Don’t forget to turn in your proposals and sign up for a time to meet with me.

Also, as we discussed in class last week, you should use this proposal and all future "benchmark" assignments as a way to start practicing Chicago Manual of Style formatting for your bibliographic citations. Historians usually use the "note-bibliography" Chicago system to cite sources, so that’s what you should use for your proposal, your drafts, and your final paper. Here are some useful links:

• The full Chicago Manual, online and searchable
• The documentation chapter in the Manual
• The Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide
• The corrected student examples that we worked on in class

Remember that getting the format wrong a few times can actually help you learn the right way more effectively. So do your absolute best to conform to the style from here on out. That way you can learn common mistakes before it counts on your final paper.

The next "benchmark" assignment you need to complete for your research paper is a 2-3 page (double-spaced) proposal, emailed directly to me. The deadline is 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, October 21.

The proposal differs from your two topics memo in a few crucial ways. The first and most obvious is that you should eliminate one of your two proposed topics and write a proposal based only on one research topic. The proposal should also be written as an essay with complete sentences and paragraphs, so in that sense it should be more formal than the "two topics" memo.

A more subtle difference is that your proposal should talk about the major question you want to answer about your topic. (Our discussion in class today about the difference between a topic and a question should help you some here.) In addition, it should explain how you plan to answer the question (i.e., the "background questions" we discussed in class), provide a list of secondary and primary sources that you plan to consult, and explicitly discuss the significance of your question/research for a broader scholarly audience.

Obviously, at this stage in your research, you may not be able to predict what your answer to the question (your thesis) will be. And your research question may even change after this week as you delve further into sources about your topic. That’s okay. But even at this very early stage, it’s important to have some kind of map for doing your research. You should think of the proposal partly as that map. It will identify what you want to know, explain how you plan to go about finding it out, and offer some thoughts about why other historians will want (and need) to know what you’ve found.

Most importantly, drafting a proposal at this stage will force you beyond simply thinking about "what I’m going to find out" about a topic to some hypotheses about "what I’m going to argue" about a topic.

So, to sum up, here’s what your 2-3 page proposal should do:

• Briefly describe the topic you’ve chosen (the shortest part, since you’ve already told me a little bit about your topics)
• Identify a main ("foreground") question or set of questions you want to answer about the topic
• Explain why this question is significant (some questions to get you thinking about this might be: has your question never even been asked before? if it has, have other historians gone about answering it differently? do you think it may challenge an existing interpretation among historians? address one of the "big questions" that have occupied historians of utopian communities? help settle a debate among historians? reveal some larger truth about American history in the period?)
• Propose how you will answer this question (e.g., what specific kinds of sources will you consult? where will you get these sources from? how will these sources help you answer your question?)
• If you can, you may also briefly hypothesize, based on the limited research you’ve done already, about the answer you expect to find, but you don’t want to be wedded to an answer at this stage.
• Provide a provisional bibliography of secondary sources and primary sources you will consult. This should be as complete as it can be, but you’re not locking yourself in to looking at everything you list. Likewise, this list does not mean these are the only sources you’ll look at. I may suggest more or different sources you need to consult. When it comes to primary sources, you can also be general; for example, you can give the name of a person whose letters you will consult, or the title of a newspaper that may contain articles on your subject, rather than listing every letter or every article). But this bibliography should represent a brief progress report on the most relevant sources you’ve already found, and should do so using the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition.

Remember, the proposal can fit in 3 pages, so it won’t be extensively detailed. Use our discussion of the sample proposals in class to guide you. The important thing here is big-picture thinking and planning about your next steps.

As of last Wednesday, you should have narrowed your research interests down to two topics, and very soon you should be deciding (based on feedback you received from me and other students) which of those topics you want to pursue. Having a topic is not the same thing as having a research question (which we will talk about more in class this week. But you should at least know by now which communities or people you are most interested in learning more about, which means that you can begin the research process:

Find information. Gather as much reliable information as you can about your community. But when evaluating information (especially information found on the Internet), consider its source and its publication context before considering it reliable. I also strongly recommend that you visit (or revisit) Fondren’s Library Guide on American History and set up an appointment with Anna Shparberg, our subject librarian for history, to see if she can assist you in locating sources.

Take notes. At this early stage of the project, your primary task will be to assemble facts about your topic (who? what? when? where? why?). It’s a good idea to make notes about what you find (e.g., a timeline, a list of major figures, etc.), being sure to mark down where you found particular pieces of information.

Dig deeper. For many communities, you may have to rely on secondary sources for your part of your research. But you also need to locate primary sources that were created by community members or contemporaries of the communities you are interested in. Whenever you can, it’s a good idea to gather or make note of possible primary sources, in case you need those sources to answer questions later down the road. If you need help identifying potential primary sources, talk with me.

Wikipedia Assignment

Your next graded assignment in this class is due by noon on October 15.

For this assignment, you will be responsible for beginning or improving an entry on your community for Wikipedia. (For more information about what Wikipedia is, read this.) Last week, we talked about the technical details of contributing to Wikipedia and improved the entry on Rosabeth Moss Kanter. For this assignment, you must draft between 200 to 300 words to add to Wikipedia, depending on the amount of research you have done and the amount of information about your community already on Wikipedia.

If there is already a Wikipedia entry about your community, you have several options. Ideally, you can expand the entry by adding an additional 200-300 words of new material (for the sake of comparison, the paragraph we added about Kanter was about 140 words). Alternatively, you can satisfy this assignment by making significant revisions or corrections to the entry. ("Significant" revisions, of course, will mean more than adding a few words or changing one line.) If both of these options prove impossible, you can also consider writing an entry on Wikipedia that will link to your community’s main entry. For example, is there a particular biographical figure who was important in your community who does not have a Wikipedia entry? You could write an entry on him/her and then modify the community’s entry to link to your new entry.

When you are writing a Wikipedia entry, be sure to consider your audience. You should approach the entry in the same way you would approach writing an encyclopedia entry or a news article. In both cases, you know that you will have a large audience, but you cannot assume that your reader will know very much about the topic. In contrast to your final essay that you will turn in at the end of the semester, which will aim to persuade someone of your thesis, your main goal in writing or revising a Wikipedia entry is to inform.

Since Wikipedia has a life of its own outside the confines of this class, you will also have to make sure that your entry conforms to the standards that the Wikipedia community has established to govern its work. For more on these standards, be sure to read Wikipedia’s general editing principles and refer to the editing tutorial.