Historiographic Essay: Description of Assignment
History is a constantly changing discipline, always subject to the various ways in which historians interpret past events. Historians often have differing perspectives on precisely how to interpret the past. These differences are usually attributed to using different sources to make claims about a certain topic, to having different interpretations of the same sources, and writing during different periods in history. This constantly-changing conversation about the past between historians is called historiography. Since historiography is vital to the discipline of history, you will write a historiographic essay this semester using at least three secondary sources gained from the Library or an article database.
In your 7-10pg historiographic essay, you are going to choose three secondary sources (books and articles) that present one narrow topic of your choosing (a topic relevant to the history of World Civilizations during the period we studied) in very different ways. You should use at least one book and one article, but are not bound to any restraints so long as the sources are academic secondary sources.
That difference may be because the books were published in different time periods; or, the books may have been published around the same time, but the historians writing each one used very different sources or interpreted the same sources very differently. You are encouraged to run your topic and book/article choices by me at office hours or via email before researching.
PLEASE USE JSTOR
In the essay, you will need a thesis statement about how your topic differs from one source to the other AND why that difference exists. A thesis statement can be more than one sentence if needed. In order to prove your thesis in the essay, you must include at least three pieces of evidence from each textbook.
The historiographic essay is due no later than May 5th. You must clear your topic with me by April 14th. The essay must be footnoted in University of Chicago/Turabian style. A copy of this style can be accessed through the Library home page under “Citation Help” and the “Turabian/Chicago” subheading. You may also see the Center for Reading and Writing for citation and paper-writing assistance.
