You will be required to write an eight-page, double-spaced paper incorporating research in both primary and secondary sources on a topic related to the Vietnam War. You must draw on your sources to develop a coherent and tightly argued thesis that is original and is supported by the evidence you cite.
It is required that you demonstrate familiarity with the history and context of the topic, situate it in relation to the extant scholarship, and offer an extensive analysis of its significance and importance.
Please note that this essay is not to be merely an expression of your opinion; it must be grounded in solid scholarly analysis. Providing context (political, cultural, social) and citing abundant credible evidence – the foundation of the scholarly enterprise – to contextualize and demonstrate the validity of your argument(s) will be crucial.
Special attention must be paid to the scholarly literature dealing with the event or artifact (or similar events or artifacts); you will need to cite at least four scholarly (i.e., peer-reviewed) secondary sources; these could be academic books, journal articles, or conference papers, but NOT encyclopedias or book reviews. The class readings will not count as secondary sources for purposes of this assignment. Please be aware, too, that not all journal articles that appear in the Kathryn A. Martin Library’s electronic databases (Academic Search Premier, Academic OneFile, et cetera), and not all books on a given subject, are necessarily scholarly. Do not rely on the databases to tell you whether a source is peer-reviewed; the databases are sometimes wrong. The same is true of newspaper and magazine articles, which are not peer-reviewed and are therefore never scholarly (as I am using that term here). I thus strongly recommend showing me your sources before you begin your reading – that is, at an early date – to confirm that they meet the course requirements.
You will also need to draw from and cite at least three primary sources (archival documents or documents in published collections, interviews or oral histories, et cetera) in your essay. If the topic you are analyzing is a cultural artifact, it will not count as one of your primary sources. I have provided links on this Canvas site to a number of databases or archives that contain primary sources. Please note, however, that not everything appearing on these websites is a primary source. If you’re not sure, ask me.
All sources used – whether consulted, quoted, paraphrased, summarized, et cetera – must be acknowledged through a Chicago-style endnote. The failure to cite a source may open you up to a charge of plagiarism. In other words, cite your sources! And please keep in mind that you must provide a citation for the sources where you encountered them. For example, if you found information about a primary source within a secondary source (or information about a secondary source within a different secondary source), you must indicate as much; your citation should not imply that you consulted the original source.
If you are not familiar with Chicago as a citation method, please follow the “Chicago Style” link (Links to an external site.) on this Canvas site. Please keep in mind that the superscript numbers used in Chicago style should run sequentially in ascending order (i.e., the numbers should not be repeated), even if citing the same source multiple times. For how to cite the same source more than once, see the Chicago site to which I linked. If you need additional help with citations or are unsure about when to cite outside sources, please speak with me.
The papers should have titles that give some indication of their topic. They must also have page numbers, and they must be formatted in twelve-point Times or Times New Roman font with one-inch margins. This will assure uniformity in paper lengths. The papers must include a page at the end with two lists: one with the primary sources you used and the other with the secondary sources you used. These should be indicated clearly. This list of secondary sources should also clearly indicate which of the secondary sources are scholarly (i.e., peer-reviewed).
And while your endnotes will identify only the page numbers from which you drew, your list of primary and secondary sources at the end of your paper must include the page range of the articles as a whole. You do not need to identify the entire page range of any books that you used unless you are citing a chapter from a volume of collected essays with different authors for the different essays. Both this list and your endnotes must provide complete and accurate citation information (i.e., author, title[s], pages, etc.); they should not just be copied and pasted from how they appeared in a library database.
The paper will be graded on the basis of both style and content; it is therefore imperative that it be well written and free of grammatical and spelling errors. I recommend that you read your paper out loud before finalizing and submitting it; this is a helpful way to catch mistakes and ensure smooth prose. I must be able to understand what you are trying to say; if I cannot, your grade will suffer.
