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Have you ever felt a moment of panic when you realize that you have to write a paper for a history class? How do you figure out what to write about? How do you even come up with a topic for a paper? And most importantly, how do you move from a broad topic to a focused and interesting research question?
We ask questions all the time: What did you have for breakfast? Why do donuts have holes? What's the meaning of life? But it turns out that developing a good historical research question can be unexpectedly difficult. As you work to find a topic to write about and then to decide on a research question, you may feel overwhelmed by all the possibilities, or even lost because you have no idea what to focus on.
This site is designed to help you learn how to ask a good historical research question, the kind that can be the basis for an excellent short paper based on primary sources. Surprise of surprises, that’s just the kind of research you’ll be expected to do later in this class on a topic of your choice. Here you'll be introduced to some different strategies that can help you move from subject to topic to research question.
Instructions for using this site
This site is designed for students in Professor Romano's History 244 (The United States in World War II). It explores the period between 1939 and 1941 when the country experienced one of the great foreign policy debates of its history: should the United States aid Britain in its war against Germany or should it do anything necessay to stay out of the war? On the background page, you'll learn some basic information about this period and the terms of the debate. You will then be guided through a series of activities that use sources from this debate to help you learn how to ask and develop your own historical research questions.
Some basic instructions:
Please go through the site page by page, starting with the "Why Questions Matter" and "Background" pages before going to the "Strategies for Developing Historical Questions" section. The site walks you through five different potential strategies for developing good research questions and ends with a brief overview of the next steps to take once you have a research question.
This is an interactive site where you will be not just learning about how to ask questions, but doing it yourself. Each strategy page is followed by an activity page where you will practice using that strategy to develop a research question. Make sure to hit submit after you finish the activity; completing all six activities is a required part of this assignment. Once you've sumbitted an activity, click the button at the bottom of the page to move on to the next strategy.
You don't have to go through the entire site in one sitting. You can break up the work in whatever way makes most sense for you as long as you complete it by the due date on the class syllabus. Each activity is submitted individually, so you don't need to do all six at once.
Plan to spend from 2-3 hours working your way through this site.
Instructions for using this site (click arrow)
This site is designed for students in Professor Romano's History 244 (The United States in World War II). It explores the history of what historians sometimes call the "Great Debate." That's the period between 1939 and 1941 when the country experienced one of the great foreign policy debates of its history: should the United States aid Britain in its war against Germany? On the background page, you'll learn some basic information about this period and the terms of the debate. You will then be guided through a series of activities that use sources from the Great Debate to help you learn how to ask and develop your own historical research questions.
Some basic instructions:
Please go through the site page by page, starting with the "Why Questions Matter" and "Background' pages before going to the "Strategies for Developing Historical Questions" section. The site walks you through five different potential strategies for developing good research questions and ends with a brief overview of the next steps to take once you have a research question.
This is an interactive site where you will be not just learning about how to ask questions, but doing it yourself. Each strategy page is followed by an activity page where you will practice using that strategy to develop a research question. Make sure to hit submit after you finish the activity; completing all six activities is a required part of this assignment. Once you've sumbitted an activity, click the button at the bottom of the page to move on to the next strategy.
You don't have to go through the entire site in one sitting. You can break up the work in whatever way makes most sense for you as long as you complete it by the due date on the class syllabus. Each activity is submitted individually, so you don't need to do all six at once.
Plan to spend from 2-3 hours working your way through this site.
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