Writing Assignment 3

Writing Assignment #3: Crafting a Research Proposal and Analyzing a Primary Source 

Building on the type of close reading and annotation you did last semester, this assignment invites you to exercise several key skills of the historians’ craft: formulating research questions, identifying relevant sources, and analyzing sources. Typically, historians already have a more or less clear set of guiding questions when they visit an archive. For this assignment, however, we will reverse-engineer the process. You will first peruse items in an archive, and then formulate a research question in which you describe how these archival materials will be relevant for your research project. You are not actually going to carry out the proposed research project – at least not in Humes, but perhaps you will at some point down the line.

Assignment

Step 1) 

Acquaint yourself with the collections housed at Davidson College’s Archives and Special Collections. By this point, you will already have learned about Davidson’s archival collections from Cara Evanson and Lia Newman, so you should have a general sense of the scope of the college’s collections and how to access material. In the interests of time, please stick to one of the collections that has been fully digitized. Given that we practiced with the social justice archive in class, we ask that you select another collection. As you browse through the collections, the question you should be asking yourself is, What kinds of research questions might the materials in this or that collection enable me to further investigate? 

Step 2)

Having come up with a research question, it is time to draft a short research proposal. The proposal should be written in the form of a cover letter (one-page, double-spaced), addressed to the Davidson College Archives & Special Collections. The point of the proposal is to explain your evolving research question, articulate its significance, and justify a visit to Davidson for archival research. 

Step 3) 

Select one or two documents from the archival collection you have chosen, and analyze it in light of your proposed research question. For example (depending on the collection and your research proposal), the document might be a few postcards, a newspaper article, a letter, etc. The goal is to provide a concrete demonstration of the significance of the archival collection for your research. The primary source analysis should run to 2-3 pages, double-spaced. We will discuss strategies and approaches to analyzing a primary source in section and plenary. When you have completed drafts of the cover letter and sample primary source analysis, put them into a single document (Word Doc or PDF).

Assessment

An excellent paper will have all of the following components:

  1. The writing is concise, clear, proofread, and engaging.
  2. Both components of the paper (cover letter and source analysis) are convincing. In other words, your reader should walk away with a clear sense of the relationship between your research question and the materials housed at Davidson College, based on your cover letter and sample primary source analysis. 
  3. The scope of your research question should be such that the Davidson College archival collection will be one research trip among others. The proposal should convince the reader that Davidson’s archives will be necessary, but insufficient, for carrying out your research project.