Description
The final paper will be 1,200-1,500 words (equivalent to four to five pages) in length, and due on the last day of class.Your final paper must be on a topic of your choosing, relating to a topic or theme in world history from 1800 to the present that we have covered in this class. We have gone over WWII, The Cold War, and Decolonization. You will conduct your own primary source research. Spend time exploring these databases to settle on a topic that interests you. I am deliberately giving you a lot of latitude to get started, but if you need help settling on a topic we can discuss ideas during office hours. You must choose at least three original sources relating to that same topic. These can be documents, images, maps, videos, or oral histories–whatever you can find! Each source should be reasonable to manage, so of similar length to the primary sources provided in the textbook reader on which you wrote your three analyses.In your paper, you will not simply describe the sources you found, but you will develop a historical argument or claim that is supported by the primary sources you found. To get to that point, you need to spend time thinking critically about the sources themselves. Refer back to the document on How to Read and Analyze a Primary Source in History. Once you’ve asked these questions of the sources, you can start to ascertain what you can conclude from the sources, and through that process you will be able to start developing an argument about the past that the sources provide evidence for.An argument (also called a claim or a thesis) is not a restatement of fact, nor is it an opinion. An argument is something that you have to defend with evidence. Think of yourself as a prosecutor in a criminal court. You are not there to simply describe the crime to the jury–restating the known facts. Rather, your job is to prove that the defendant is guilty using the evidence, and specifically using your interpretation of the evidence. The defense will be using the same evidence to argue against you, so you must make your case more convincing. If you spend all your time describing what happened without explaining the different reasons that led you to the conclusion that the defendant is guilty (that is, without arguing your case, or in this paper your thesis), then you will not have done your job. Think of that analogy when you are writing your paper. Ask yourself, am I actually proving something here or just describing something? And, am I proving something here with convincing interpretations of the evidence (your primary sources), or am I just stating my opinion (because in court, you couldn’t just say “I think he’s guilty” and leave it at that). To get to a sound argument, you must first examine the evidence and come to some conclusions about what each source is telling you.