Paper #3 Assignment—Historical Argument About a Primary News Source

Paper #3 Assignment—Historical Argument About a Primary News Source

The Assignment

The assignment is to present a historical argument about a small set of primary news sources.

Your goal is to develop an interesting, not obvious, historical argument, and to develop it out of the sources at hand: your primary sources, some elementary research (in reference works), and an understanding of the context (our reading in Kovarik or other).

This paper is quite similar to the first paper assignment – except that you will be the one building the corpus of primary sources. Your corpus should follow the guidelines for the research paper: a substantial body of sources from the news before 2015 that shed light on an important topic. I must approve your corpus and your topic.

I suggest you develop your paper in stages: building a bibliography, reading, compiling notes, brainstorming argument, constructing an outline, drafting and reworking the text of the paper.

The work that you do for this paper will be integrated into the final paper assignment, a research paper of 8 to 12 pages (including context, historiography, primary source evidence and analysis, etc.).

Some Guidelines

  • Length: 3 to 5 pages
  • Format & citations: follow the guidelines in the Sample Short Paper. For citations, use Chicago-style footnotes with precise references, following the examples in Mary Lynn Rampolla as explained in the Sample Paper
  • Include a bibliography – in bibliographical format – of the sources that you have read for this paper. Separate primary and secondary sources, but note, you really don’t need a lot of secondary sources for this paper, perhaps just a couple encyclopedia articles and a few pages in Kovarik for context
  • Upload paper in pdf format to Moodle assignment

Criteria

  • Do you have an interesting corpus of primary sources that shed light on a larger topic?
  • Does the paper show a strong understanding of the primary sources?
  • Does it show a strong understanding of context?
  • Does it present a strong thesis?
  • Does it deliver this thesis with well-chosen examples and strong analysis?
  • Is it well organized (with a strong structure and well organized paragraphs)?
  • Is it well written – in clear prose that sounds like you?
  • Does it cite all sources and use information ethically?
  • Do you list your primary sources – and any secondary sources you are using – in a clean bibliography?