Use the following sorces
This is a good time for you to do this. From the start of your program you need to be thinking about your major research project. Within the next year and a half most of you should be writing a research paper. Several of you will use your paper in a seminar course as your research project for your masters. Others will write a longer master’s thesis. This research prospectus assignment is to help you get started thinking in these terms.
First, do you want to work in US or non-US history? If you are interested in non-US history, unless you want to work in modern British history, the next question is what are your language skills? Ideally you should be able to read primary sources in the language appropriate to the time and area you are studying. Different professors may be willing to work with you arranging topics where you can draw more on English sources or English translations. You can use, of course, a dictionary for translating and there are computer translation tools available.
Next, think in terms of a geographic area, an historical time (such as year, decade, century), and a topical field (such as social, cultural, intellectual, labor, military, or political history, or the history of education, etc.).
Finally, for this to be a realistic venture, choose a topic that relates to a field of a professor in our program that you might be writing a seminar paper or thesis for in the future.
Through email, we can discuss what you are interested in and develop a tentative topic.
You will want to see what secondary and primary sources are available on the topic. This will help you to narrow your topic for a research paper.
Among the secondary sources, look for monographs related to your topic. A monograph is a scholarly history book often deriving from a PhD dissertation and usually published by an academic press. It is an in-depth study of a single subject or topic. It draws heavily on primary source research and presents and supports a new thesis. It cites sources in foot or end notes. It usually has a comprehensive bibliography. Unlike in the natural sciences and in much of the social sciences where nearly all scholarship is done in articles, within the history profession the monograph is the most important scholarly publication. The notes and bibliography of monographs can be used to find articles and primary sources for your topic.
>You will not actually be researching and writing a research paper during this course. For this course you only need to do enough preliminary research–and most of that can be online–in secondary and primary sources to write the prospectus and prepare a bibliography.
Please email me about any questions or concerns you have along the way in preparing the prospectus.
If you are a history accelerated masters student, you can choose to write your prospectus for your senior seminar paper.
If you are already working with a professor regarding either a seminar paper or thesis, please base your prospectus on that project.
If you are not a history MA student or history accelerated masters student, please send me an email. We can discuss alternatives to this assignment.
What to include in the prospectus describing your proposed research project:
Your name
Title of the project
Thesis
Questions you will consider
Method or strategy you will use to address those questions
Field(s) or kind(s) of history you will be working in (such as intellectual history, social history, military history, etc.)
Geographic area (such as French history, Chinese history, US history, etc.), and you might want to be specific on this such as, for US history, working in a region or area or state (such as the West, Ozarks, or Missouri)
Time frame for your project such as a general period such as medieval or early modern but also you should be specific, such as listing a decade
Which professor(s) in the department you would like to work with
Primary and secondary sources that you plan to use
If you are not doing US or modern British history, then be specific on your foreign language reading ability or on plans you have such as reading English translations or using translation tools.
How your paper will differ from the literature on the subject
For example, if your topic was the 1780s dispute over constitutional reform, and your question was whether geography and economic interests were important in determining how people voted on the issues connected to constitutional reform, then you would be working in political or legal and constitutional history, 18th century history, 1780s, in US history, and, to make it manageable, you could restrict your study to a single state, for example, New York. Your thesis could be that NYC wanted constitutional reform but the rural parts of NY did not. Obvious primary sources would include the journals of the NY legislature and the NY ratifying convention, and the method could be quantitative, to count votes by NY legislators and members of the NY ratifying convention and map them out to see if there was a clear division of votes between those from NYC and the rural parts of the state. Think of your thesis or question, what sources you would need to answer that question or support that thesis, and how you would go about using the sources to answer that question or support that thesis.
For the part on how your paper will differ from the literature on the subject, think in terms of an unexplored aspect, a new method of analysis, or a new interpretation. In the 1960s, for example, the quantitative method described above was a new method to use to study political history.
Bibliography. Divide it into primary and secondary sources. Use the Chicago style/Turabian as your guide on form. Be consistent in style with your entries.
Have at least 5 primary sources and at least 10 secondary sources.
The essay and bibliography together should be about five pages. The essay should be double spaced and in 12 font.
The essay will be graded on formal style and language. Do not use abbreviations or contractions. Do not use slang. Avoid writing in the first person. Be sure to proofread the paper for misspellings.Primary Sources:
Aberth, John. The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350: A brief history with documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, Macmillan Learning, 2017.
Andrews, Frances, Katherine Ludwig Jansen, and Joanna H. Drell. Medieval italy: Texts in translation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
Horrox, Rosemary. The Black Death. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1995.
Smelyansky, Eugene. “Chapter 7 Disease and Disability in Medieval Europe.” Essay. In The Intolerant Middle Ages: A Reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020.
Wallis, Faith. Medieval medicine: A reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
Secondary Sources:
Alfani, Guido, and Francesco Ammannati. “Long‐term Trends in Economic Inequality: The Case of the Florentine State, c. 1300–1800.” The Economic History Review 70, no. 4 (2017): 1072–1102. https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.12471.
Caferro, William. Petrarch’s war: Florence and the Black Death in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Cohn, Samuel K. The Black Death Transformed: Disease and culture in early renaissance Europe. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010.
Cohn, Samuel K. The cult of remembrance and the black death: Six renaissance cities in Central Italy. Baltimore u. a.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Cohn, Samuel. “After the Black Death: Labour Legislation and Attitudes towards Labour in Late-Medieval Western Europe.” The Economic History Review 60, no. 3 (2007): 457–85. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2006.00368.x.
Day, W.R. “The Population of Florence before the Black Death: Survey and Synthesis.” Journal of Medieval History 28, no. 2 (2002): 93–129. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0304-4181(02)00002-7.
Gottfried, Robert Steven. The Black Death: Natural and human disaster in Medieval Europe. San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 1997.
Green, Monica H. Pandemic disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the black death. Kalamazoo: Arc Medieval Press, 2015.
Herlihy, David, and Samuel Kline Cohn. The Black Death and the transformation of the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Kelly, John. The great mortality: An intimate history of the black death, the most devastating plague of all time. London: Harper perennial, 2006.
Meiss, Millard. Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.
This research paper needs to be 10-15 pages long