Paper 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 key skills of the historians’ craft: formulating research questions, and identifying and closely analyzing primary 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. Of course, you are not necessarily going to complete 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 digitized parts of Davidson Archives and Special Collections. As you browse through the various 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? Your research question should be broadly connected to course themes and questions. I recommend focusing on the College Archives sub-collection, where the most material can be found.  

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 goal of the proposal is to explain your evolving research question, articulate its significance, and justify a visit to Davidson for your research. 

Step 3:

Select a document from the archival collection you have chosen, and analyze it in light of your proposed research question. Depending on the sub-collection and your research proposal, the source might be a newspaper article or a letter, for example. In this analysis, you will begin to offer conclusions about what this artifact reveals about its time period, how it begins to make meaning, and what it suggests about what could be learned with further investigation. The goal is to provide a concrete demonstration of the significance of the archival collection for your research. Your primary source analysis should run to 2-3 pages, double-spaced. 

Step 4:

When you have completed drafts of the cover letter and sample primary source analysis, combine them into a single document (Word Doc or PDF) and upload to Moodle. You must also upload a copy of your primary source, separately or as part of the document.

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 (the 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 archives would 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.