does not mean that you should simply draw most of your evidence from primary research and then include a few facts or quotations found in a book. The goal is for you as a student of history, in the introduction and/or conclusion of your paper, to enter into a direct dialogue with the arguments and conclusions made by other historians who have addressed the same or similar topics. Your paper should be able to answer the question of why your topic is important, and it should discuss how your findings relate to broader debates in the academic scholarship about your topic. Do your findings mesh with what other scholars have argued, or do they suggest new ways of thinking about the topic? If you write about a topic in Detroit, for example, you should explicitly compare and contrast your conclusions to the analysis offered by Thomas Sugrue in Origins of the Urban Crisis (and one additional scholar). If you research an aspect of the nonviolent civil rights movement, then grapple with Chafe's "Progressive Mystique"; for an episode from the 1970s, Bruce Schulman's arguments in The Seventies, and so on. An excellent paper will address broad historical themes in the introduction and the conclusion, while presenting a primary source-driven account that forms the heart of the narrative.

2. Primary Sources. The research paper must be based primarily in primary research. A well-researched paper reconstructs a historical narrative from a variety of primary sources and is original in its presentation, without ever losing focus on the larger analytical framework. Simply summarizing events as they are recounted by someone else in a secondary source will result in an unsatisfactory research paper. Good papers will be based in a diverse rather than narrow range of primary sources. Broadly defined, primary sources portray events from an immediate firsthand perspective rather than a secondhand scholarly interpretation. Common types of primary sources include newspaper and magazine articles, oral interviews with participants or eyewitnesses, government reports and documents, court cases, and manuscript collections of the private papers of organizations or individuals (see below). Primary sources may also include films, novels, music, and other cultural forms that reflect the time period in which they appeared. Primary sources on the syllabus would include each of the assigned films (except the Berkeley documentary) as well as the O'Brien novel and the articles by Friedman, Ignatieff, Fallows, Gladwell, Edmundson, Samuels, the Reagan speeches, the Port Huron Statement, and the 2002 "National Security Strategy." Primary sources also would include an article or advertisement from an issue of Life magazine during the 1950s, an interview with one of your grandparents, an article in the Detroit News covering the events of 1967, the text of a Supreme Court decision, a report by the NAACP, or statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Some tips on beginning primary research:

**Many primary sources—including newspaper articles, magazine articles, and legal cases—are available electronically through Lexis-Nexis/Academic Universe and ProQuest. You will have to familiarize yourself with the navigation tricks if you have not used these databases previously, but you can keyword search several dozen newspapers and hundreds of journals and magazines through these resources.

**Lexis-Nexis and ProQuest are only two of the major research databases available at the University of Michigan Library's Search Tools webpage.  Check out some of the other databases by following the link in the previous sentence, including the very useful America: History and Life search engine.  If you have trouble navigating this resource, consult a research specialist in the library.

**The ProQuest database includes a new feature that allows you to keyword search every article published in five newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Wall Street Journal), including decades that are too early to be included in many of the main electronic databases. The search engine for these five newspapers can be found at ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

**Articles from Time magazine can now be keyword searched online at the Time Archive: 1923 to the present.

**The Microforms Room in the Graduate Library contains a number of manuscript collections that have been microfilmed for researchers, including the NAACP Papers and the Educational Research Information Center, among others. Most primary sources are not available electronically, and microfilm is often an essential way to uncover certain documents. The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, for two examples, are available on-line only for recent years, and so you have to consult microfilm before that. If you search for the title of any newspaper or magazine on MIRLYN, you can find out whether it is available electronically or on microfilm or in the stacks.

**The Government Documents Room, also in the Graduate Library, contains many reports from local, state, and federal governments. Reference librarians can help you navigate this resource.

**The Bentley Historical Library, located on North Campus, contains the manuscript collections of many different individuals and organizations. The Bentley also contains the Michigan Historical Collections, with many sources about political and social history in the state. If you are having trouble deciding on a topic, then exploring the Bentley's collections might give you some good ideas.

**The Labadie Collection, part of the Special Collections Department at U-M, contains one of the world's most extensive archives of resources in the areas of political and social protest, including most of the major themes of this class. You can begin to scroll through the specific collections at the Labadie by following this link to the Labadie Manuscripts. You can also look through the general topics in the collection at the Labadie Subject Vertical File. You will have to visit the Labadie Collection in person to get into any of the details. Some of the very best research papers written for History 467 in the past have utilized the extraordinary resources of the Labadie Collection, which allows you to probe far deeper into a topic than simply reading newspaper and magazine articles online.

**Some magazines can be found only in bound volumes in the stacks. The reference room on the second floor of the graduate library contains a number of volumes that might prove useful, including the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. If you want to research a topic where source availability is in question, planning ahead can allow you to request newspaper microfilm not held by the U-M library through Interlibrary Loan, but ordering this material takes several weeks and should be done promptly if necessary. If you have questions about how to conduct library research, begin by asking one of the reference librarians.

**The History 467 Resources for Research webpage includes a number of electronic archives and sources available on the web, designed to give you ideas for the research paper.

**A note on web-based research: An immense amount of material is available on the worldwide web, some of it from traditional sources such as newspaper websites and public policy centers and government archives, much of it from nontraditional sources such as personal websites constructed by individuals to highlight their own interests or obsessions. You should use nontraditional sources sparingly and with caution. An impressive research paper will not be based mainly on material found on the website of someone who is a self-styled expert on a television show or a political event. In addition, using a free website such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ for the main evidence and arguments that you include in your research paper is inappropriate. If you draw most of your research from wikipedia or similar websites, your grade will reflect this lack of effort to conduct your own research beyond googling information. Your paper must be based on original primary research, and websites of this nature are in fact secondary sources in electronic form, but also lacking the standards of historical accuracy required by book publishers. The activity involved in extracting data from such websites is more like reading a classmate's paper than it is like doing your own research and analysis. However, personal and other types of theme-based websites can be useful in providing information that might be hard to find elsewhere, such as the transcripts for episodes from a television series, or chat-room dialogue that offers evidence of the attitudes of fans. In these cases, such a website would be an appropriate forum for one of your primary documents. The test for primary versus secondary sources is whether the document provides evidence that requires you to assemble your own narrative and conduct your own analysis, or whether the document presents material that allows you simply to summarize someone else's narrative and analysis. It should go without saying that presenting material from a web-based archive as your own work, or finding all or part of your research paper from one of the many on-line archives that offer assistance in cheating (and are also keyword searchable by graders as well as students), will result in serious penalties that begin with a failing grade for the class.

If the distinction made here between primary and secondary research on the web still seems confusing, check out these two electronic sites for an illustration. The University of Maryland Law Library offers an electronic database that includes the Historical Publications of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. These are primary sources found on the web. On the other hand, The Wonder Years: An American Narrative is a website project created by a group of U-M students about the popular television show. If you found this website, or something similar, through an internet search engine, the material inside could provide some ideas for your own research (with mandatory citation of the website in your notes or in a bibliography), but it would not count as your own primary research. Instead, primary research would involve watching episodes of The Wonder Years on your own, looking up newspaper and magazine articles about the effects of the show during the period of its broadcast, and analyzing the themes and significance of the show through comparison to broader trends in nuclear family sitcoms or examination of the historical context of the program.