… for American Studies Senior Seminar participants. Below are some places to start with work for a larger project of historical research. These are by no means prescriptive, but rather are drawn from my own years of work — including the year I spent working on a thesis for American Studies at Georgetown 15 years ago.
- You need a question! Nothing is more important that having a strong inquiry question to keep your research and writing on track through the course of the project. You’ll need to refine it and elaborate it continually through the process.
- You need a method! Mine is generally centered around historical approaches with assistance from cultural theory.
- What is the process of history? At its most basic, history is the practice of learning about the past based on evidence from primary sources. Generally, historians look at questions of change and causation, and then try to offer interpretations about what happened and why. This is not as easy as it seems.
- You need a field, or several! Historians care what other historians have thought about events in the past. These interpretations change over time and need to be accounted for in historical work.
- Read as widely as possible in scholarly fields that are related to your topic. This forms your base of secondary sources, offers context, and provides you with possible interpretations to engage.
- Have an organizing system for your work from the beginning. Absolutely use Zotero. [Here is my current library.]
- Search the databases that are related to your field for relevant articles. Start with the American Studies Research Guide. I really like American History and Life, but JStor, and ProjectMuse are also good places to start.
- Consult Reviews in American History to get a sense of the scholarly conversations going on in the field.
- Use your library. Search and browse the stacks. Skim and summarize individual works (what is the argument and how is it related to my work?). Be sure to read several reviews on each of the important secondary sources.
- You need primary sources! The choices are endless here, but you might want to consult Archive Finder or the searchable catalog of website reviews from teachinghistory.org to be begin locating materials that might start to offer answers to your inquiry question.
- You need to work through your sources!
- Create a Zotero entry for each primary source. Take notes there. Sync often.
- Cognitive science research tells us that there are particular ways that historians approach primary sources.
- Write all the time: outline, make notes on significance, revisit your questions, constantly articulate your understanding of meaning. I do this with handwritten free writing, and plain text notes.
- You need to draft! Write and rewrite. Writing is a craft that needs to be practiced with conscious attention. Even after doing this for 15 years, I rarely produce anything worth reading without three full drafts. Plan ahead for the amount of time that this drafting process takes.
- Use models. Find a writer or work that you really admire and use that as a guide for possible approaches and structures.
- Use your writing groups and your advisor. It is almost impossible to write well in isolation. We need readers who offer thoughtful commentary and criticism.
- Writing environment is really important. I need a clean, full-screen place to draft if I am working on a computer (Try OmmWriter or WriteRoom).
- Scale matters to me. I have trouble writing on a large screen, and if I get really stuck, I go to paper and pencil. I write a lot by hand and then type it up. The transfer process gives me a chance to take a second pass and make an initial revision as I make things digital.
- I do my notes as I go (Chicago Manual of Style endnotes, including discursive notes). Never leave them to the end of the process; you will never catchup and you will end up with lots of mistakes. Use Zotero to drag and drop citation information into your documents.
- You need a platform to communicate your conclusions! Historical interpretation can take many forms, not just traditional linear narrative. We can talk more about this if you want.