Description

The proposal is an early opportunity to think critically about your topic.

 

Every proposal should answer these questions:

 

What is your topic? Describe it briefly.

What is your main research question? What is your hypothesis?

What will your readers learn from this project? Will you be bringing new information to light, or will you be interpreting commonplace knowledge in a new way?

Why is your project significant or interesting? Discuss the relationship between your project and some broader issue in history.

 

Adapted from: William Kelleher Storey, Writing History: A Guide for Students, 4th ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 29, and William Kelleher Storey, Writing History: A Guide for Students, 5th ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 28.

 

The preliminary annotated bibliography will contain at least three primaries and three secondary scholarly sources.

Annotations:

For primary sources, identify the source (i.e., letter, diary, newspaper article, etc.), describe the content, the author’s thesis, if relevant, and a description of the evidence used, and what the work’s significance to your topic is, for a total of roughly three to four sentences.

For secondary sources, identify the source (journal article, book, documentary film), address the author’s thesis, a description of the evidence used, and what the work’s significance to your topic is, for a total of roughly three to four sentences. Single-space entries and annotations with double-spacing between entries.

 

For the purposes of grading your bibliography, primary sources must be relevant to the topic. Many of these sources will be found in local archives such as the Northwest Room at the Tacoma Public Library, the Seattle Public Library, the Washington State History Museum, and the UW Library system. Secondary sources need to be scholarly; websites, per se, don’t count unless they are from verifiable sources, such as a museum or historical society. (It doesn’t matter how you access scholarly works, just that you use them. For instance, if you rely on www.jstor.org you are tapping into scholarly literature via the web, which is quite different than going to some random website; the first is research, the second is wasting your time.

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