Historical methodology essay

Overview: For this essay you are asked to conceptualise a research project. Rather than carrying out the project in its entirety, you are asked to critically evaluate the archive and the method you would use if you were to carry out the project. Imagine you have to write your final-year dissertation, which is 10,000 words, or about the length of a journal article: what topic would you like to research? This essay helps you think critically about how you would go about that research.
Choosing a subject: You may have enjoyed the insights of a method you studied in Hy120, and decide to look for an archive to evaluate using that approach. Or you may search for an archive related to a particular subject, and then find a method to use to evaluate it. Ultimately, the archive and the method you choose should help you pursue a quest to understand some larger historical subject. You want to choose an archive and an item from it that help you answer a question you do not know the answer to yet.
Choosing a method: Please use one of the methods studied on Hy120. The secondary sources you need should be found on the Hy120 reading list. You need not confine your reading to one week of the reading list. For example, you can combine gender history and visual history, but you should avoid having too many methods. You will have to critically evaluate your method, and it will not be possible to fit in more than about two. You may go ‘beyond’ the Hy120 reading list, but to go beyond it, you must go through it.
Choosing an archive: An archive is any physical or digital collection of primary source materials. Your archive can be anywhere in the world. It can be official, or non-official. It can be one we have looked at on the course, or it can be one you found yourself. You should have enough information about it to be able to understand the scope of the archive – all that is included and not included. You should also be able to read some of the items in the archive for this project.
You should critically evaluate your archive. You should describe and examine the collection as a whole. Critical analysis of the archive should draw on one of the historical methods we have studied in the course, and use secondary reading from the Hy120 reading list. Explore the limitations and possibilities that the archive and its collection present for historical understanding of a particular subject.
You should zoom in to discuss one item from the archive. This can be a text, a map, a material object or a recording of an oral history. You may choose more than one item, but you must analyse the item, so be careful not to try to cram in too many things to analyse.
Your essay must have an argument. Here are some questions to help you think about the content of your essay. These should not be used to structure your essay; in other words, do not answer these questions one-by-one in your submission. Use them to spur your thinking as you develop an argument.
Archive
What is the scope of the archive you have chosen? Who or what is included? What subjects are excluded?
Who are the curators of this archive? Are their intentions and motivations for collecting these materials clear?
What types of questions has this archive been compiled to answer? Have scholars used this archive to answer different questions from those set by the founders and curators?
How have the uses of this archive changed over time?
What larger research questions would you like to use this archive to answer?
Collection Item
Thinking about the one item you choose: What is the context for the item you have chosen? Who produced the item and for whom?
Is the item you chose representative of a wider trend? What kind of research would you need to do to find out?
Thinking about satisfying your larger research question, what are the limits of this collection and this document in that quest?
Method
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the method you can use to evaluate this archive and this source?
What are the debates within scholars who use the method you have chosen? Do you find one approach more rigorous, more flexible, or more appropriate?
How does the method help you interpret the archive and the item you have chosen? What are the limitations of this approach?
Your essay must have an argument.
You choose your essay title. Examples of essay titles from first-class essays from the past:
‘To what extent can the Black Cultural Archives redefine the dominant narrative of the 1981 Brixton Uprising?’
What can an oral history approach offer to our understanding of Partition of India (1947) through the Digital Archive of the Partition Museum?
To what extent can an Instagram archive tell us new things about the lives of ordinary members of the Middle East and North Africa region and in particular, those of the Palestinian diaspora?
How do Eleanor Roosevelt’s observations in her newspaper column ‘My Day’, collected by the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, reflect her perception of the Arab-Israeli conflict?
Overview: For this essay you are asked to conceptualise a research project. Rather than carrying out the project in its entirety, you are asked to critically evaluate the archive and the method you would use if you were to carry out the project. Imagine you have to write your final-year dissertation, which is 10,000 words, or about the length of a journal article: what topic would you like to research? This essay helps you think critically about how you would go about that research.
Choosing a subject: You may have enjoyed the insights of a method you studied in Hy120, and decide to look for an archive to evaluate using that approach. Or you may search for an archive related to a particular subject, and then find a method to use to evaluate it. Ultimately, the archive and the method you choose should help you pursue a quest to understand some larger historical subject. You want to choose an archive and an item from it that help you answer a question you do not know the answer to yet.
Choosing a method: Please use one of the methods studied on Hy120. The secondary sources you need should be found on the Hy120 reading list. You need not confine your reading to one week of the reading list. For example, you can combine gender history and visual history, but you should avoid having too many methods. You will have to critically evaluate your method, and it will not be possible to fit in more than about two. You may go ‘beyond’ the Hy120 reading list, but to go beyond it, you must go through it.
Choosing an archive: An archive is any physical or digital collection of primary source materials. Your archive can be anywhere in the world. It can be official, or non-official. It can be one we have looked at on the course, or it can be one you found yourself. You should have enough information about it to be able to understand the scope of the archive – all that is included and not included. You should also be able to read some of the items in the archive for this project.
You should critically evaluate your archive. You should describe and examine the collection as a whole. Critical analysis of the archive should draw on one of the historical methods we have studied in the course, and use secondary reading from the Hy120 reading list. Explore the limitations and possibilities that the archive and its collection present for historical understanding of a particular subject.
You should zoom in to discuss one item from the archive. This can be a text, a map, a material object or a recording of an oral history. You may choose more than one item, but you must analyse the item, so be careful not to try to cram in too many things to analyse.
Your essay must have an argument. Here are some questions to help you think about the content of your essay. These should not be used to structure your essay; in other words, do not answer these questions one-by-one in your submission. Use them to spur your thinking as you develop an argument.
Archive
What is the scope of the archive you have chosen? Who or what is included? What subjects are excluded?
Who are the curators of this archive? Are their intentions and motivations for collecting these materials clear?
What types of questions has this archive been compiled to answer? Have scholars used this archive to answer different questions from those set by the founders and curators?
How have the uses of this archive changed over time?
What larger research questions would you like to use this archive to answer?
Collection Item
Thinking about the one item you choose: What is the context for the item you have chosen? Who produced the item and for whom?
Is the item you chose representative of a wider trend? What kind of research would you need to do to find out?
Thinking about satisfying your larger research question, what are the limits of this collection and this document in that quest?
Method
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the method you can use to evaluate this archive and this source?
What are the debates within scholars who use the method you have chosen? Do you find one approach more rigorous, more flexible, or more appropriate?
How does the method help you interpret the archive and the item you have chosen? What are the limitations of this approach?
Your essay must have an argument.
You choose your essay title. Examples of essay titles from first-class essays from the past:
‘To what extent can the Black Cultural Archives redefine the dominant narrative of the 1981 Brixton Uprising?’
What can an oral history approach offer to our understanding of Partition of India (1947) through the Digital Archive of the Partition Museum?
To what extent can an Instagram archive tell us new things about the lives of ordinary members of the Middle East and North Africa region and in particular, those of the Palestinian diaspora?
How do Eleanor Roosevelt’s observations in her newspaper column ‘My Day’, collected by the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, reflect her perception of the Arab-Israeli conflict?

Here are the instructions, I have attached what I already have, but I would like it to be added upon.
Please include footnotes.

Here are some possible sources:

Intersectionality and its Discontents: Intersectionality as Traveling Theory in European Journal of Women’s Studies
Article by Sara Salem 11/2018

Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis in Gender & history
Article by Jeanne Boydston 2008

How Gender Affects the Experience of Archival Research and Field Work in Modern American History
Article by Ashley D. Farmer; Gretchen Heefner; Rebecca Herman; Lien-Hang T. Nguyen; Kirsten Weld 2019

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics in University of Chicago Legal Forum,
Article by Kimberle Crenshaw

Gender: Still a Useful Category of Analysis? in Diogenes
Article by Joan Wallach Scott 02/2010

What is cultural history?
Book by Peter Burke 2004

Material Culture and Cultural History in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Article by Richard Grassby 200Material Culture and Cultural History in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

The Power of the Archive and its Limits in Refiguring the Archive
Chapter by Achille MbembeThe Power of the Archive and its Limits in Refiguring the Archive

Last Completed Projects