Need 5 page spainish hist done

The Literature Review should have three parts: 1) identify three works of scholarship (journal articles of book chapters) that provide useful background and case studies for the topic you are interested in; 2) discuss how these three works have shaped your understanding of the topic, the questions historians find interesting regarding the topic, and your own approach to a potential project of your own; 3) a one paragraph statement on the kinds of primary sources (original historical documents) that other scholars have used to research and write on the topic.  This will be a significant amount of work for you and is the most substantial element of the research proposal, so give yourself time to do a good job.  Please include your prospectus with the Literature Review.  We will do our best to get you feedback on your revisions to the prospectus early next week and I'd like you to make further revisions to how youo frame your topic based on our feedback.  All sources for the Literature Review should be properly cited in Chicago Style.

Historical Context/Time and Place

· what events were especially significant during the time period that interests you?

· was the economy growing or contracting?  was the population growing or contracting? was Spanish rule weakening or strengthening?

· what were the primary economic enterprises in the region?  Mining? Ranching? Commercial Agriculture? Slave Plantations? Indigenous agriculture?

· was the region along or near major trade routes?  was the economy of the region tied to internal markets, to Atlantic trade, to Pacific trade?

· were there any significant epidemics, droughts, or natural disasters during the period you are studying?

· in what era would you place your period: Conquest; Post-conquest; the Long Middle Period; Late Colonial?  what processes of change defined the eras?

Categories for Social History

· social groups are defined by race, ethnic, gender, and age; all these categories overlap to produce sub-categories.

· avoid broad generalizations about a single social group; for example, women include individuals from different racial and ethnic categories, different regions, and from different age groupss. Peoples of African descent include slaves and free, city dwellers and rural folk, American born and African born.

· social groups are also associated with geography; their lives varied according to where they lived, cities vs the countryside; mountain valleys vs coastal shorelines; frontiers vs viceregal centers.

Making comparisons and identifying contrasts among different historians

· what is the thesis or main argument of each article? can you summarize each author's argument in a single sentence?

· what are the conceptual premises of the article?  do the author's make analytical assumptions?  do the three authors use the same concepts and methods, or different concepts and methods?  an example of a conceptual premise might be: women were controlled by male authorities or  social relations in a community are defined by the work that was done or Spanish authority in the late eighteenth century was getting stronger.

· how does each author define key terms?

· after reading an article, consider the question: where do we go from here? what the implications of this historians concepts and methods, their main argument, their conclusions for the work that I have proposed for my own research.

You might find it useful to look at a book review

· to see how historians assess each other's work, read a book review in a scholarly--they're short!

· your goal is not to make an evaluation of the quality of the work you choose to read; instead, your goal is to take something useful and positive from the article, and apply it to your own interests. 

· Hi, As you'll see on the syllabus, the instructions for the prospectus for your research proposal are quite simple.  We'd like a one-page statement that answers three questions: