Assignment Question
What is an historiography? While the book review assignment analyzed an individual work and its thesis, a historiographical review identifies themes or developments among a number of works. Assignment: Write a historiographical review of 5-7 pages. In total, you must review either two books and three scholarly articles or one book and four scholarly articles. You may include the books you reviewed for the book reviews.
Overview: This assignment has three major goals: To discern, explain, and assess the arguments of individual historical To identify themes or developments among a number of historical To make an argument about the historical literature that relates to your Make sure you include all of the following components in your historiography: Relation to topic: All of the works under review must relate to your topic of historical inquiry. They might represent different approaches to your topic, different aspects of the history of your topic, or examples of other scholars’ approaches to similar topics. You must make clear how each work relates to your historical question. Thesis: By contrast with the book review, a historiographical essay is organized around a thesis. The bulk of your paper will be devoted to proving this thesis. This thesis can take several forms. Possible forms include the identification of a theme in the historiography, the identification of a development in the historiography or the identification of common approaches to a particular topic.
Theme: Since X book was published in [YEAR], the scholarship on [TOPIC] has been organized around [CONCEPT] Development: In the past Y years, scholarship on [TOPIC] has changed in the following ways… Approaches: Books [X], [Y] and [Z] each approach [TOPIC] from different perspectives, but are united by… Analysis of individual historical works: Your historiography must include brief analyses (a few sentences) of the historical works under review. In these analyses, it is imperative that you identify the author’s approach, argument, and relationship to a broader historiography. Compare/Contrast: In order to illustrate how each work relates to the broader historiography, you must explicitly compare and contrast the approaches, arguments and evidentiary uses of the works under review. In doing so, you will discuss points of convergence among these works, as well as points that are in dispute. The above has been modified for use for Fall 2023 from another (unknown) professor’s work to make it reflect reasonable expectations of upper-level undergraduates Feed back on the original Please schedule a session with the Writing Center to help you with your grammar. Students have free access to the Writing Center, and there are online sessions available. Additionally, please ensure that you are using credible scholarly articles, as per assignment instructions.