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.