University of New
Mexico, Fall Semester 2016
History 491: Historiography
Professor E. A.
Sanabria
Final
Paper Assignment
A full 30% of your
course grade will derive from your performance on your final paper due, which
will be in due on Tuesday, 13 December 2016, by—and no later than—NOON. You may deliver the paper in person (though I
will be proctoring an exam that morning) or get the paper into my History
Department mail office (Ground Floor of Mesa Vista Hall) by Noon. Earlier submissions are welcome and
appreciated as I have to read your papers lickety-split in order to figure out
your final grades as expeditiously as possible.
This final paper is in lieu of a final examination for this course.
The paper is an historiographical essay on a topic of your choice, but it
must showcase, to some degree, skills, concepts, methods, etc. that you have
learned from our seminar. It must be
about 2500 words long (approximately 10-12 pages) not including your
bibliography, which should adhere to the Chicago
Manual of Style documentation style, in a normal 12 point font with no more
than 1 ¼” margins, double spaced. If you
decide you must quote at length from a book or article that informs your paper,
separate the more-than-four-lines-of-text passage from the text of your essay,
and single space the passage. Refer to
the course syllabus for examples of how your footnotes or endnotes should look
like or search for Chicago Manual of
Style from
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html
In this paper you
should show in detail a concrete aspect of the course as well as your critical
insight and both research and writing skill.
Ideally, I would like you to have selected a topic for your
historiographical essay or annotated bibliography by Tuesday, September 13th
when I ask you to email me with your proposed topic, and/or you visit me
personally in office hours to discuss your topic. I am happy to provide you with reading
suggestions, if I can, but it is imperative you get a jump on this assignment
from the get-go.
You are to prepare an historiographical essay, which will require a good
measure of additional reading on your part on the topic of your choosing, but
most importantly will allow you to showcase your ability to gather, examine,
and evaluate materials pertaining to a particular subject. You are required you to seek out 7 to 10
different sources for your evaluation.
Historiography is the
study of the ways in which historians have interpreted the past. Knowing how to read and evaluate the work of
other historians is also a very important skill in addition to holding the key
to how historians agree, build upon, disagree, etc. in their interpretation of
events, people, and/or concepts of their study.
For example, some historians have made and developed the argument that the
leadership and legislation of the Left-Republican/Socialist coalition that was in control during 1931 to
1933 is to be blamed for the outbreak of the Civil War. Other historians, however, have made and
developed the argument that the Spanish Civil War was an inevitable result of
the political and cultural fracturing of the nation which began in with the
Napoleonic Invasion and Occupation of 1808-1814. These differences in interpretation reflect
the varying approaches that historians might take to their subject as some
historians might be primarily interested in social, cultural, political,
economic, legal, or intellectual history.
They might approach their work from a Marxist, Freudian, feminist, or
post-modernist perspective. Such
backgrounds and interests affect the ways in which a historian explores and
interprets the past; thus, historians interested in the same historical event
might examine different sets of sources to answer the same question. As the abovementioned Mary Lynn Rampolla writes:
“For
example, in studying the causes of the French Revolution, Marxist historians
might focus on economic and class issues, while intellectual historians might
concentrate on the impact of the writings of philosophies (a group of French
Enlightenment writers) on the political thought and practice. Moreover, since the historian’s work is
embedded in a particular social and cultural context, historical interpretations
and methodologies change over time. For
example, the growth of the civil rights and feminist movements in the 1960s led
to a greater interest in African American and women’s history.” [1]
So an
historiographic essay is one in which you, acting as an historian, study the
approaches to a topic that other historians have taken. You are essentially writing an history of the history of the topic of your
choosing. You are to identify, compare
and evaluate the viewpoints of several scholars. You should begin by reading critically the texts
containing historians’ interpretations (especially introductions and
conclusions to books and articles) as if you’re preparing a book review of the
source, but it is important that your historiographical essay not be a series
of book review that you glue together.
Rather, you should synthesize your material and construct an argument in
support of a thesis. Rampolla,
again, cites the following example:
“Historians
have held dramatically different view about the importance of European colonial
rule in Africa: Marxist historians,
along with others who focus on economic issues, have tended to see the colonial
period as an important turning point, while cultural historians have maintained
that the impact of the West on the ancient cultural traditions of
Although I hope you
know you shouldn’t pass on the writing of another author as your own without
fully documenting your source, I suggest you skim this example of an historiographic essay prepared by Stanley G. Payne:
Which can be accessed
at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/260362
As you may know you
can use and access the Jstor.org database directly from any UNM computer
terminal. If you want and need to access
jstor from your home or laptop computer, here’s how
you do it:
Go to http://elibrary.unm.edu
Select the letter “J”
from the databases grid
Select Jstor
Enter your UNM user
id and password