hIstorical paper

• It is your task to come up with a thesis, a proposition that you can argue for and demonstrate with evidence. I will not give you a topic.

• As you formulate a thesis (a statement that implies an answer to a question and which invites analysis rather than summary), you may take guidance from the “Five Cs of Historical

Thinking” – Change Over Time, Causality, Context, Complexity, and Contingency.

Remember to maintain a clear focus on specific years, named eras and chronology in general;

and to account for long temporal gaps between your examples.

• Your evidence should all come from readings on the syllabus. You must cite at least three secondary sources and three primary sources. You are free to read ahead and use sources from

the last part of the semester. You are also free to expand on the two-page paper that you have

written (or will write) for recitation section and to incorporate that material into this paper.

Your thesis may overlap with the one you developed for the midterm essay, but you must use

different examples and sources to illustrate it.

• Your paper should have a title that reflects your thesis, it should use Chicago Style to cite sources, and it should be a clean, well-edited text that demonstrates attention to grammar and

punctuation and reflects professional standards and serious effort.