American History

  
Due 24th, next Sunday, Thank you.
Choose a topic for your paper, it can be anything the interests you from the period that this class covers (US History To 1877), and find 2 primary and 2 secondary sources.  At least one of the secondary sources has to be a real book.  Moreover, your textbook or any book assigned as reading for this class is not valid source for your research paper.  Also, your online sources must be from reputable, scholarly sources, such as universities, museums, historical journal, or others along those lines, do not try to use the History Channel’s Website or some other television network.  Please use the template to help you format this assignment.
Name:__________________________________________
Topic of Paper/Working Title:
Primary Source-
Title:
Publisher:
Date of Publication:
Where you found it:
What information does it have that will be useful:
Primary Source-
Title:
Publisher:
Date of Publication:
Where you found it:
What information does it have that will be useful:
Secondary Source-
Title:
Publisher:
Date of Publication:
Where you found it:
What information does it have that will be useful:
Secondary Source-
Title:
Publisher:
Date of Publication:
Where you found it:
What information does it have that will be useful:
Now that you have chosen a topic and found some sources, I would like you to submit an outline of your paper.  At this point it should be a very basic outline and included information for your introduction, 3 main body topics, and a conclusion.  You should use Word to write this as it has a outlining feature that will help you with formatting.  Show me where you are going to use your sources, what information you are getting from them, and in general what you are going to write about.  I will then give you feed back to show you if you are on the right path and what you need to do to begin writing.  Remember, on the page in module 2 dealing with help on your paper shows how to get Word to create an outline for you.
Some things to help you with your paper
How to find sources for your paper
Finding sources for a paper may seem to be a daunting task.  Where do I start and how do I know if a sources is a good one are questions I seem to get all the time.  Hopefully these instruction will help you to find sources that you can use that are reputable and useful.
1. Choose a topic.  I know this sounds very basic, but you need to know what you are looking for before you start looking.  Try going through your textbook and see if anything jumps out at you.  If all else fails, send me a message and we can try to come up with something together.  I truly do not care what topic you choose as long as it falls within the time parameters of the class.
2. Try the UTPB library website.  http://library.utpb.edu/ (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.  This site has links to the card catalog to help you find books on your topic and a link to the online databases that you have access to as a student here.  Just type your topic into the search engine and see what you get.  Moreover, you can always physically go to the library, or your local public library, and talk to a librarian for help, they will happily point you in the right direction.
3. Try the website of a major newspaper that was publishing when your event happened.  The go to paper for American history is the New York Times.  Yes, some of their archives you have to pay for, but some you do not, and newspapers are a great primary source.
4. If all else fails try just doing a web search for your topic in a major search engine like Yahoo or Google.  If the web site address ends in .edu then most likely it is from a college or university and should be a reputable sources.  But, you can always ask me to check the source for you, just send me a message.  Beware any website that does not have an author’s name or any citations about where the information used to create the site came from.  Anyone can put up a website, it does not mean that what they put on their site is true or correct.
5. Remember, you need 2 primary and 2 secondary sources.  Primary sources are sources that were written at the time of the event or sources that were written somewhat later by an eye witness or participant in the event.  These kinds of sources include newspapers, letters, diaries, after action reports, TV or radio news broadcasts, or autobiographies.  Secondary sources are anything written after the event by someone who was not there.  Secondary sources include books written by historians, biographies, and journal articles from historical publications.  If you need more information on the difference between primary and secondary sources, check out: http://www.princeton.edu/~refdesk/primary2.html (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
6. Finally, once you find one source it can easily lead to more.  Look at the footnotes, endnotes, or bibliography of a book that you find about your topic.  It will list other sources that you can look at.  Just because the author of the book you are reading already cited this other sources does, it does not mean that you may not find something else useful from it, read it for yourself!
 And, as always, if you get stuck, send me a message and ask me!
How to take notes for a research paper
Taking notes from a book, article, or website is something that most of your will have to do throughout your professional career.  So, now is the perfect time to learn how.  At this point you should have picked a topic and found some sources that you believe will be useful to you in writing your paper.  Follow these steps to research and take notes from your sources.
1. Get some background on your topic.  You may have choose to do something like the American Revolution, World War I, or the Cold War (depending on your class).  These are very large topics, much larger than you can cover in a paper of this size.  You need to scale it down some, perhaps to one event or person connected to this event.  To do this you need to read a little.  Your textbook is a great place to start.  Also, Wikipedia can also provide some background to you.  But, never use Wikipedia as a source!!!!!  Wikipedia is open source, which means that anyone can edit it.  So, looking up and reading about your topic to get some basic information on Wikipedia is fine, but make sure that you confirm all information that you get from it in a reliable source.
2. Now that you have narrowed down your topic (and if you need help with that just send me a message and I can help you), you need to do some research.  Read the sources that you found and take notes about the topic that you decided to write on.  There are many different ways to take notes and I am going to suggest one here, but use what works for you.
3. I use a note card based system.  Below you will see a sample of the note cards I use for my research.  Each card has the last name of the author, the title of the source, and the page number at the top of the card.  The body of the card has my note on it, and the bottom of the card has a general topic.  This way, I know where each note came from which makes writing my citations much easier and, with each note on a separate card, I can more easily organize my notes into an order that makes sense for how I am going to write my paper.