historical research questions

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Research Guides

The History Research Process

Choosing a Topic & Framing a Research Question
Brainstorming Search Terms
Feasibility: Secondary Sources
Feasibility: Primary Source Overview
Example Assessment of Primary Sourcebase #1
Example Assessment of Primary Sourcebase #2
Where and How to Find Primary Sources
Tutorial on Reading Primary Sources
Searching: How-To Videos
Writing History Book Reviews
Find the Historiography of a Topic This link opens in a new window
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Reference Sources
Surveying Scholarship
Discussing Scholarship in Your Narrative
Referencing Scholarship in Footnotes
Chicago Citation Style (new window)

Research Topics Versus Research Questions

You will often begin by selecting a research topic, then defining a research question within this topic to investigate. What's the difference?

A simple topic is too broad. For example:

African Americans and the Civil War may be a broad topic that interests you, but this is not yet a question you can attempt to answer.
How did African American participation in the Union and Confederate armies change during the course of the war? is one example of a research question you might create from the previous topic.
How were African Americans participating in the Civil War in eastern Kentucky in June of 1864? is one example of a question which relates to the previous topic, but which is too narrow in scope to be reasonable.

As you explore scholarly secondary sources and historical primary sources, you may need to periodically re-evaluate your research question to ensure that it is neither too broad nor too narrow.

Robert C. Williams suggests that a research question might:

"ask how or why an event happened (causation, explanation)"
"ask what the consequences were of a particular event"
"discuss the intellectual origins of a particular idea"
"ask what the cultural context of an event was";
"ask whether or not an individual was responsible for a certain act"
"ask about the social history of a political event"
"quantify broad trends in a society at a particular time" (52)

Source: Williams, Robert C. The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History . Second ed. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007.

Additional Resources for Selecting Topics

The following books can suggest topic ideas.

Consulting a special encyclopedia in your area of history may also inspire you with ideas for topics and research questions.

Another approach is to start with the primary sources that are available and work backwards to a research question. Browse through sources from the "Primary Sources" tab (or similar). What questions do the documents raise for you? (Maybe regarding the people who created them, the culture in which they were created, etc.) Your research might seek to answer one of your questions.

Tips for Choosing Research Topics

Start with something that interests you. Extreme boredom will make it harder to stay motivated.
Jenny Presnell recommends choosing a topic "that exemplifies a larger phenomenon. For instance, you may be following the current debates on the changing family in twenty-first century America and want to explore what families were like in a different place and time" (8).

This list of tips owes credit to: Presnell, Jenny L. The Information-Literate Historian: A Guide to Research for History Students . New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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Last Updated: Dec 11, 2023 12:16 PM
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Page revision date: 23-Mar-2009

HIST H270 What is History?

Finding Books
Finding Articles
Primary Source Databases
Other Primary Sources at IU
Develop a Research Question
Primary Sources
Cite Sources
Scholarly vs Popular
Thesis Statements

Developing a Research Question

From Laurier Library.

Selecting and Narrowing a Topic

When starting out on your research, it is important to choose a research topic that is not only of interest to you, but can also be covered effectively in the space that you have available. You may not know right away what your research question is - that's okay! Start out with a broad topic, then conduct some background research to explore possibilities and narrow your topic to something more manageable.

Choose an interesting general topic. If you’re interested in your topic, others probably will be too! And your research will be a lot more fun. Once you have a general topic of interest, you can begin to explore more focused areas within that broad topic.

Gather background information. Do a few quick searches in OneSearch@IU or in other relevant sources. See what other researchers have already written to help narrow your focus.

What subtopics relate to the broader topic?
What questions do these sources raise?
What piques your interest? What might you like to say about the topic?

Consider your audience. Who would be interested in this issue? For whom are you writing?

Adapted from: George Mason University Writing Center. (2008). How to write a research question. Retrieved from http://writingcenter.gmu.edu/writing-resources/wc-quick-guides

From Topic to Research Question

Once you have done some background research and narrowed down your topic, you can begin to turn that topic into a research question that you will attempt to answer in the course of your research. Keep in mind that your question may change as you gather more information and as you write. However, having some sense of your direction can help you evaluate sources and identify relevant information throughout your research process.

Explore questions.

Ask open-ended “how” and “why” questions about your general topic.
Consider the “so what?” of your topic. Why does this topic matter to you? Why should it matter to others?

Evaluate your research question. Use the following to determine if any of the questions you generated would be appropriate and workable for your assignment.

Is your question clear? Do you have a specific aspect of your general topic that you are going to explore further?
Is your question focused? Will you be able to cover the topic adequately in the space available?
Is your question sufficiently complex? (cannot be answered with a simple yes/no response, requires research and analysis)

Hypothesize. Once you have developed your research question, consider how you will attempt to answer or address it.

If you are making an argument, what will you say?
Why does your argument matter?
What kinds of sources will you need in order to support your argument?
How might others challenge your argument?

Adapted from: George Mason University Writing Center. (2008). How to write a research question. Retrieved from http://writingcenter.gmu.edu/writing-resources/wc-quick-guides

Sample Research Questions

A good research question is clear, focused, and has an appropriate level of complexity. Developing a strong question is a process, so you will likely refine your question as you continue to research and to develop your ideas.

Unclear : Why are social networking sites harmful?

Clear: How are online users experiencing or addressing privacy issues on such social networking sites as MySpace and Facebook?

Unfocused: What is the effect on the environment from global warming?

Focused: How is glacial melting affecting penguins in Antarctica?

Simple vs Complex

Too simple: How are doctors addressing diabetes in the U.S.?

Appropriately Complex: What are common traits of those suffering from diabetes in America, and how can these commonalities be used to aid the medical community in prevention of the disease?

Adapted from: George Mason University Writing Center. (2008). How to write a research question. Retrieved from http://writingcenter.gmu.edu/writing-resources/wc-quick-guides

General online reference sources.

Reference sources like dictionaries and encylopedias provide general information about various subjects. They also include definitions that may help you break down your topic and understand it better. Sources includes in these entries can be springboards for more in-depth research.

A note on citation: Reference sources are generally not cited since they usually consist of common knowledge (e.g. who was the first United States President). But if you're unsure whether to cite something it's best to do so. Specific pieces of information and direct quotes should always be cited.

Database of encyclopedias and specialized reference sources.

Encyclopedias and specialized reference resources in: Arts, Biography, History, Information and Publishing, Law, Literature, Medicine, Multicultural Studies, Nation and World, Religion, Science, Social Science

The online equivalent of the printed Encyclopedia Britannica and more. A fully searchable and browsable collection of authoritative references, including Britannica's latest article database, hundreds of recent articles not found in the print Britannica. Thousands of illustrations; references to biographies, geography and yearbooks are available.

Why Use References Sources

Reference sources are a great place to begin your research. They can help you:

gain an overview of a topic
explore potential research areas
identify key issues, publications, or authors in your research area

From here, you can narrow your search topic and look at more specialized sources.

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History Research Paper Topics

200 History Research Paper Topics

Welcome to the comprehensive list of history research paper topics. In this section, we have curated a diverse collection of topics covering various periods, regions, and themes in history. Whether you are a student seeking inspiration or a researcher looking for new avenues of exploration, these topics will provide you with a wealth of possibilities for your research. We have organized the topics into 20 categories, each representing a distinct aspect of human history. From the 20th century to ancient civilizations, from political movements to cultural developments, and from scientific advancements to the experiences of marginalized groups, this list encompasses a wide range of historical subjects. Let us embark on this fascinating journey through time and uncover captivating research paper topics in history.

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20th Century History

The World Wars: Causes, Consequences, and Lessons Learned
The Cold War: Superpower Rivalry and Global Implications
The Civil Rights Movement: Struggles for Equality and Social Justice
The Rise and Fall of Fascism: Hitler, Mussolini, and Totalitarian Regimes
The Space Race: Exploration, Innovation, and the Moon Landing
The Women’s Suffrage Movement: Empowerment and Political Activism
The Great Depression: Socioeconomic Impact and Recovery Efforts
The Vietnam War: Perspectives, Protests, and the Anti-war Movement
Decolonization: Nationalism, Independence Movements, and Postcolonial Realities
The Digital Age: Technological Advancements and the Information Revolution

African History

Ancient Egypt: Pharaohs, Pyramids, and Civilization
The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Origins, Impact, and Resistance
Pan-Africanism: Identity, Unity, and Liberation Movements
Apartheid in South Africa: Struggles for Equality and Nelson Mandela’s Legacy
Colonialism and Independence Movements in Africa
African Traditional Religion: Beliefs, Rituals, and Cultural Practices
African Art and Cultural Expressions: Masks, Sculptures, and Textiles
The Rwandan Genocide: Causes, Consequences, and Reconciliation
African Literature: Identity, Postcolonialism, and Representation
Economic Development and Challenges in Contemporary Africa

Ancient History

The Rise and Fall of Ancient Civilizations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome
Alexander the Great: Conquests, Empire, and Legacy
The Persian Empire: Expansion, Administration, and Cultural Exchange
Ancient Chinese Dynasties: Politics, Philosophy, and Inventions
The Maya Civilization: Religion, Mathematics, and Architecture
The Byzantine Empire: Politics, Religion, and Artistic Achievements
The Aztec Empire: Society, Warfare, and Cultural Practices
Ancient Indian History: Indus Valley Civilization, Mauryan Empire, Gupta Empire
The Phoenicians: Seafaring, Trade, and Cultural Influences
Ancient African Civilizations: Ghana, Mali, Songhai

American History

The American Revolution: Causes, Battles, and the Birth of a Nation
The Founding Fathers: Contributions, Ideals, and the Constitution
Westward Expansion: Manifest Destiny, Frontier Life, and Native American Relations
The Civil War: Causes, Consequences, and the Abolition of Slavery
The Roaring Twenties: Jazz Age, Prohibition, and Changing Social Norms
The Civil Rights Movement: Leaders, Events, and Achievements
The Great Depression: Economic Crisis and the New Deal
The Cold War and America’s Global Role
Women’s Rights Movement: Suffrage, Feminism, and Gender Equality
The 21st Century: Challenges, Progress, and Future Perspectives

Art History

Renaissance Art: Masters, Techniques, and Cultural Context
Impressionism: Origins, Techniques, and Influential Artists
Modernism and Avant-garde Movements: Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism
Renaissance Architecture: Cathedrals, Palaces, and Urban Planning
Ancient Greek and Roman Art: Sculptures, Mosaics, and Temples
Islamic Art and Architecture: Calligraphy, Mosques, and Geometric Patterns
African Art: Masks, Sculptures, and Symbolism
Asian Art Traditions: Chinese, Japanese, and Indian Art
Indigenous Art: Cultural Significance and Contemporary Expression
Contemporary Art: Installations, Performance Art, and Digital Media

Asian History

The Silk Road: Trade, Cultural Exchange, and the Spread of Ideas
Ancient Chinese Dynasties: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Imperial Rule
The Samurai: Warriors, Codes of Conduct, and Feudal Japan
The Mughal Empire: Cultural Flourishing and Architectural Marvels
The Opium Wars: Imperialism and China’s Transformation
Colonialism and Independence Movements in India and Southeast Asia
Confucianism and Taoism: Philosophical Foundations and Social Values
The Korean War: Origins, Conflict, and Divided Nations
The Vietnam War: Regional Dynamics and Global Implications
Economic Development and Technological Advancements in East Asia

British History

The Tudor Dynasty: Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Religious Reformation
The British Empire: Colonization, Trade, and Global Impact
The Industrial Revolution in Britain: Innovations, Urbanization, and Social Change
The Suffragette Movement: Women’s Rights and the Fight for Representation
The Victorian Era: Society, Culture, and Technological Advancements
World War I and II: Britain’s Role and Resilience
The Irish Troubles: Nationalism, Conflict, and Peace Process
The British Welfare State: Social Policies, Healthcare, and Education
The Falklands War: Sovereignty, Conflict, and National Identity
The Brexit Saga: Referendum, Negotiations, and Future of the United Kingdom

Cultural History

Cultural Revolutions: Societal Transformations and New Norms
The Renaissance: Revival of Arts, Literature, and Humanism
Counter-Culture Movements: Beat Generation, Hippies, and Punk
Cultural Exchange and Cross-Cultural Encounters
Language and Identity: Linguistic Diversity and Cultural Preservation
Music and Society: Impact of Genres, Artists, and Movements
Fashion and Style: Trends, Symbolism, and Cultural Significance
The History of Food: Culinary Traditions and Cultural Identity
Performing Arts: Theater, Dance, and the Evolution of Entertainment
Visual Culture and Media: Advertising, Photography, and Propaganda

Economic History

The Industrial Revolution: Economic Transformation and Labor Conditions
Mercantilism and Colonial Economies: Trade, Exploitation, and Economic Development
The Great Depression: Causes, Effects, and Recovery Efforts
Economic Systems: Capitalism, Socialism, and Mixed Economies
Globalization and the World Economy: Trade, Finance, and Multinational Corporations
Economic Inequality and Income Distribution: Historical Perspectives
Economic Effects of Technological Advancements: From the Steam Engine to Artificial Intelligence
Economic Impacts of Wars and Conflicts: Reconstruction, Boom, or Bust
Agricultural Revolutions: Shifts in Farming Techniques and Food Production
Economic Development in Developing Countries: Challenges and Strategies

Environmental History

Industrialization and Environmental Impact: Pollution, Resource Depletion, and Climate Change
Conservation Movements and National Parks: Preservation of Natural Spaces
Environmental Disasters and Their Consequences: Chernobyl, Deepwater Horizon, and more
Environmental Policy and Regulation: Historical Approaches and Current Debates
Deforestation and Land Use Changes: Historical Patterns and Ecological Consequences
Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and Practices: Sustainable Resource Management
Environmental Justice Movements: Advocacy for Marginalized Communities
Pollution and Public Health: Historical Perspectives and Environmental Health Policies
Environmental Movements: Greenpeace, Earth Day, and Activism
Sustainable Development and Historical Lessons: Balancing Economic Growth and Environmental Protection

European History

The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
The French Revolution and Its Impact on Europe
The Renaissance: Cultural and Intellectual Awakening in Europe
The Industrial Revolution and its Consequences in Europe
The World Wars: Causes, Impacts, and Legacies in Europe
The Cold War and the Division of Europe
European Colonialism and its Effects on Indigenous Peoples
The European Union: Integration and Challenges
Nationalism and Nation-Building in Europe
The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Reunification of Germany

History of Science and Technology

The Scientific Revolution and its Influence on Society
The Development of Modern Medicine: Breakthroughs and Ethical Dilemmas
The Space Race: Exploring the Final Frontier
The Internet Revolution: Transforming Communication and Information Exchange
The Impact of the Printing Press on the Spread of Knowledge
The Industrial Revolution and Technological Advancements
The Discovery and Understanding of DNA: Revolutionizing Genetics
Innovations in Transportation: From Horse-drawn Carriages to Automobiles
The Green Revolution: Agricultural Advances and Challenges
The Evolution of Computers: From Mainframes to Personal Devices

Indigenous History

Indigenous Cultures and Traditions: Preservation and Revitalization Efforts
Colonization and its Impact on Indigenous Peoples
Land Rights and Indigenous Sovereignty Movements
Indigenous Resistance and Activism: Struggles for Autonomy and Recognition
Indigenous Healing Practices and Traditional Medicine
Oral History and Indigenous Knowledge Systems
Indigenous Art and Cultural Expressions
Indigenous Languages: Revitalization and Preservation Efforts
The Impact of Western Education on Indigenous Communities
Indigenous Rights and Environmental Conservation

Intellectual History

The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason
The Influence of Philosophers: Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu
The Impact of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution on Intellectual Thought
Marxism and Socialism: Ideas and Movements
The Feminist Movement and the Quest for Gender Equality
Existentialism and its Influence on Modern Philosophy
Postmodernism: Challenging Traditional Notions of Knowledge and Truth
The Rise of Human Rights Discourse
The Role of Intellectuals in Political and Social Change
Intellectual Responses to Globalization and the Digital Age

Medieval History

Feudalism and the Social Structure of Medieval Europe
The Crusades: Religious Conflict and Cultural Exchange
Knights, Chivalry, and the Code of Honor
Medieval Castles and their Role in Society
The Black Death: Causes, Impact, and Responses
The Magna Carta and the Evolution of Legal Systems
The Hundred Years’ War: Power Struggles and National Identity
The Inquisition: Religious Orthodoxy and Persecution
Medieval Trade Routes and the Rise of Merchant Guilds
Medieval Manuscripts and the Preservation of Knowledge

Military History

Ancient Warfare: Strategies and Tactics
The Art of War: Sun Tzu’s Influence on Military Thought
The Battle of Waterloo: Turning Point in European History
World War I: The Great War and its Consequences
The Battle of Stalingrad: The Turning Point of World War II
Nuclear Weapons and the Cold War Arms Race
Guerrilla Warfare: Tactics and Impact in Modern Conflicts
Military Leaders and their Influence on History
The Role of Technology in Modern Warfare
The Ethics of War and the Just War Theory

Political History

The Rise and Fall of Ancient Empires: Egypt, Greece, Rome
The American Revolution: Independence and the Birth of a Nation
The French Revolution: Causes, Events, and Consequences
The Women’s Suffrage Movement: Gaining Political Rights
Decolonization and the End of European Imperialism
The Cold War: Ideological Conflict and Global Power Struggles
The Collapse of the Soviet Union: End of the Communist Era
Apartheid in South Africa: Racial Segregation and Resistance
The Arab Spring: Political Transformations in the Middle East

Renaissance History

The Italian Renaissance: Art, Architecture, and Humanism
The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment
The Printing Press and the Spread of Knowledge
Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
The Medici Family: Patrons of the Arts and Political Power
The Reformation: Religious Reform and the Rise of Protestantism
The Age of Exploration: Navigating New Worlds
Women in the Renaissance: Challenges and Contributions
The Impact of Renaissance Ideas on European Society
The Legacy of Renaissance Thinkers: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and More

Social History

The Industrial Revolution and its Impact on Society
Urbanization and the Growth of Cities
Social Movements: Civil Rights, Feminism, LGBTQ+ Rights
The Evolution of Family Structures and Gender Roles
Immigration and the Formation of Ethnic Communities
The Welfare State: Social Policies and their Impact
The Rise of Consumer Culture: Advertising and Mass Media
The Evolution of Education Systems
Sports and Leisure: Changing Social Dynamics
Social Class and Inequality: Past and Present

Women’s History

Women’s Suffrage Movements: Struggles for Political Rights
Women in Ancient Civilizations: Contributions and Limitations
Feminism and the Second Wave: Challenging Patriarchy
Women’s Role in World War II: From Home Front to Frontlines
The Women’s Liberation Movement: Redefining Gender Roles
Women in Science: Breaking Barriers and Achieving Recognition
Gender and Sexuality: Historical Perspectives and Activism
Women’s Health and Reproductive Rights: Challenges and Advances
Women in Leadership: Pioneers and Trailblazers
Women’s Rights and Empowerment in the 21st Century

In conclusion, this comprehensive list of history research paper topics provides a broad and diverse range of subjects for exploration and investigation. From ancient civilizations to modern events, from cultural developments to economic transformations, and from political movements to social struggles, these topics offer endless possibilities for historical research. Whether you are interested in a specific era, region, or theme, you will find a wealth of captivating research paper topics to delve into. So, choose a topic that resonates with your interests and embark on a journey of discovery and understanding through the rich tapestry of human history.

History and its Range of Research Paper Topics

In the vast realm of history, there is an incredible diversity of topics to explore and research. From the tumultuous events of the 20th century to the intricate civilizations of ancient times, the field of history offers a wide range of fascinating subjects for research papers. In this article, we will delve into the rich tapestry of history and explore the captivating themes and topics that researchers can explore within various categories.

20th Century History : The 20th century witnessed significant upheavals and transformations that shaped the modern world. Topics within this category could include the World Wars, the Cold War, decolonization movements, the civil rights movement, and the effects of globalization on the world order. These topics offer opportunities to examine the causes, impacts, and legacies of major historical events and their lasting significance.
African History : The history of Africa is filled with rich narratives, ancient civilizations, and struggles for independence. Research topics in this category might encompass precolonial kingdoms, the transatlantic slave trade, decolonization movements, postcolonial challenges, and the cultural impact of the African diaspora. Exploring African history provides a deeper understanding of the continent’s diverse cultures, achievements, and challenges throughout different time periods.
Ancient History : Ancient civilizations have left an indelible mark on human history. Within this category, one can explore topics such as ancient Egypt with its religious practices and monumental structures, the rise and fall of classical Greece, the Roman Empire’s expansion and decline, the captivating civilizations of Mesopotamia, and the enigmatic Indus Valley Civilization. Studying ancient history allows us to unravel the mysteries of our distant past and understand the foundations of modern society.
American History : The history of the United States is a fascinating tapestry of triumphs, struggles, and transformations. Research paper topics in American history can encompass pivotal events such as the American Revolution, the institution of slavery and the abolitionist movement, the Civil War and Reconstruction era, the Great Depression and the New Deal, and the civil rights movement. Exploring American history provides insights into the nation’s identity, values, and ongoing pursuit of equality.
Art History : Art has always been an integral part of human expression and cultural identity. Art history offers a vast array of topics to explore, from the Renaissance and its impact on art and culture, to movements such as impressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Additionally, studying contemporary art trends provides a deeper understanding of the evolving nature of artistic expression and its relevance to society.
Asian History : Asia is a continent steeped in rich history and diverse cultures. Topics within Asian history may include ancient China with its dynasties, philosophies, and Confucianism, the profound influence of Buddhism and Hinduism in the region, the development of unique art forms and architectural marvels, and the socio-political dynamics of different Asian societies. Exploring Asian history allows us to appreciate the depth and breadth of this vibrant continent.
British History : The history of Britain spans centuries and includes topics such as the Roman occupation, the Norman Conquest, the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, the British Empire, the Industrial Revolution, and modern British society. Researching British history provides insights into the development of constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy, and the cultural contributions of the British Isles.
Cultural History : Cultural history explores the beliefs, values, practices, and expressions of different societies. Topics within this category can include the study of rituals, folklore, music, literature, and other cultural artifacts. Exploring cultural history allows us to understand how societies evolve, adapt, and shape their identity through shared customs and traditions.
Economic History : Economic history examines the development of economic systems, trade, and financial practices throughout different time periods. Topics within this category may include the rise of capitalism, mercantilism, the industrial revolution’s impact on economies, economic policies during times of crisis, and globalization’s effects on national economies. Understanding economic history provides insights into the forces that have shaped societies and influenced their development.
Environmental History : Environmental history focuses on the interactions between human societies and the natural world. Research topics within this category could include the impact of human activity on the environment, conservation efforts, the history of resource exploitation, and environmental movements. Exploring environmental history helps us understand humanity’s relationship with nature and the consequences of our actions.
European History : Europe’s history is vast and diverse, spanning multiple regions, cultures, and time periods. Topics within European history might include the Renaissance and its intellectual and artistic achievements, the Age of Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the World Wars, the fall of communism, and the European Union’s formation. Studying European history offers a comprehensive view of the continent’s political, social, and cultural evolution.
History of Science and Technology : The history of science and technology explores the advancements and discoveries that have shaped human knowledge and transformed societies. Research topics within this category could include the scientific revolution, the impact of the Industrial Revolution, the development of medical breakthroughs, the history of computing, and the influence of technology on everyday life. Exploring the history of science and technology allows us to understand the progression of human innovation and its impact on society.
Indigenous History : Indigenous history focuses on the experiences, cultures, and contributions of indigenous peoples across different regions of the world. Topics within this category may include the impact of colonization, indigenous resistance movements, cultural preservation efforts, and the recognition of indigenous rights. Exploring indigenous history provides a perspective that challenges dominant narratives and highlights the resilience and richness of indigenous cultures.
Intellectual History : Intellectual history examines the evolution of ideas, philosophies, and intellectual movements throughout history. Topics within this category might include the Enlightenment and its impact on political thought, the rise of scientific theories, the development of social and political ideologies, and the contributions of influential thinkers and philosophers. Exploring intellectual history helps us understand the shaping of human thought and the progression of ideas.
Medieval History : The Middle Ages encompass a significant period in European history, characterized by feudalism, the rise of Christianity, knights, castles, and the Crusades. Topics within medieval history may include the Byzantine Empire, the Viking Age, the Norman Conquest of England, the Hundred Years’ War, and the influence of medieval literature and art. Studying medieval history offers insights into the political, social, and cultural dynamics of this fascinating era.
Military History : Military history examines the wars, conflicts, and military strategies throughout different time periods. Topics within this category could include specific battles, military leaders, the impact of technological advancements on warfare, the role of warfare in shaping societies, and the study of military tactics and doctrines. Exploring military history provides insights into the complexities of armed conflict and its influence on societies.
Political History : Political history explores the development of political systems, governance structures, and the exercise of power. Topics within this category might include the rise and fall of empires, the formation of nation-states, the study of political ideologies, revolutions and political movements, and the analysis of political leaders and their impact. Understanding political history helps us grasp the dynamics of governance and the forces that have shaped political structures.
Renaissance History : The Renaissance was a period of cultural, intellectual, and artistic revival in Europe. Topics within Renaissance history may include the works of influential artists and thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, the impact of humanism, the scientific advancements of the era, and the spread of Renaissance ideas beyond Italy. Studying Renaissance history provides insights into the birth of modernity and the flourishing of arts and sciences.
Social History : Social history focuses on the everyday lives, experiences, and interactions of people throughout history. Topics within this category could include the study of social classes, gender roles, family structures, education systems, labor movements, and social reforms. Exploring social history allows us to understand the lived experiences of individuals and groups and sheds light on social inequalities and societal changes.
Women’s History : Women’s history examines the contributions, experiences, and struggles of women throughout history. Topics within this category might include women’s suffrage movements, the role of women in society, women’s achievements in various fields, the impact of feminism, and the study of influential women in history. Exploring women’s history provides a broader understanding of the significant role women have played in shaping societies.

These 20 categories encompass a vast array of research topics within the field of history. Each category offers a wealth of possibilities for exploration and discovery, providing students with the opportunity to delve into specific aspects of human experience and gain a deeper understanding of the past. Whether your interests lie in political history, cultural history, or the lives of remarkable individuals, history provides a captivating canvas for research and analysis.

Choosing History Research Paper Topics

Choosing the right research paper topic in history can be an exciting yet challenging task. The field of history offers a vast array of subjects to explore, but selecting a topic that is engaging, significant, and manageable can make a difference in the success of your research. In this section, we will provide you with expert advice on how to choose history research paper topics that will captivate your readers and allow you to delve into the depths of the past.

Identify Your Interests : Begin by reflecting on your personal interests and passions within the field of history. Consider the time periods, regions, or themes that intrigue you the most. Engaging with a topic that genuinely captivates your interest will make the research process more enjoyable and rewarding.
Narrow Down Your Focus : Once you have identified your general area of interest, it is essential to narrow down your focus. History is a vast subject, so selecting a specific aspect within your chosen field will enable you to delve deeper into the subject matter. For example, if you are interested in American history, you can narrow your focus to a particular era, event, or individual that sparks your curiosity.
Consider Significance and Relevance : When choosing a history research paper topic, it is crucial to consider its significance and relevance. Select a topic that contributes to the existing body of historical knowledge, addresses an important historical question, or sheds light on lesser-known aspects of history. Researching and writing about a topic that has historical significance will make your paper more compelling and valuable.
Consult Secondary Sources : Before finalizing your research topic, consult secondary sources such as textbooks, scholarly articles, and reputable websites. This will help you gain a broader understanding of the existing research and identify any gaps or areas that need further exploration. Secondary sources will also provide you with valuable insights and potential leads for your research topic.
Explore Primary Sources : Engaging with primary sources is an essential aspect of historical research. Primary sources include documents, artifacts, eyewitness accounts, and other sources that provide firsthand information about the time period or event you are studying. Exploring primary sources will not only enrich your understanding of the topic but also allow you to bring unique perspectives to your research paper.
Consider Multidisciplinary Approaches : History is an interdisciplinary field, and incorporating different perspectives and approaches can enhance the depth and breadth of your research. Consider integrating insights from related disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, literature, or political science into your historical analysis. This multidisciplinary approach will add richness and complexity to your research paper.
Discuss with Your Instructor or Advisor : Engaging in a conversation with your instructor or research advisor can provide valuable guidance and insights. They can help you refine your research topic, suggest relevant sources, and offer feedback on the feasibility and scope of your project. Their expertise and experience can be instrumental in choosing a compelling and manageable research paper topic.
Assess Available Resources : Before finalizing your research topic, assess the availability of resources, both physical and digital. Ensure that there are ample primary and secondary sources accessible to support your research. If specific sources are scarce, consider alternative approaches or adjust the scope of your topic accordingly.
Stay Updated with Current Research : Keep yourself informed about the latest trends and developments in historical research. Attend conferences, read scholarly journals, and follow reputable historians in your area of interest. Staying updated with current research will not only inspire new research paper topics but also enable you to situate your work within the broader historical discourse.
Choose a Manageable Scope : Finally, when choosing a history research paper topic, consider the scope and time frame that you can realistically cover within the given constraints. Be mindful of the length of your paper, the available resources, and the time you have for research and writing. Select a topic that is manageable and allows you to conduct in-depth analysis without becoming overwhelmed.

In conclusion, choosing a history research paper topic requires careful consideration and thoughtful decision-making. By identifying your interests, narrowing down your focus, considering significance and relevance, consulting both secondary and primary sources, engaging with multidisciplinary approaches, seeking guidance from instructors or advisors, assessing available resources, staying updated with current research, and choosing a manageable scope, you can select a compelling and enriching topic for your history research paper. Remember to enjoy the process of exploration and embrace the opportunity to contribute to the vast field of historical knowledge.

How to Write a History Research Paper

Writing a history research paper can be a rewarding and intellectually stimulating experience. It allows you to dive deep into the past, analyze historical evidence, and present your findings in a coherent and persuasive manner. In this section, we will guide you through the process of writing a history research paper, from choosing a thesis statement to organizing your content and crafting a compelling argument.

Understand the Assignment Requirements : Before you begin writing, carefully read and understand the assignment requirements. Take note of the specific topic, formatting guidelines, length requirements, and any other instructions provided by your instructor. Understanding the expectations will help you stay focused and meet the objectives of the research paper.
Choose a Clear and Concise Thesis Statement : The thesis statement is the central argument of your research paper. It should be clear, concise, and specific, conveying the main idea or argument you will be exploring in your paper. Take time to formulate a strong thesis statement that reflects your research question and provides a roadmap for your paper.
Conduct In-Depth Research : A successful history research paper relies on thorough and comprehensive research. Engage with a variety of primary and secondary sources to gather evidence and support your thesis. Visit libraries, consult scholarly databases, explore archival materials, and use reputable online resources to access a wide range of historical information.
Organize Your Research and Create an Outline : Once you have gathered sufficient research material, organize your findings and create an outline for your paper. An outline provides a structure for your writing and helps you maintain a logical flow of ideas. Divide your paper into sections based on your research, and arrange your main points and supporting evidence in a coherent manner.
Develop a Strong Introduction : Your introduction sets the stage for your research paper and grabs the reader’s attention. Start with a compelling opening sentence to pique the reader’s interest, provide background information on the topic, and end with a clear and concise thesis statement. The introduction should give readers a sense of the historical context and the significance of your research.
Present Well-Structured Body Paragraphs : The body paragraphs of your research paper should present and analyze your supporting evidence in a well-structured manner. Each paragraph should focus on a single idea or argument and provide relevant historical evidence to support it. Use topic sentences to introduce the main point of each paragraph and ensure a smooth transition between paragraphs.
Analyze and Interpret the Evidence : As a historian, your role is to analyze and interpret the evidence you have gathered. Avoid simply presenting facts and dates; instead, critically analyze the evidence to uncover historical patterns, causes, and consequences. Use historical methodologies and theories to support your analysis and provide a nuanced understanding of the topic.
Engage with Counterarguments : To strengthen your argument and demonstrate your understanding of the topic, engage with counterarguments. Address opposing viewpoints or interpretations and provide evidence to refute them or offer alternative perspectives. This shows your ability to critically evaluate different historical perspectives and strengthen your own argument.
Craft a Cohesive Conclusion : In your conclusion, summarize the main points of your research paper and restate your thesis statement. Avoid introducing new information but instead, provide a thoughtful reflection on the significance and implications of your research findings. End with a strong closing statement that leaves a lasting impression on the reader.
Revise, Edit, and Proofread : After completing your initial draft, take time to revise, edit, and proofread your research paper. Pay attention to the clarity of your writing, the coherence of your arguments, and the accuracy of your historical facts. Check for grammatical and spelling errors, and ensure proper citation of your sources using the appropriate citation style (such as APA, MLA, or Chicago).

By following these steps and adhering to the principles of historical research and writing, you can produce a well-crafted history research paper. Remember to maintain a clear thesis statement, support your arguments with relevant evidence, engage with different perspectives, and present your findings in a logical and compelling manner. Writing a history research paper allows you to contribute to the field of historical knowledge and develop your skills as a critical thinker and researcher.

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6 Choosing and Narrowing a Topic

Choosing a topic to research.

Students often struggle to choose their topics of study or interest and therefore do not know where to start when it comes to the work of a history class. Here are some points to consider:

The most important element in choosing a topic for an undergraduate history class is to make sure that you can remain interested in the topic. Start by listing subjects, time periods, scenarios that interest you. Then consider whether or not you might want to focus on an individual, a singular event, a movement that crossed several eras, or some other aspect of the past. You might also consider what kinds of sources interest you—personal correspondence or diaries? Political speeches? Videos? Scientific treatises? Maps? Advertisements? Some of the best research papers focus on a narrow range of sources, but because they are examined within a new framework, or particularly in-depth, they yield fascinating new analyses.

Topic Finder and Term Clusters

For those with access to UTA’s databases, you can “map” terms that interest you on Gale Virtual Reference library and see related terms for entries in GVRL’s resources. For example, if you put in “pandemic” and “history” you get citations to a number of related individuals and events of previous pandemics in global history. See this link to Gale Virtural Resource Library and click on “Topic Finder” at top of page. https://login.ezproxy.uta.edu/login?url=https://go.gale.com/ps/start.do?p=GVRL&u=txshracd2597

The second most important element is to ascertain whether you can access the sources necessary to answer your research question. Are primary sources available? Do you know—or can you find—some of the secondary resources, that is, the historians who have preceded you and have written about the topic? [See Locating Sources ] You may be particularly interested in ancient or medieval history, or the history of an indigenous people far removed from the United States. Unfortunately, the older the primary source or the further removed from the US experience it is, the less likely it is to be accessible to a public university student. Sometimes you can find a unique digitized or published set of primary sources but counting on such a find is risky. You might, however, be able to find contemporary sources on the representation of your topic—say nineteenth-century “gentlemen archaeologists” who studied those distant peoples, or twentieth-century newspaper or magazine articles that discussed an ancient find—thus allowing you to at least see how others from a more modern era have portrayed those times or individuals that interest you. Remaining flexible and creative when honing your topic is key.

Occasionally, a professor will direct students toward specific topics or otherwise offer parameters. In this instance, make sure you understand the scope, or timeline/focus, of your topic. Is your instructor looking to see if you can analyze change over a broad swath of time—centuries—or (more likely) to explain the motivations of an individual or what happened at a specific point in time? What sort of allowances will your instructor make for your own take on the topic? Does your instructor have in mind a particular sort of primary source analysis, such as considering maps or the artifacts of popular culture? Even with assigned topics, you should be able to find a research question that will interest you and be accessible to you with a bit of creativity.

Narrowing down your Research Question

Once you have chosen your topic or subject, it is time to frame your project by asking the right Historical Questions. Questions form the backbone of historical analysis and direct the historian as they complete the research portion of the assignment. By developing a proper set of questions, historians can set effective and efficient parameters on their research as they begin to study their accumulated evidence. For example: What role did women play in the American Revolution? This question defines both the subject matter of the research (women) and the time period (American Revolution) while also directing our reading of the documents. We are now going to look for women who played active roles during the war, as well as the impact of those actions. But it would be wise to narrow your topic further still if you only have a semester in which to produce your paper. You might do so by place or time. What role did women in Massachusetts play during the opening years of the Revolution? Or what was the contribution of a particular woman—say for example how did Mercy Otis Warren affect the development of Revolutionary politics of Colonial Massachusetts?

You’ll notice by this last question that the historical question you ask should define the scope of your research in such a way that you will be able to isolate your subject quite a bit. Though you started with a broad interest—women in the American Revolution—your research question has allowed you to focus on a person who left sources, and a problem that needs answering—what did Warren do in the context of her own community in the years leading up to the American Revolution? For the most part, undergraduate students of history tend to attempt subjects that are too broad for fear that they will not be able to “fill up ten pages” (or twenty or five) unless they aim broadly. But this assumption sets them up for failure, in that trying to tackle a large question, well-trodden by other historians, they are unable to demonstrate the primary source analysis skills that their professors most want to see. Although you should consult closely with your instructor, the best rule of thumb is to narrow your topic into a question that has specificity by time, place, and primary source collections .

Don’t worry though. Most research topics lend themselves to multiple historical questions, any one of which would make a decent research paper for an undergraduate student. By answering these with proper analysis of evidence historians are capable of crafting well-supported arguments and conclusions.

Recapping: How to make sure you find a topic for your paper that works

1. Be curious about a topic for which there exists primary sources –either in a local archive, in published primary sources, or a digital collection. What would you like to know? Brainstorm with many questions. Perhaps you might start with:

An event (a strike, an invention, a battle, a treaty, a new law): what was the cause? Who was responsible? Why him/her? Why did it happen when it did? Can I compare it to some similar event, and thereby evaluate what was unique about this cause/outcome?
An on-going trend (protests, women smoking, anti-tobacco movement): what was it like for people involved in this trend? Why did they make the choices they did? Why not other ones? How did they choose to participate?
Individual’s or groups’ motivations and responses – what motivated an individual? How did others understand an event or a remarkable individual? What led a group to organize?

2. Choose the best answerable problem from these questions . This involves narrowing the question, so that rather than asking about motivations generally, your research question might be “Why did x act as she did during the debate over the initial passage of this legislation?” OR “What were three major concerns for y when he was involved in that on-going trend?” Some suggestions for narrowing include:

Considering a specific time period (the background or ten years after a new invention)
Assessing the impact in a different location, such as a town you know something about, or have access to the newspapers for.
Focusing on a single individual and tracing their own experience in the context of a an important event or emerging trend.
Being pragmatic; narrow your question in light of available primary sources to answer your question.

3. Draft an argument or hypothesis based on that question , and make sure it’s grounded in an historical context (that is, not a trans-historical “people are like this” explanation). For example,

X pursued this legislation because she was inspired and educated by her father, who was also a reformer.
This enslaved man who corresponded with his master in the 1850s spoke in a sort of code, rarely revealing sincere anger or irritation.

For further help in narrowing down a topic check out Learning to do Historical Research which has additional helpful resources

How History is Made: A Student’s Guide to Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Discipline Copyright © 2022 by Stephanie Cole; Kimberly Breuer; Scott W. Palmer; and Brandon Blakeslee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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History: Developing a topic or research question

Suggested steps for developing a topic or question.

Image courtesy of William Cronon's Learning to Do Historical Research: A Primer

Use the sources -- primary and secondary -- to guide the development of a topic or research question.
Search for primary documents. Historical research consists primarily of constructing arguments based on primary documents. You will want to spend significant time exploring which documents are available that are related to your topic. These documents may include photographs, newspaper or magazine articles, recordings, public records, and so on. As always, consult a librarian if you are unsure where to start.
Read scholarly literature (secondary sources). Reading academic literature is critical for you to identify the questions that have not yet been sufficiently studied, to locate your topic within a particular context, and to ask further questions. If you are uncertain how to find the books and articles you may need, you should ask a librarian for help.
Example: I am studying _________________because I want to know_______________in order to help my readers understand____________________.
Research is an iterative process . As you discover new information or ideas, you may need to redo your database searches to locate additional primary and secondary sources. By constantly reviewing what you have found and learning, you can continually revise, develop new ideas, and make improvements.
Talk to professors and librarians.
Ask questions at every step to help you decide where to take your research next.
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Last Updated: Apr 9, 2024 1:09 PM
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The Top 10 Most Interesting History Research Topics

Choosing history research topics is one of the hardest and most time-consuming things to do, especially if there is no guidance. You have to employ the right research skills to find authentic sources and ensure that your history research questions are precise and clear.

So to make your work easier, we have curated history research paper topics for college students and high schoolers, as well as examples of history research questions you can use for your assignment.

Find your bootcamp match

What makes a strong history research topic.

Clarity makes a strong history research topic. History is a broad subject, so your topic should be well-defined and your language should be simple enough for the reader to understand the basic outline of your history research project. In other words, there should be no ambiguity. An ambiguous topic will be much harder to write than a clear one.

Tips for Choosing a History Research Topic

Understand the requirements. Pay attention to your academic level and make sure that you are clear on what is expected of you. Keep referring to your assignment as you go along to ensure that you do not deviate from it.
Choose a topic that interests you. If your history topic is boring, doing the research and writing the paper will become tedious work. It is important that you select a topic that appeals to you and that you will enjoy writing about. Even if you choose a controversial topic, it’s worth pursuing as long as it will motivate you to keep writing.
Be objective. Movies such as Pearl Harbor have romanticized history as their subject, so make sure you select a topic based on facts and not merely your opinion. This will help in removing bias from your research questions as well.
Begin your search for research sources early. Ensure that there are adequate primary and secondary sources for your research assignment. You can also consult other alternative sources for your research. Remember to also make use of your high school or college librarian. They will guide you toward reliable sources.
Consult others when necessary. Whenever your assignment requirements are unclear to you, consult your professor. You can also brainstorm with fellow students to get more ideas on what topic you should select, or visit your university’s writing center to get a refresher on how to write strong topic sentences.

What’s the Difference Between a Research Topic and a Research Question?

A research topic refers to a broad idea that you may have chosen for your history research paper. For example, “modern history” is a general topic from which you can get various, more specific topics, such as “the role of globalization in industrialization.”

A research question takes a broad topic and narrows it down to a more specific subject. Your question will help in selecting the right sources. A research question answers the what, why, and how of the research topic. For example, what role has industrialization played in globalization?

How to Create Strong History Research Questions

A strong history research question should be empirically sound. This means that it should be narrow enough to do an in-depth analysis. However, it should not be so narrow that it can be answered with a simple yes or no. A simple search on Google should not answer your research question.

According to Kristin Poling from the Department of History at Harvard, formulating a research question requires preliminary research. You need to see whether there are authentic sources available to answer your question, and you need to understand where the gaps in the literature are. Strong questions lead to strong thesis statements.

2. Causes of the American Revolution

The American Revolution, also known as the United States War of Independence, is an important American historical event that occurred between 1775 and 1783. Researching the American revolutionaries behind the Boston Tea Party is a great way to understand how monumental social conflicts bring about the rise and fall of nations.

3. American Neutrality in World War Ⅰ

Also known as the First War or the Great War, World War Ⅰ was the first major global war of the 20th Century, and it lasted between 1914 and 1918. If you choose this topic, you will be able to analyze why America first made the foreign policy decision to avoid taking part in the war, as well as why it changed its mind later on.

4. Effects of the Allies’ Occupation of Germany

The Allied occupation of Germany began in 1945 after Germany was defeated in the Second World War. It refers to the joint occupation of Germany by the US, Great Britain, Soviet Union, and France. If you select this history research topic for your assignment, you will be able to delve deeper into the effects of the occupation on both Germany and the rest of the world.

5. Ronald Reagan and the End of the Cold War

The Cold War was a 20th Century battle of supremacy between the United States and the Soviet Union involving nuclear weapons. By discussing the role Ronald Reagan played in ending the Cold War, you could gain insight into the diplomatic history between these two powers or interpret how Reagan’s actions affected the course of American society.

6. Political, Economic, and Social Causes of the French Revolution

The French Revolution, which occurred between 1789 and 1799, significantly shifted the social and political ideals of all 18th Century European countries. This riveting European history research topic provides a means to explore the dangers of classism and its effects on civilian life.

7. The Legacy of Alexander the Great

You cannot learn about historical figures in ancient times without coming across Alexander the Great, the king of ancient Macedonia. Selecting this ancient history topic for your assignment will be a fascinating dive into how this key figure in history influenced Greek and Asian culture as he expanded his empire.

8. Rise of the Catholic Church as a Political Institution in the Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a historical era between the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE and the beginning of the Renaissance period in the 14th century. Selecting this topic will help you understand the factors that influenced the rise of the Catholic Church as a powerful political institution in medieval Europe.

9. Impact of the Industrial Revolution on Working-Class Families

The Industrial Revolution was an era between the late 18th century and the middle of the 19th century when great strides were made in engineering, production, and manufacturing. It affected the economic and social lives of the working class and shifted gender roles. Studying industrialization effects would lend itself well to university students with access to rare books.

10. The Role of Martin Luther King Jr in the Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement is one of the best Black history research paper topics for college students. One of the most impactful social movements, this movement was a response to the social injustice toward African Americans that continued after the abolition of slavery. Martin Luther King Jr was a key figure whose importance to American history cannot be overstated.

History Research Questions

In what ways have Alois Riegl’s theories shaped modern art today?
How did the Renaissance shift the worldview of European thinkers?
How did the Berlin Conference influence British Colonialism in Africa?
How have women in tech history shaped the role of American women in STEM in the 21st Century?
In what ways did the 17th century’s political and military shifts in Spain affect British rule?

Choosing the Right History Research Topic

Whether you are a high school or a college student, there are many history topics from which you can select your research project. Selecting history topics for history is highly dependent on the type of paper you have chosen to write. Argumentative research paper topics will yield different results than a comparative study or a descriptive study.

Whether you choose to select a historical figure, the military clashes between the American settlers and Native Americans, or the role of women in industrialization, make sure that you narrow down your topic and choose something that answers a specific question about an interesting issue, period, or event.

History Research Topics FAQ

Historiography is the study of recorded historical events and their interpretations. In other words, historiographies help us understand how experienced writers have shaped what, how, and why a specific history subject was recorded and interpreted a certain way.

You start a research paper by beginning with a historical overview from which you can narrow down your topics and the history research questions that you want to address. From there, you will be able to carefully choose your primary and secondary sources. According to Purdue OWL, evaluating sources is an excellent place to begin a research assignment.

You can find many research sources from online university libraries as well as websites devoted to history. The Internet is full of curated libraries such as the American Historical Association, which has resources for historical researchers to help you join the ranks of the most expert writers in the field.

Yes, you can pursue an online degree in history. Many major universities offer online history degrees as an alternative to in-person degrees. You can look up the university of your choice and check the requirements for enrollment.

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First think about historical topics that interest you broadly. Then, gather background information by reading encyclopedias, major books on the topics, and then add focus with a research question.

Qualities of good historical questions.

Open-ended, asks "how" and "why" questions about your general topic
Considers causes or effects
Is argumentative and uses interpretations based on the evidence)
Appropriate specificity (think who, where, when)
Consider the "so what?" of your topic. Why does this topic matter to you? Why should it matter to others?
Reflect on the questions you have considered. Identify one or two questions you find engaging and which could be explored further through research.

Example: "How did white and African-American defense plant workers create and think about interracial relationships during World War II?"

This question investigates broad issues - interracial romance, sexual identity - but within a specific context - World War II and the defense industry.

WARNING: Avoid selecting a topic that is too broad: "How has war affected sex in America?" is too broad. It would take several books to answer this question.

A good question is narrow enough so that you can find a persuasive answer to it in time to meet the due date for this class paper. A good historical question also demands an answer that is not just yes or no. Why and how questions are often good choices, and so are questions that ask you to compare and contrast a topic in different locations or time periods; so are questions that ask you to explain the relationship between one event or historical process and another.

Adapted from: George Mason University Writing Center, (2008) " How to write a research question ," and Brown, " Writing about History ."

Connecting your interpretation to previous work by other historians:

Once you have a topic in mind, you need to find out what other scholars have written about your topic. If they've used the same sources you were thinking of using and reached the same conclusions, there's no point in repeating their work, so you should look for another topic.

Most of the time, though, you'll find that other scholars have used different sources and/or asked different questions, and that reading their work will help you place your own paper in perspective. When you are writing your paper, you will cite these historians - both their arguments about the material, and also (sometimes) their research findings.

Example: "As Tera Hunter has argued concerning Atlanta's laundresses, black women workers preferred work outside the homes of their white employers"(and then you would cite Hunter in a footnote, including page numbers).

Adapted from: Brown, " Writing about History ."

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Next: Finding Secondary Sources >>
Last Updated: May 1, 2024 1:02 PM
URL: https://guides.library.msstate.edu/history

A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing Historical Research [without getting hysterical!] In addition to being a scholarly investigation, research is a social activity intended to create new knowledge. Historical research is your informed response to the questions that you ask while examining the record of human experience. These questions may concern such elements as looking at an event or topic, examining events that lead to the event in question, social influences, key players, and other contextual information. This step-by-step guide progresses from an introduction to historical resources to information about how to identify a topic, craft a thesis and develop a research paper. Table of contents: The Range and Richness of Historical Sources Secondary Sources Primary Sources Historical Analysis What is it? Who, When, Where, What and Why: The Five "W"s Topic, Thesis, Sources Definition of Terms Choose a Topic Craft a Thesis Evaluate Thesis and Sources A Variety of Information Sources Take Efficient Notes Note Cards Thinking, Organizing, Researching Parenthetical Documentation Prepare a Works Cited Page Drafting, Revising, Rewriting, Rethinking For Further Reading: Works Cited Additional Links So you want to study history?! Tons of help and links Slatta Home Page Use the Writing and other links on the lefhand menu I. The Range and Richness of Historical Sources Back to Top Every period leaves traces, what historians call "sources" or evidence. Some are more credible or carry more weight than others; judging the differences is a vital skill developed by good historians. Sources vary in perspective, so knowing who created the information you are examining is vital. Anonymous doesn't make for a very compelling source. For example, an FBI report on the antiwar movement, prepared for U.S. President Richard Nixon, probably contained secrets that at the time were thought to have affected national security. It would not be usual, however, for a journalist's article about a campus riot, featured in a local newspaper, to leak top secret information. Which source would you read? It depends on your research topic. If you're studying how government officials portrayed student activists, you'll want to read the FBI report and many more documents from other government agencies such as the CIA and the National Security Council. If you're investigating contemporary opinion of pro-war and anti-war activists, local newspaper accounts provide a rich resource. You'd want to read a variety of newspapers to ensure you're covering a wide range of opinions (rural/urban, left/right, North/South, Soldier/Draft-dodger, etc). Historians classify sources into two major categories: primary and secondary sources. Secondary Sources Back to Top Definition: Secondary sources are created by someone who was either not present when the event occurred or removed from it in time. We use secondary sources for overview information, to familiarize ourselves with a topic, and compare that topic with other events in history. In refining a research topic, we often begin with secondary sources. This helps us identify gaps or conflicts in the existing scholarly literature that might prove promsing topics. Types: History books, encyclopedias, historical dictionaries, and academic (scholarly) articles are secondary sources. To help you determine the status of a given secondary source, see How to identify and nagivate scholarly literature . Examples: Historian Marilyn Young's (NYU) book about the Vietnam War is a secondary source. She did not participate in the war. Her study is not based on her personal experience but on the evidence she culled from a variety of sources she found in the United States and Vietnam. Primary Sources Back to Top Definition: Primary sources emanate from individuals or groups who participated in or witnessed an event and recorded that event during or immediately after the event. They include speeches, memoirs, diaries, letters, telegrams, emails, proclamations, government documents, and much more. Examples: A student activist during the war writing about protest activities has created a memoir. This would be a primary source because the information is based on her own involvement in the events she describes. Similarly, an antiwar speech is a primary source. So is the arrest record of student protesters. A newspaper editorial or article, reporting on a student demonstration is also a primary source. II. Historical Analysis What is it? Back to Top No matter what you read, whether it's a primary source or a secondary source, you want to know who authored the source (a trusted scholar? A controversial historian? A propagandist? A famous person? An ordinary individual?). "Author" refers to anyone who created information in any medium (film, sound, or text). You also need to know when it was written and the kind of audience the author intend to reach. You should also consider what you bring to the evidence that you examine. Are you inductively following a path of evidence, developing your interpretation based on the sources? Do you have an ax to grind? Did you begin your research deductively, with your mind made up before even seeing the evidence. Historians need to avoid the latter and emulate the former. To read more about the distinction, examine the difference between Intellectual Inquirers and Partisan Ideologues . In the study of history, perspective is everything. A letter written by a twenty- year old Vietnam War protestor will differ greatly from a letter written by a scholar of protest movements. Although the sentiment might be the same, the perspective and influences of these two authors will be worlds apart. Practicing the " 5 Ws " will avoid the confusion of the authority trap. Who, When, Where, What and Why: The Five "W"s Back to Top Historians accumulate evidence (information, including facts, stories, interpretations, opinions, statements, reports, etc.) from a variety of sources (primary and secondary). They must also verify that certain key pieces of information are corroborated by a number of people and sources ("the predonderance of evidence"). The historian poses the " 5 Ws " to every piece of information he examines: Who is the historical actor? When did the event take place? Where did it occur? What did it entail and why did it happen the way it did? The " 5 Ws " can also be used to evaluate a primary source. Who authored the work? When was it created? Where was it created, published, and disseminated? Why was it written (the intended audience), and what is the document about (what points is the author making)? If you know the answers to these five questions, you can analyze any document, and any primary source. The historian doesn't look for the truth, since this presumes there is only one true story. The historian tries to understand a number of competing viewpoints to form his or her own interpretation-- what constitutes the best explanation of what happened and why. By using as wide a range of primary source documents and secondary sources as possible, you will add depth and richness to your historical analysis. The more exposure you, the researcher, have to a number of different sources and differing view points, the more you have a balanced and complete view about a topic in history. This view will spark more questions and ultimately lead you into the quest to unravel more clues about your topic. You are ready to start assembling information for your research paper. III. Topic, Thesis, Sources Definition of Terms Back to Top Because your purpose is to create new knowledge while recognizing those scholars whose existing work has helped you in this pursuit, you are honor bound never to commit the following academic sins: Plagiarism: Literally "kidnapping," involving the use of someone else's words as if they were your own (Gibaldi 6). To avoid plagiarism you must document direct quotations, paraphrases, and original ideas not your own. Recycling: Rehashing material you already know thoroughly or, without your professor's permission, submitting a paper that you have completed for another course. Premature cognitive commitment: Academic jargon for deciding on a thesis too soon and then seeking information to serve that thesis rather than embarking on a genuine search for new knowledge. Choose a Topic Back to Top "Do not hunt for subjects, let them choose you, not you them." --Samuel Butler Choosing a topic is the first step in the pursuit of a thesis. Below is a logical progression from topic to thesis: Close reading of the primary text, aided by secondary sources Growing awareness of interesting qualities within the primary text Choosing a topic for research Asking productive questions that help explore and evaluate a topic Creating a research hypothesis Revising and refining a hypothesis to form a working thesis First, and most important, identify what qualities in the primary or secondary source pique your imagination and curiosity and send you on a search for answers. Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive levels provides a description of productive questions asked by critical thinkers. While the lower levels (knowledge, comprehension) are necessary to a good history essay, aspire to the upper three levels (analysis, synthesis, evaluation). Skimming reference works such as encyclopedias, books, critical essays and periodical articles can help you choose a topic that evolves into a hypothesis, which in turn may lead to a thesis. One approach to skimming involves reading the first paragraph of a secondary source to locate and evaluate the author's thesis. Then for a general idea of the work's organization and major ideas read the first and last sentence of each paragraph. Read the conclusion carefully, as it usually presents a summary (Barnet and Bedau 19). Craft a Thesis Back to Top Very often a chosen topic is too broad for focused research. You must revise it until you have a working hypothesis, that is, a statement of an idea or an approach with respect to the source that could form the basis for your thesis. Remember to not commit too soon to any one hypothesis. Use it as a divining rod or a first step that will take you to new information that may inspire you to revise your hypothesis. Be flexible. Give yourself time to explore possibilities. The hypothesis you create will mature and shift as you write and rewrite your paper. New questions will send you back to old and on to new material. Remember, this is the nature of research--it is more a spiraling or iterative activity than a linear one. Test your working hypothesis to be sure it is: broad enough to promise a variety of resources. narrow enough for you to research in depth. original enough to interest you and your readers. worthwhile enough to offer information and insights of substance "do-able"--sources are available to complete the research. Now it is time to craft your thesis, your revised and refined hypothesis. A thesis is a declarative sentence that: focuses on one well-defined idea makes an arguable assertion; it is capable of being supported prepares your readers for the body of your paper and foreshadows the conclusion. Evaluate Thesis and Sources Back to Top Like your hypothesis, your thesis is not carved in stone. You are in charge. If necessary, revise it during the research process. As you research, continue to evaluate both your thesis for practicality, originality, and promise as a search tool, and secondary sources for relevance and scholarliness. The following are questions to ask during the research process: Are there many journal articles and entire books devoted to the thesis, suggesting that the subject has been covered so thoroughly that there may be nothing new to say? Does the thesis lead to stimulating, new insights? Are appropriate sources available? Is there a variety of sources available so that the bibliography or works cited page will reflect different kinds of sources? Which sources are too broad for my thesis? Which resources are too narrow? Who is the author of the secondary source? Does the critic's background suggest that he/she is qualified? After crafting a thesis, consider one of the following two approaches to writing a research paper: Excited about your thesis and eager to begin? Return to the primary or secondary source to find support for your thesis. Organize ideas and begin writing your first draft. After writing the first draft, have it reviewed by your peers and your instructor. Ponder their suggestions and return to the sources to answer still-open questions. Document facts and opinions from secondary sources. Remember, secondary sources can never substitute for primary sources. Confused about where to start? Use your thesis to guide you to primary and secondary sources. Secondary sources can help you clarify your position and find a direction for your paper. Keep a working bibliography. You may not use all the sources you record, but you cannot be sure which ones you will eventually discard. Create a working outline as you research. This outline will, of course, change as you delve more deeply into your subject. A Variety of Information Sources Back to Top "A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension." --Oliver Wendell Holmes Your thesis and your working outline are the primary compasses that will help you navigate the variety of sources available. In "Introduction to the Library" (5-6) the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers suggests you become familiar with the library you will be using by: taking a tour or enrolling for a brief introductory lecture referring to the library's publications describing its resources introducing yourself and your project to the reference librarian The MLA Handbook also lists guides for the use of libraries (5), including: Jean Key Gates, Guide to the Use of Libraries and Information Sources (7th ed., New York: McGraw, 1994). Thomas Mann, A Guide to Library Research Methods (New York: Oxford UP, 1987). Online Central Catalog Most libraries have their holdings listed on a computer. The online catalog may offer Internet sites, Web pages and databases that relate to the university's curriculum. It may also include academic journals and online reference books. Below are three search techniques commonly used online: Index Search: Although online catalogs may differ slightly from library to library, the most common listings are by: Subject Search: Enter the author's name for books and article written about the author. Author Search: Enter an author's name for works written by the author, including collections of essays the author may have written about his/her own works. Title Search: Enter a title for the screen to list all the books the library carries with that title. Key Word Search/Full-text Search: A one-word search, e.g., 'Kennedy,' will produce an overwhelming number of sources, as it will call up any entry that includes the name 'Kennedy.' To focus more narrowly on your subject, add one or more key words, e.g., "John Kennedy, Peace Corps." Use precise key words. Boolean Search: Boolean Search techniques use words such as "and," "or," and "not," which clarify the relationship between key words, thus narrowing the search. Take Efficient Notes Back to Top Keeping complete and accurate bibliography and note cards during the research process is a time (and sanity) saving practice. If you have ever needed a book or pages within a book, only to discover that an earlier researcher has failed to return it or torn pages from your source, you understand the need to take good notes. Every researcher has a favorite method for taking notes. Here are some suggestions-- customize one of them for your own use. Bibliography cards There may be far more books and articles listed than you have time to read, so be selective when choosing a reference. Take information from works that clearly relate to your thesis, remembering that you may not use them all. Use a smaller or a different color card from the one used for taking notes. Write a bibliography card for every source. Number the bibliography cards. On the note cards, use the number rather than the author's name and the title. It's faster. Another method for recording a working bibliography, of course, is to create your own database. Adding, removing, and alphabetizing titles is a simple process. Be sure to save often and to create a back-up file. A bibliography card should include all the information a reader needs to locate that particular source for further study. Most of the information required for a book entry (Gibaldi 112): Author's name Title of a part of the book [preface, chapter titles, etc.] Title of the book Name of the editor, translator, or compiler Edition used Number(s) of the volume(s) used Name of the series Place of publication, name of the publisher, and date of publication Page numbers Supplementary bibliographic information and annotations Most of the information required for an article in a periodical (Gibaldi 141): Author's name Title of the article Name of the periodical Series number or name (if relevant) Volume number (for a scholarly journal) Issue number (if needed) Date of publication Page numbers Supplementary information For information on how to cite other sources refer to your So you want to study history page . Note Cards Back to Top Take notes in ink on either uniform note cards (3x5, 4x6, etc.) or uniform slips of paper. Devote each note card to a single topic identified at the top. Write only on one side. Later, you may want to use the back to add notes or personal observations. Include a topical heading for each card. Include the number of the page(s) where you found the information. You will want the page number(s) later for documentation, and you may also want page number(s)to verify your notes. Most novice researchers write down too much. Condense. Abbreviate. You are striving for substance, not quantity. Quote directly from primary sources--but the "meat," not everything. Suggestions for condensing information: Summary: A summary is intended to provide the gist of an essay. Do not weave in the author's choice phrases. Read the information first and then condense the main points in your own words. This practice will help you avoid the copying that leads to plagiarism. Summarizing also helps you both analyze the text you are reading and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses (Barnet and Bedau 13). Outline: Use to identify a series of points. Paraphrase, except for key primary source quotations. Never quote directly from a secondary source, unless the precise wording is essential to your argument. Simplify the language and list the ideas in the same order. A paraphrase is as long as the original. Paraphrasing is helpful when you are struggling with a particularly difficult passage. Be sure to jot down your own insights or flashes of brilliance. Ralph Waldo Emerson warns you to "Look sharply after your thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear...." To differentiate these insights from those of the source you are reading, initial them as your own. (When the following examples of note cards include the researcher's insights, they will be followed by the initials N. R.) When you have finished researching your thesis and you are ready to write your paper, organize your cards according to topic. Notecards make it easy to shuffle and organize your source information on a table-- or across the floor. Maintain your working outline that includes the note card headings and explores a logical order for presenting them in your paper. IV. Begin Thinking, Researching, Organizing Back to Top Don't be too sequential. Researching, writing, revising is a complex interactive process. Start writing as soon as possible! "The best antidote to writer's block is--to write." (Klauser 15). However, you still feel overwhelmed and are staring at a blank page, you are not alone. Many students find writing the first sentence to be the most daunting part of the entire research process. Be creative. Cluster (Rico 28-49). Clustering is a form of brainstorming. Sometimes called a web, the cluster forms a design that may suggest a natural organization for a paper. Here's a graphical depiction of brainstorming . Like a sun, the generating idea or topic lies at the center of the web. From it radiate words, phrases, sentences and images that in turn attract other words, phrases, sentences and images. Put another way--stay focused. Start with your outline. If clustering is not a technique that works for you, turn to the working outline you created during the research process. Use the outline view of your word processor. If you have not already done so, group your note cards according to topic headings. Compare them to your outline's major points. If necessary, change the outline to correspond with the headings on the note cards. If any area seems weak because of a scarcity of facts or opinions, return to your primary and/or secondary sources for more information or consider deleting that heading. Use your outline to provide balance in your essay. Each major topic should have approximately the same amount of information. Once you have written a working outline, consider two different methods for organizing it. Deduction: A process of development that moves from the general to the specific. You may use this approach to present your findings. However, as noted above, your research and interpretive process should be inductive. Deduction is the most commonly used form of organization for a research paper. The thesis statement is the generalization that leads to the specific support provided by primary and secondary sources. The thesis is stated early in the paper. The body of the paper then proceeds to provide the facts, examples, and analogies that flow logically from that thesis. The thesis contains key words that are reflected in the outline. These key words become a unifying element throughout the paper, as they reappear in the detailed paragraphs that support and develop the thesis. The conclusion of the paper circles back to the thesis, which is now far more meaningful because of the deductive development that supports it. Chronological order A process that follows a traditional time line or sequence of events. A chronological organization is useful for a paper that explores cause and effect. Parenthetical Documentation Back to Top The Works Cited page, a list of primary and secondary sources, is not sufficient documentation to acknowledge the ideas, facts, and opinions you have included within your text. The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers describes an efficient parenthetical style of documentation to be used within the body of your paper. Guidelines for parenthetical documentation: "References to the text must clearly point to specific sources in the list of works cited" (Gibaldi 184). Try to use parenthetical documentation as little as possible. For example, when you cite an entire work, it is preferable to include the author's name in the text. The author's last name followed by the page number is usually enough for an accurate identification of the source in the works cited list. These examples illustrate the most common kinds of documentation. Documenting a quotation: Ex. "The separation from the personal mother is a particularly intense process for a daughter because she has to separate from the one who is the same as herself" (Murdock 17). She may feel abandoned and angry. Note: The author of The Heroine's Journey is listed under Works Cited by the author's name, reversed--Murdock, Maureen. Quoted material is found on page 17 of that book. Parenthetical documentation is after the quotation mark and before the period. Documenting a paraphrase: Ex. In fairy tales a woman who holds the princess captive or who abandons her often needs to be killed (18). Note: The second paraphrase is also from Murdock's book The Heroine's Journey. It is not, however, necessary to repeat the author's name if no other documentation interrupts the two. If the works cited page lists more than one work by the same author, include within the parentheses an abbreviated form of the appropriate title. You may, of course, include the title in your sentence, making it unnecessary to add an abbreviated title in the citation. > Prepare a Works Cited Page Back to Top There are a variety of titles for the page that lists primary and secondary sources (Gibaldi 106-107). A Works Cited page lists those works you have cited within the body of your paper. The reader need only refer to it for the necessary information required for further independent research. Bibliography means literally a description of books. Because your research may involve the use of periodicals, films, art works, photographs, etc. "Works Cited" is a more precise descriptive term than bibliography. An Annotated Bibliography or Annotated Works Cited page offers brief critiques and descriptions of the works listed. A Works Consulted page lists those works you have used but not cited. Avoid using this format. As with other elements of a research paper there are specific guidelines for the placement and the appearance of the Works Cited page. The following guidelines comply with MLA style: The Work Cited page is placed at the end of your paper and numbered consecutively with the body of your paper. Center the title and place it one inch from the top of your page. Do not quote or underline the title. Double space the entire page, both within and between entries. The entries are arranged alphabetically by the author's last name or by the title of the article or book being cited. If the title begins with an article (a, an, the) alphabetize by the next word. If you cite two or more works by the same author, list the titles in alphabetical order. Begin every entry after the first with three hyphens followed by a period. All entries begin at the left margin but subsequent lines are indented five spaces. Be sure that each entry cited on the Works Cited page corresponds to a specific citation within your paper. Refer to the the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (104- 182) for detailed descriptions of Work Cited entries. Citing sources from online databases is a relatively new phenomenon. Make sure to ask your professor about citing these sources and which style to use. V. Draft, Revise, Rewrite, Rethink Back to Top "There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed." --John Kenneth Galbraith Try freewriting your first draft. Freewriting is a discovery process during which the writer freely explores a topic. Let your creative juices flow. In Writing without Teachers , Peter Elbow asserts that "[a]lmost everybody interposes a massive and complicated series of editings between the time words start to be born into consciousness and when they finally come off the end of the pencil or typewriter [or word processor] onto the page" (5). Do not let your internal judge interfere with this first draft. Creating and revising are two very different functions. Don't confuse them! If you stop to check spelling, punctuation, or grammar, you disrupt the flow of creative energy. Create; then fix it later. When material you have researched comes easily to mind, include it. Add a quick citation, one you can come back to later to check for form, and get on with your discovery. In subsequent drafts, focus on creating an essay that flows smoothly, supports fully, and speaks clearly and interestingly. Add style to substance. Create a smooth flow of words, ideas and paragraphs. Rearrange paragraphs for a logical progression of information. Transition is essential if you want your reader to follow you smoothly from introduction to conclusion. Transitional words and phrases stitch your ideas together; they provide coherence within the essay. External transition: Words and phrases that are added to a sentence as overt signs of transition are obvious and effective, but should not be overused, as they may draw attention to themselves and away from ideas. Examples of external transition are "however," "then," "next," "therefore." "first," "moreover," and "on the other hand." Internal transition is more subtle. Key words in the introduction become golden threads when they appear in the paper's body and conclusion. When the writer hears a key word repeated too often, however, she/he replaces it with a synonym or a pronoun. Below are examples of internal transition. Transitional sentences create a logical flow from paragraph to paragraph. Iclude individual words, phrases, or clauses that refer to previous ideas and that point ahead to new ones. They are usually placed at the end or at the beginning of a paragraph. A transitional paragraph conducts your reader from one part of the paper to another. It may be only a few sentences long. Each paragraph of the body of the paper should contain adequate support for its one governing idea. Speak/write clearly, in your own voice. Tone: The paper's tone, whether formal, ironic, or humorous, should be appropriate for the audience and the subject. Voice: Keep you language honest. Your paper should sound like you. Understand, paraphrase, absorb, and express in your own words the information you have researched. Avoid phony language. Sentence formation: When you polish your sentences, read them aloud for word choice and word placement. Be concise. Strunk and White in The Elements of Style advise the writer to "omit needless words" (23). First, however, you must recognize them. Keep yourself and your reader interested. In fact, Strunk's 1918 writing advice is still well worth pondering. First, deliver on your promises. Be sure the body of your paper fulfills the promise of the introduction. Avoid the obvious. Offer new insights. Reveal the unexpected. Have you crafted your conclusion as carefully as you have your introduction? Conclusions are not merely the repetition of your thesis. The conclusion of a research paper is a synthesis of the information presented in the body. Your research has led you to conclusions and opinions that have helped you understand your thesis more deeply and more clearly. Lift your reader to the full level of understanding that you have achieved. Revision means "to look again." Find a peer reader to read your paper with you present. Or, visit your college or university's writing lab. Guide your reader's responses by asking specific questions. Are you unsure of the logical order of your paragraphs? Do you want to know whether you have supported all opinions adequately? Are you concerned about punctuation or grammar? Ask that these issues be addressed. You are in charge. Here are some techniques that may prove helpful when you are revising alone or with a reader. When you edit for spelling errors read the sentences backwards. This procedure will help you look closely at individual words. Always read your paper aloud. Hearing your own words puts them in a new light. Listen to the flow of ideas and of language. Decide whether or not the voice sounds honest and the tone is appropriate to the purpose of the paper and to your audience. Listen for awkward or lumpy wording. Find the one right word, Eliminate needless words. Combine sentences. Kill the passive voice. Eliminate was/were/is/are constructions. They're lame and anti-historical. Be ruthless. If an idea doesn't serve your thesis, banish it, even if it's one of your favorite bits of prose. In the margins, write the major topic of each paragraph. By outlining after you have written the paper, you are once again evaluating your paper's organization. OK, you've got the process down. Now execute! And enjoy! It's not everyday that you get to make history. VI. For Further Reading: Works Cited Back to Top Barnet, Sylvan, and Hugo Bedau. Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing: A Brief Guide to Argument. Boston: Bedford, 1993. Brent, Doug. Reading as Rhetorical Invention: Knowledge,Persuasion and the Teaching of Research-Based Writing. Urbana: NCTE, 1992. Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Gibladi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 4th ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 1995. Horvitz, Deborah. "Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved." Studies in American Fiction , Vol. 17, No. 2, Autum, 1989, pp. 157-167. Republished in the Literature Research Center. Gale Group. (1 January 1999). Klauser, Henriette Anne. Writing on Both Sides of the Brain: Breakthrough Techniques for People Who Write. Philadelphia: Harper, 1986. Rico, Gabriele Lusser. Writing the Natural Way: Using Right Brain Techniques to Release Your Expressive Powers. Los Angeles: Houghton, 1983. Sorenson, Sharon. The Research Paper: A Contemporary Approach. New York: AMSCO, 1994. Strunk, William, Jr., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 3rd ed. New York: MacMillan, 1979. Back to Top This guide adapted from materials published by Thomson Gale, publishers. For free resources, including a generic guide to writing term papers, see the Gale.com website , which also includes product information for schools.

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40 Interesting Historical Research Topics

Last modified 2024-03-28
Published on 2021-03-17

History is typically a required course in high school, under the umbrella of social science. History is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea; however, understanding American, European, and World History will give you an opportunity to escape your little bubble of life and gain broader perspectives about historical events and how they influence current and future events. History repeats itself, is often said. Learning about history will not only give you knowledge of the past but also predictions for the future.

History may sound boring at first, but historical events were influenced by numerous factors, ranging from politics, technological advancement, and social circumstances. Especially, when you dive deeper into history with historical research, you will develop critical analysis and technical analysis skills by uncovering events and analyz ing how they have impacted the future through convincing arguments.

So now, you’re very interested in doing historical research, but you don’t know where to start. Every research paper starts with an interesting topic. So, ask yourself, what topic is of the most interest to you and most unique and interesting to readers? Maybe you are interested in learning more about European History during the Renaissance period, or the decolonization of Asia under the event of the Second World War . Depending on the topic, you will be able to integrate and discuss multiple perspectives that contribute to the events or incidents. Examples include: the economy, education, politics, social life, etc. While brainstorming a topic, you should also look for reliable resources. Reliable resources can come from your school’s library, scholarly and peer-reviewed articles, etc. For more details about steps in the research process, we’ve written in detail 8 critical steps while doing research you should check out.

Before going into the list, we recommend that you should have a clear direction of what historical aspect you should focus on. There are 5 main aspects when it comes to historical events:

Religion/Philosophy: belief, creator, place of worship, ideas
Politics: government, laws, leaders, crimes, war, military, democracy
Economics: currency, jobs, bank, trade, stocks, gold, production
Society: communication, personality, age, nationality, gender, religion
Culture: traditions, clothing, appearance, festivals, food, language, sports, education, architecture

You can write any one of those preceding aspects, or a combination of two or three aspects in relation to each historical event. We’ve compiled and categorized topics to guide you in your historical research paper writing process. Using the topics, you can dive deeper into exploring which topics you’re most interested in writing about, and should be most relevant to your history career in high school and college. Now, let’s get started!

1. World History

World History is a broad and diverse research topic that covers a wide period of time: from civilization to social movement. Therefore, there are multiple topics students can choose from. Remember, world history discusses the development in the world in response to interchanges among significant countries in the world.

World Wars I and II, the links between them, and how they could have been prevented
American Revolution – Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783
Trade in the Roman World designed by The Romans created one of the most impressive road networks of the ancient world.
The rise and fall of empires, in relation to conflicts, protests, and riots against corporate globalization, and the threat of worldwide terrorism against the West.
Cradle of civilization: Ancient Discoveries of China, Egypt, Mesoamerica, or India, or any other civilization that le d to a high level of craft specialization and artistic production from each civilization, creating opportunities for trade
Architecture through the ages: the changes in architecture through various traditions, regions, and dates, growing from human’s basic needs of shelter and protection.
Women’s rights movement around the world. To see the overall timeline of women’s rights movements, you can explore women’s activism from generations past and present on the UN Women’s website .
Math and Science discoveries throughout ancient history that contribute to how we apply math and science today
Ancient conquests and their influence on the modern world map formation
Nuclear warfare, a military conflict or political strategy which deploys nuclear weaponry.

2. United States History

For students studying in the US, United States History has always been fascinating, given its Declaration of Independence in 1776. American History ranges from prehistory, European colonization, the American Revolution, the Federal period, the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, and the Cold War. Below are some examples for U.S. historical Research paper:

Attack on Pearl Harbor, the military strike by Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service upon the United States against the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The Vietnam War: Social consequences and treatment of veterans returning from the war
Immigration in the late 1800s: the “melting pot” and “salad bowl” metaphors
Gold Rush and its development of the California state
Civil War and the participation of women and African America ns
JFK Presidency, Policy and Assassination
My Lai Massacre, incident of American violence committed against unarmed civilians during the Vietnam War
Sept 11, 2001 attacks and their impact on American security policies, foreign policy, and views on Islam through media and movies
Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, its tactics, movements, and outcomes
Yellow journalism and its impact on the Spanish-American War

3. European History

The history of Europe began with the first appearance of anatomically modern humans in Europe. European History is considered the best-documented history compared to that of other regions in the world of history. Through conducting European studies, you will be able to understand its people, culture, and the way they saw the world.

The Nude in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: religious or erotic?
Italian unification
The relationship between Turkey and the European Union, and its impact on the position that Turkey has today
Black Death, cause, symptoms and impact
Religious crisis in the 16th century: the birth of Protestantism
The Agricultural Revolution and the development of market economies
The spread of Christianity: the political aspects
European imperialism, in relation to the economic and political power overseas
The Industrial Revolution and societal consequences
The influence of Locke and French philosophies on the rise of liberal political thought in Europe in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries

4. Asian History

Asian History remains unknown to many people in the Western world . However, in the discussion of world history, the civilizations of Asia display a preeminence prior to the age of Western civilization.

Western imperialism in Asia and Asia n transformation in the areas of religion, economy, and society
The Story of Viet n am: From Prehistory to the Present
Open Door policy and its impact on the economies in the US and China
Ancient Korean & Chinese Relations
The Forgotten History of South Korean Massacres in Vietnam
Invasions of the Korean Peninsula and its struggle for unification
Yasuke and its defense on Japan’s Greatest Warlord
British Malaya: British involvement in Malay Politics
The Great Game: a political and diplomatic confrontation between the British Empire and the Russian Empire over Afghanistan and neighboring territories in Central and South Asia.
The Indus Valley Civilization, one of the world’s earliest civilizations

History is a topic of great breadth and depth. Historians today are fascinated by the new findings of history through the examination of archaeology and anthropology. The above are the few examples we hope will inspire you to take the next step to conduct historical research. If you are passionate about history and would like to conduct a research project in preparation for history or other liberal arts majors in college or a history career in the future, we are here to help! We recently launched a new Historical Research project, along with the long-standing American, European, and World History courses.

Aralia’s History tutors are inspired teachers and professors who are committed to student success. They are recognized in their field or are currently teaching at top high schools and colleges/universities in the US.

5. Take History classes with Aralia

Through Historical Research and Writing, students will learn about choosing a topic, composing research questions, effective research methods, drafting, composing, and revising. These skills will be taught with an emphasis on historical research, allowing students to engage in analysis of primary and secondary sources, discover interesting insights in history, and partake in the active pursuit of understanding the importance of the historical study.

In AP United States History (APUSH), students will review key content concepts and course objectives found in the APUSH course description through writing long essay questions (LEQ), document-based question essays (DBQs), and short answer questions (SAQs). Furthermore, students will practice using historical thinking skills tested on the exam by answering stimuli-based multiple-choice questions and through their written responses.

In this course, we will cover a period from the height of Ancient Greece to the middle of the sixteenth century, as we study the emergence of the first civilizations around modern day Europe and the trajectory of their development into Western society. We will examine the contributions of Greece and Rome and how they expanded their empires; how ideas are conceived, put into practice, and have social consequences; how and why their empires collapsed; how people and societies existed during the Middle Ages; how numerous cultures developed values and coexisted/clashed with others; and how a broken Europe, after several starts, reinvigorated itself with the Renaissance, and split again in the Reformation.

This course will allow students to discover important moments in World History while developing academic, writing, and communication skills. By studying, reading, and writing about World History, students will gain a better understanding of how the modern world came to be and how past events dictate current ones.

Explore the rise and fall of empires, the clash, and encounter of cultures, plagues, religious fervor, and political intrigue and war. This course aims to discover the complex interactions between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans in different regions of North America across more than 500 years of history.

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Home » Historical Research – Types, Methods and Examples

Historical Research – Types, Methods and Examples

Table of Contents

Historical Research

Definition:

Historical research is the process of investigating and studying past events, people, and societies using a variety of sources and methods. This type of research aims to reconstruct and interpret the past based on the available evidence.

Types of Historical Research

There are several types of historical research, including:

Descriptive Research

This type of historical research focuses on describing events, people, or cultures in detail. It can involve examining artifacts, documents, or other sources of information to create a detailed account of what happened or existed.

Analytical Research

This type of historical research aims to explain why events, people, or cultures occurred in a certain way. It involves analyzing data to identify patterns, causes, and effects, and making interpretations based on this analysis.

Comparative Research

This type of historical research involves comparing two or more events, people, or cultures to identify similarities and differences. This can help researchers understand the unique characteristics of each and how they interacted with each other.

Interpretive Research

This type of historical research focuses on interpreting the meaning of past events, people, or cultures. It can involve analyzing cultural symbols, beliefs, and practices to understand their significance in a particular historical context.

Quantitative Research

This type of historical research involves using statistical methods to analyze historical data. It can involve examining demographic information, economic indicators, or other quantitative data to identify patterns and trends.

Qualitative Research

This type of historical research involves examining non-numerical data such as personal accounts, letters, or diaries. It can provide insights into the experiences and perspectives of individuals during a particular historical period.

Data Collection Methods

Data Collection Methods are as follows:

Archival research : This involves analyzing documents and records that have been preserved over time, such as government records, diaries, letters, newspapers, and photographs. Archival research is often conducted in libraries, archives, and museums.
Oral history : This involves conducting interviews with individuals who have lived through a particular historical period or event. Oral history can provide a unique perspective on past events and can help to fill gaps in the historical record.
Artifact analysis: This involves examining physical objects from the past, such as tools, clothing, and artwork, to gain insights into past cultures and practices.
Secondary sources: This involves analyzing published works, such as books, articles, and academic papers, that discuss past events and cultures. Secondary sources can provide context and insights into the historical period being studied.
Statistical analysis : This involves analyzing numerical data from the past, such as census records or economic data, to identify patterns and trends.
Fieldwork : This involves conducting on-site research in a particular location, such as visiting a historical site or conducting ethnographic research in a particular community. Fieldwork can provide a firsthand understanding of the culture and environment being studied.
Content analysis: This involves analyzing the content of media from the past, such as films, television programs, and advertisements, to gain insights into cultural attitudes and beliefs.

Data Analysis Methods

Content analysis : This involves analyzing the content of written or visual material, such as books, newspapers, or photographs, to identify patterns and themes. Content analysis can be used to identify changes in cultural values and beliefs over time.
Textual analysis : This involves analyzing written texts, such as letters or diaries, to understand the experiences and perspectives of individuals during a particular historical period. Textual analysis can provide insights into how people lived and thought in the past.
Discourse analysis : This involves analyzing how language is used to construct meaning and power relations in a particular historical period. Discourse analysis can help to identify how social and political ideologies were constructed and maintained over time.
Statistical analysis: This involves using statistical methods to analyze numerical data, such as census records or economic data, to identify patterns and trends. Statistical analysis can help to identify changes in population demographics, economic conditions, and other factors over time.
Comparative analysis : This involves comparing data from two or more historical periods or events to identify similarities and differences. Comparative analysis can help to identify patterns and trends that may not be apparent from analyzing data from a single historical period.
Qualitative analysis: This involves analyzing non-numerical data, such as oral history interviews or ethnographic field notes, to identify themes and patterns. Qualitative analysis can provide a rich understanding of the experiences and perspectives of individuals in the past.

Historical Research Methodology

Here are the general steps involved in historical research methodology:

Define the research question: Start by identifying a research question that you want to answer through your historical research. This question should be focused, specific, and relevant to your research goals.
Review the literature: Conduct a review of the existing literature on the topic of your research question. This can involve reading books, articles, and academic papers to gain a thorough understanding of the existing research.
Develop a research design : Develop a research design that outlines the methods you will use to collect and analyze data. This design should be based on the research question and should be feasible given the resources and time available.
Collect data: Use the methods outlined in your research design to collect data on past events, people, and cultures. This can involve archival research, oral history interviews, artifact analysis, and other data collection methods.
Analyze data : Analyze the data you have collected using the methods outlined in your research design. This can involve content analysis, textual analysis, statistical analysis, and other data analysis methods.
Interpret findings : Use the results of your data analysis to draw meaningful insights and conclusions related to your research question. These insights should be grounded in the data and should be relevant to the research goals.
Communicate results: Communicate your findings through a research report, academic paper, or other means. This should be done in a clear, concise, and well-organized manner, with appropriate citations and references to the literature.

Applications of Historical Research

Historical research has a wide range of applications in various fields, including:

Education : Historical research can be used to develop curriculum materials that reflect a more accurate and inclusive representation of history. It can also be used to provide students with a deeper understanding of past events and cultures.
Museums : Historical research is used to develop exhibits, programs, and other materials for museums. It can provide a more accurate and engaging presentation of historical events and artifacts.
Public policy : Historical research is used to inform public policy decisions by providing insights into the historical context of current issues. It can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of past policies and programs.
Business : Historical research can be used by businesses to understand the evolution of their industry and to identify trends that may affect their future success. It can also be used to develop marketing strategies that resonate with customers’ historical interests and values.
Law : Historical research is used in legal proceedings to provide evidence and context for cases involving historical events or practices. It can also be used to inform the development of new laws and policies.
Genealogy : Historical research can be used by individuals to trace their family history and to understand their ancestral roots.
Cultural preservation : Historical research is used to preserve cultural heritage by documenting and interpreting past events, practices, and traditions. It can also be used to identify and preserve historical landmarks and artifacts.

Examples of Historical Research

Examples of Historical Research are as follows:

Examining the history of race relations in the United States: Historical research could be used to explore the historical roots of racial inequality and injustice in the United States. This could help inform current efforts to address systemic racism and promote social justice.
Tracing the evolution of political ideologies: Historical research could be used to study the development of political ideologies over time. This could help to contextualize current political debates and provide insights into the origins and evolution of political beliefs and values.
Analyzing the impact of technology on society : Historical research could be used to explore the impact of technology on society over time. This could include examining the impact of previous technological revolutions (such as the industrial revolution) on society, as well as studying the current impact of emerging technologies on society and the environment.
Documenting the history of marginalized communities : Historical research could be used to document the history of marginalized communities (such as LGBTQ+ communities or indigenous communities). This could help to preserve cultural heritage, promote social justice, and promote a more inclusive understanding of history.

Purpose of Historical Research

The purpose of historical research is to study the past in order to gain a better understanding of the present and to inform future decision-making. Some specific purposes of historical research include:

To understand the origins of current events, practices, and institutions : Historical research can be used to explore the historical roots of current events, practices, and institutions. By understanding how things developed over time, we can gain a better understanding of the present.
To develop a more accurate and inclusive understanding of history : Historical research can be used to correct inaccuracies and biases in historical narratives. By exploring different perspectives and sources of information, we can develop a more complete and nuanced understanding of history.
To inform decision-making: Historical research can be used to inform decision-making in various fields, including education, public policy, business, and law. By understanding the historical context of current issues, we can make more informed decisions about how to address them.
To preserve cultural heritage : Historical research can be used to document and preserve cultural heritage, including traditions, practices, and artifacts. By understanding the historical significance of these cultural elements, we can work to preserve them for future generations.
To stimulate curiosity and critical thinking: Historical research can be used to stimulate curiosity and critical thinking about the past. By exploring different historical perspectives and interpretations, we can develop a more critical and reflective approach to understanding history and its relevance to the present.

When to use Historical Research

Historical research can be useful in a variety of contexts. Here are some examples of when historical research might be particularly appropriate:

When examining the historical roots of current events: Historical research can be used to explore the historical roots of current events, practices, and institutions. By understanding how things developed over time, we can gain a better understanding of the present.
When examining the historical context of a particular topic : Historical research can be used to explore the historical context of a particular topic, such as a social issue, political debate, or scientific development. By understanding the historical context, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of the topic and its significance.
When exploring the evolution of a particular field or discipline : Historical research can be used to explore the evolution of a particular field or discipline, such as medicine, law, or art. By understanding the historical development of the field, we can gain a better understanding of its current state and future directions.
When examining the impact of past events on current society : Historical research can be used to examine the impact of past events (such as wars, revolutions, or social movements) on current society. By understanding the historical context and impact of these events, we can gain insights into current social and political issues.
When studying the cultural heritage of a particular community or group : Historical research can be used to document and preserve the cultural heritage of a particular community or group. By understanding the historical significance of cultural practices, traditions, and artifacts, we can work to preserve them for future generations.

Characteristics of Historical Research

The following are some characteristics of historical research:

Focus on the past : Historical research focuses on events, people, and phenomena of the past. It seeks to understand how things developed over time and how they relate to current events.
Reliance on primary sources: Historical research relies on primary sources such as letters, diaries, newspapers, government documents, and other artifacts from the period being studied. These sources provide firsthand accounts of events and can help researchers gain a more accurate understanding of the past.
Interpretation of data : Historical research involves interpretation of data from primary sources. Researchers analyze and interpret data to draw conclusions about the past.
Use of multiple sources: Historical research often involves using multiple sources of data to gain a more complete understanding of the past. By examining a range of sources, researchers can cross-reference information and validate their findings.
Importance of context: Historical research emphasizes the importance of context. Researchers analyze the historical context in which events occurred and consider how that context influenced people’s actions and decisions.
Subjectivity : Historical research is inherently subjective, as researchers interpret data and draw conclusions based on their own perspectives and biases. Researchers must be aware of their own biases and strive for objectivity in their analysis.
Importance of historical significance: Historical research emphasizes the importance of historical significance. Researchers consider the historical significance of events, people, and phenomena and their impact on the present and future.
Use of qualitative methods : Historical research often uses qualitative methods such as content analysis, discourse analysis, and narrative analysis to analyze data and draw conclusions about the past.

Advantages of Historical Research

There are several advantages to historical research:

Provides a deeper understanding of the past : Historical research can provide a more comprehensive understanding of past events and how they have shaped current social, political, and economic conditions. This can help individuals and organizations make informed decisions about the future.
Helps preserve cultural heritage: Historical research can be used to document and preserve cultural heritage. By studying the history of a particular culture, researchers can gain insights into the cultural practices and beliefs that have shaped that culture over time.
Provides insights into long-term trends : Historical research can provide insights into long-term trends and patterns. By studying historical data over time, researchers can identify patterns and trends that may be difficult to discern from short-term data.
Facilitates the development of hypotheses: Historical research can facilitate the development of hypotheses about how past events have influenced current conditions. These hypotheses can be tested using other research methods, such as experiments or surveys.
Helps identify root causes of social problems : Historical research can help identify the root causes of social problems. By studying the historical context in which these problems developed, researchers can gain a better understanding of how they emerged and what factors may have contributed to their development.
Provides a source of inspiration: Historical research can provide a source of inspiration for individuals and organizations seeking to address current social, political, and economic challenges. By studying the accomplishments and struggles of past generations, researchers can gain insights into how to address current challenges.

Limitations of Historical Research

Some Limitations of Historical Research are as follows:

Reliance on incomplete or biased data: Historical research is often limited by the availability and quality of data. Many primary sources have been lost, destroyed, or are inaccessible, making it difficult to get a complete picture of historical events. Additionally, some primary sources may be biased or represent only one perspective on an event.
Difficulty in generalizing findings: Historical research is often specific to a particular time and place and may not be easily generalized to other contexts. This makes it difficult to draw broad conclusions about human behavior or social phenomena.
Lack of control over variables : Historical research often lacks control over variables. Researchers cannot manipulate or control historical events, making it difficult to establish cause-and-effect relationships.
Subjectivity of interpretation : Historical research is often subjective because researchers must interpret data and draw conclusions based on their own biases and perspectives. Different researchers may interpret the same data differently, leading to different conclusions.
Limited ability to test hypotheses: Historical research is often limited in its ability to test hypotheses. Because the events being studied have already occurred, researchers cannot manipulate variables or conduct experiments to test their hypotheses.
Lack of objectivity: Historical research is often subjective, and researchers must be aware of their own biases and strive for objectivity in their analysis. However, it can be difficult to maintain objectivity when studying events that are emotionally charged or controversial.
Limited generalizability: Historical research is often limited in its generalizability, as the events and conditions being studied may be specific to a particular time and place. This makes it difficult to draw broad conclusions that apply to other contexts or time periods.

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Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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HIS 100 - Perspectives in History

Developing a research question.

The FAQ What is a research question and how do I develop one? provides great information on the process of forming and developing your research question:

A research question is the question that is answered by your research. So when you are developing one, you want to ask yourself: What do you want to know about a topic? When doing research, you want to address your topic as a question for which there are no immediate answers.

For example:

Topic: video games and violence

Research Question: Does playing violent video games lead to juvenile violence?

Try these steps to formulate a research question:

Start by identifying your topic (e.g. texting and driving).
Focus your topic by asking your self: who? what? when? why? where? (e.g. texting and driving and accidents).
Formulate a question to ask about your topic (e.g. How many car accidents are caused by drivers who are texting?)
Narrow your question further if possible again by asking your self: who? what? when? why? where? (e.g. How many car accidents are caused in the U.S. per year by drivers who are texting?).

Further Help

To access help with citation and more, visit Academic Support via modules in Brightspace:

The Complete Guide to Using Academic Support via Brightspace This link opens in a new window This link opens in a new window
<< Previous: Defining Primary and Secondary Sources
Next: Research Topic List: Inequality and Human Rights >>

Module 7: The Early Republic (1790-1820)

Developing research questions, learning objectives.

Identify effective research questions that are not too narrow or broad
Generate substantive, open-ended questions about the past

Imagine the following conversation with your friend:

Friend : “The funniest thing ever happened today!” You : “What happened?” Friend : “Oh my goodness…you wouldn’t even believe it. I don’t even know where to start.” You : “Okay, now I need to know. Where were you? Did it happen to you or to someone else?” Friend : “Someone else. It saw it on the way to class.” You : “Well, what happened? Who was it?” Friend : “This guy had turned around to talk to his friend and kept walking—directly into the fountain.” You : “Did he fall in?” Friend : “Yes, he started falling, and when he reached out for something to catch his fall, he grabbed a girl next to him and pulled her in, too!”

And you can imagine even more questions to follow—How did she react? Were they soaked afterwards? Did anyone help? Did they say anything?

In conversation with someone, it’s natural to ask questions to learn more. The more questions you ask, the more details you have, and the better equipped you’ll be to fully visualize what happened. Much in the same way that actively engaging in a conversation helps you paint a picture about a situation, you can also ask questions to learn more information about a research topic.

Research Questions

Developing a research question is the first, and, arguably, the most crucial step in creating a research-based project, whether it be a traditional academic research paper, a podcast, or a video presentation. A well-framed research question will allow you to focus on the matter at hand and approach it in a logical way. A poorly framed research question will make your project extremely difficult to complete, if not impossible. Let’s take a deeper look into developing the research question.

Watch this video to see how developing a research question can set you up for successful research.

You can view the transcript for “Developing a Research Question” here (opens in new window) .

Developing a Research Question

Your research question guides your research. Your research project will answer your research question. But how do you develop a research question? If your project is for a class in the history of the early United States, you may be assigned a specific research question, for example, “What were the causes of the Whiskey Rebellion?” But what if your assignment requires you to develop your own research question? Where do you start?

First, consider the general topic. (If the assignment requires you to focus on the history of the early U.S. republic, then a topic about World War II will not work.) Then, look for some aspect of that general topic that is interesting to you. A research project that interests you is much easier (and more fun!) to complete than one that bores you. For example, if your topic is the early U.S. republic, you could generally look into the expansion of the United States Navy, or the growing concerns enslavers had about slave rebellion. Both are appropriate, but one might be far more interesting to you.

Once you arrive at a general topic, consider a few defining questions. Defining questions help take a broad topic and narrow it down to create a focal point. If your topic was the American Revolution you might ask the following general defining questions:

Who did America fight?
Who won the war?
When was the war?
What caused the war?
Where was the war fought?

These are very general questions, and you already know most of these answers, but they do allow you to think more deeply about the general topic as you work toward developing your research question.

For this exercise, imagine that your instructor has assigned you a research project on an enslaved person’s revolt during the 18th and 19th centuries—a topic about which you know very little, so you will begin by asking five defining questions. They can be quite general, but they will allow you to probe the topic a bit more deeply. For example, you might ask “Where did the enslaved people revolt?” Use the space below to jot down ideas for your clarifying questions.

Now, let’s do some preliminary research on your topic. Here your course textbook or a review of a Wikipedia article can provide you with enough general information to ask a more specific, focused research question. You want to develop a good research question that focuses your research and sets you up for success in the finished product. Let’s first look at what constitutes a “bad” research question.

Is your question easily answered with a few simple facts? For example, if the question is: “Who was the first secretary of the United States Treasury?” then it will be difficult to develop a full project because that question is way too narrow. It can be answered in one sentence: “Alexander Hamilton was the first secretary of the United States Treasury.” Your instructor probably expects more than one sentence for your research project.

But even if the research question is not easily answered in one sentence, a question can still be too narrow. If your general topic is Alexander Hamilton, and the question you ask is: “How did Alexander Hamilton’s childhood education affect his view of public credit?” you will likely have a very difficult time finding sources to investigate and answer the question. This is a great tip to keep in mind. If you cannot find sources to answer your question, then that is a very clear indication the question is too narrow or otherwise problematic.

A research question can also be too broad. For example, “What was the impact of the Louisiana Purchase?” would be too broad, and would likely require hundreds of pages to answer. You would need to address the impact of the purchase on the expansion of slavery and the debates associated with slavery, evaluate the environmental impact of westward expansion, examine how Native Americans were affected, discuss how Napoleon used the purchase price to carry out wars in Europe, evaluate the significance of the port of New Orleans to the future of the United States, etc. This is likely well beyond the scope of your project. If you begin your research and are overwhelmed with sources, that is a good indication your topic is too broad.

See how well you can identify which research questions are either too narrow or too broad in this activity:

So the goal, then, is to hit the “sweet spot” in developing a research question. You want a question neither too narrow nor too broad. You want a question with boundaries that keep you on track. Let’s take a broad question and narrow it down to a workable and good research question. One way to do this is to use the 5Ws to narrow down the question.

Who? : who is the individual or group of individuals we are investigating?
What? : what aspect of the “who” are we investigating?
When? : what is the timeframe of our investigation?
Where? : what is the geographical focus of our investigation?
Why? : why is this investigation important or meaningful?

Answering the questions posed by the 5Ws can help you narrow down the types of things you are curious about and lead you to your research question.

For closed captioning, open the video on its original page by clicking the YouTube logo in the lower right-hand corner of the video display. In YouTube, the video will begin at the same starting point as this clip, but will continue playing until the very end.

You can view the transcript for this segmented clip of “Using the 5Ws to Develop a Research Question” here (opens in new window) .

Let’s assume that your general topic is slave revolt. Here we want to apply the 5Ws.

Who? : Enslaved persons
What? : Revolt
When? : The early republic, 1790-1820
Where? : The U.S. South
Why? : Did slave revolt have an impact on the treatment of enslaved persons?

And now we need to frame the 5Ws into one, answerable research question.

How did the revolt of enslaved persons in the U.S. South during the early republic impact laws about slavery?

We now have placed boundaries with a question that will keep us on track as we move forward with the research. We know we are examining how the law changed as a result of slave revolt between 1790 and 1820 in the U.S. South. Books on slave revolt in Cuba are not relevant. Articles on slave revolt in the 1730s are not relevant. Books on slave revolt in the North are not relevant. Boundaries on your question allow you to manage the project without being overwhelmed and arrive at an answer.

For this exercise, select one of the following topics and apply the 5Ws. Then, craft a research question that applies to the topic you selected.

Topics options:

Hamilton’s Report on Public Credit
The Battle of Tippecanoe
Corps of Discovery

Research question :

Research Projects other than the Research Paper

Traditionally, when we think of research projects, we think of research papers, and the idea that a good research question makes for a good research paper. That is true, but the principles for evaluating a research question can be applied to multiple projects. Perhaps your instructor in this class, or another class, assigns a poster project, where you must present data in a concise format such as a poster. Doing so without clearly defining the topic will be difficult, and when you are given an assignment that requires you to be brief and concise, a clear research question is vital to meeting the expectations.

The importance of crafting a solid research question applies to other types of assignments such as a video presentation or podcast as well. Podcasts are unique in that your presentation is not written but auditory. When we read something in which the topic wanders or is otherwise confusing, it is easy to go back and reread the material to make sense of what the author is trying to convey. That is not easy to do with a podcast (think about all the times you have hit the rewind button, only to go back too far, or not far enough). In a podcast, you want to stay on track throughout the narrative arc. A well-crafted research question will help you to stay focused, but it will also help shape and refine the focus of your podcast.

Creating a Podcast

Imagine your assignment is to create a podcast on a topic in U.S. history before the Civil War. Without a strong research question, that will be a very long podcast! Where do you even begin? Working through the techniques we have learned here will get you off to a great start:

Pick a general topic that is interesting to you.
Conduct preliminary research.
Consider the 5Ws.
Craft your research question, and then begin looking for the answers.
Refine your question as you compile your research.
Create an outline for your podcast, then fill in the specifics with a script, interview questions, or more details. For podcasting tips, visit this NPR website .

Remember that a research question can evolve and change while you work on your project. For example, if you were creating a podcast about some aspect of slave revolts, after some initial searching, you might have a research question of, “How did the revolt of enslaved persons in the U.S. South during the early Republic impact laws about slavery?”

While you conduct research, you may find interesting stories, news articles, or details about slave codes that lead you to adjust your question. For example, during your research, you will likely learn about the 1811 German Coast Uprisings in New Orleans—the largest uprising in North America with between 200 and 500 enslaved participants. They marched twenty miles in two days, burning and destroying some plantation homes and crops until White people in the area gathered a militia and promptly killed over forty of the enslaved participants. Over the next two weeks, White planters and officials interrogated, tried, executed, and decapitated an additional 44 escaped enslaved Blacks who had been captured. Executions were generally by hanging or firing squad. Heads were displayed on pikes to intimidate other enslaved persons. This is all shocking and new information to you and you decide to focus your research specifically on this uprising. Your new research question may be, “What were the reactions to the German Coast Uprisings in Louisiana in 1811?” Your podcast could answer this question in some way. Note that podcasts come in a variety of formats—it could be an interview, a conversation between co-hosts, a narrative, or something else altogether. No matter the format, having a guiding question that you ultimately answer during the podcast will give you a stronger delivery.

Imagine your assignment is to create a podcast on U.S. history before the Civil War. What topic would you choose? Write a research question that could help you focus on a specific topic or event for your podcast. There is no correct answer, but you can jot down your ideas in the space below.

Historical Hack: Developing Research Questions. Authored by : Sarah Franklin for Lumen Learning. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
Developing a Research Question. Provided by : Steely Library NKU. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWLYCYeCFak . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
1811 German Coast Uprising. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1811_German_Coast_uprising . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
Defining Questions. Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/englishcomp1coreq/chapter/defining-questions/ . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
Using the 5Ws to Develop a Research Question. Provided by : New Literacies Alliance. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex4FaIaOjlA&t=134s . License : Other . License Terms : Standard YouTube License

Researching
3. Sub-questions

How to develop research sub-questions

Martin Luther King giving an inspiring speech

Once you have become familiar with your topic through your background research , you can begin to think about how to approach answering your Key Inquiry Question .

However, the Key Inquiry Question is usually too broad to answer at this early juncture.

Therefore, you need to break your Key Inquiry Question into smaller questions (called 'sub-questions') in order to answer it sufficiently.

Sub-questions are secondary questions that are related to a primary or main inquiry question and are used to break down and further explore a particular aspect of the main question.

They help to clarify the main question and provide more specific direction for the research.

How to create sub-questions

A good Key Inquiry Question can easily be divided into three separate parts which can be turned into sub-questions.

Based upon good background research , you should be able to identify the three divisions of your Key Inquiry Question .

For example:

If your Key Inquiry Question was:

Why did Martin Luther King believe that social problems could be fixed through non-violent means?

The three parts that need to be answered separately can be highlighted as follows:

Why did Martin Luther King believe that social problems could be fixed through non-violent means ?

Each of these parts can be turned into three sub-questions (with the same three elements highlighted).

What were Martin Luther King’s beliefs about society?

For what social problems did Martin Luther King want to find a solution?

How did Martin Luther King imagine that non-violent practices could help ?

The importance of good sub-questions

Spend time thinking of good sub-questions. Well thought-out sub-questions can mean the difference between an average and an excellent essay.

Good sub-questions should:

Be 'open' questions (This means that they cannot be answered with a simple 'yes' or 'no' answer. Usually this means starting the question with: what, why, or how)
Incorporate terms and concepts that you learnt during your background research

In answering each of your three sub-questions through source research , you will ultimately have an answer for your Key Inquiry Question .

Watch a video explanation on the History Skills YouTube channel:

Watch on YouTube

Improving your sub-questions

Even though you are required to create sub-questions at the beginning of your research process , it does not mean that they do not change.

As you begin finding sources that help answer your original sub-questions, you will find that you will need to modify your questions.

This is usually the result of discovering further, more specific, information about your topic.

Improving your sub-questions during your source research stage will result in better topic sentences and, as a result, a better essay .

What role did the bombings of Tokyo , Hiroshima and Nagasaki have on Japan’s decision to surrender at the end of World War Two?

An initial and simplistic set of sub-questions could be:

What role did the bombing of Tokyo have on Japan’s decision to surrender at the end of World War Two?
What role did the bombing of Hiroshima have on Japan’s decision to surrender at the end of World War Two?
What role did the bombing of Nagasaki have on Japan’s decision to surrender at the end of World War Two?

However, after conducting further research, they could be improved by including specific dates and historical information :

What role did the March 9th incendiary bombings of Tokyo have on Japan's decision to surrender at the end of World War Two ?
What role did the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6th have on Japan's decision to surrender at the end of World War Two ?
What role did the atomic bombing of Nagasaki August 9th have on Japan's decision to surrender at the end of World War Two ?

Finally, after finding some detailed primary and secondary sources, they could be further improved by citing the role that key people played :

How did the March 9th incendiary bombings of Tokyo motivate emperor Hirohito to become more involved in ending the Second World War?
Why did the Japanese government not surrender after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on the 6th of August, 1945 ?
Why did Hirohito finally decide to surrender after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945 ?

Test your learning

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'I learned how to ask the right questions'

5/17/2024 A&S Communications

Kim Montpelier

Classics and Philosophy Washington, D.C.

Why did you choose Cornell?

Mostly for the ice cream and the fact that Kurt Vonnegut went here. But also because I knew that I wanted to study classics and I thought that the faculty in the classics department here were doing really exciting things (there aren't many places where you can take a class in spoken Latin!).

What is your main extracurricular activity and why is it important to you?

I was involved in the Prison Reform and Education Project, because of which I became a tutor for people incarcerated in Westchester. I learned a lot through this experience, both about teaching and about the obstacles that people in prison face (especially obstacles to education) while they are incarcerated and after they get out of prison.

What Cornell memory do you treasure the most?

I took a day hiking P.E. class in the spring semester one year. On the first day of class there was a big snowstorm, and I was hoping that the class would be cancelled. It wasn't. I was expecting a cold, wet, miserable day outside, but instead it was a lot of fun. It was cold but beautiful, and in a really different way than the way that other seasons are beautiful. That was my first winter in Ithaca and it taught me to love it for what it is.

What are the most valuable skills you gained from your Arts & Sciences education?

I learned how to ask the right questions when you are confused about something. When I first started at Cornell, I found that I often had to do readings that were so hard to understand that I didn’t even know what I was confused about or what to ask to gain clarity. Throughout my time at Cornell, I was taught how to construct questions and what kinds of questions to ask to get closer to the truth.

What have you accomplished as a Cornell student that you are most proud of?

I am pretty proud of my two theses. One is on friendship in Augustine’s Confessions and one is on materialism in the works of the 17th century philosopher Margaret Cavendish. These are the most substantial research projects that I’ve done so far, and through them I’ve learned the joy of feeling like you’ve made intellectual progress in your understanding of something after a lot of work.

How have your beliefs or perspectives changed since you first arrived at Cornell?

Before I came here, I felt that a lot of the friends I had thought of the world in a very similar way to me. When I got here, I met people who were from a lot of different places and had a lot of different ways of thinking about the world. I realized that I shouldn’t take my approach to things for granted, even with my friends. It’s easy to assume you already know what someone’s going to say, but even people who we know really well can surprise us in really beautiful ways.

Humanities scholars research free speech, AI, sports culture and the Supreme Court

National Humanities Center selects two A&S professors as 2024-25 Fellows

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Humanities scholars research free speech, AI, sports culture and the Supreme Court

5/21/2024 By | Kathy Hovis , A&S Communications

Elizabeth Rene ’24 has had an interest in the court system since her high school days watching “Law and Order,” but she became particularly attentive to what was going on in the Supreme Court when Donald Trump became president.

“It was the greatest attack on our democracy and a lot of students my age felt this,” she said. “We started seeing invalidations of landmark precedents, such as Roe vs. Wade, and you don’t see that happening very often in democracies, where you establish a constitutional precedent and then get rid of it.”

That curiosity to understand what was going on in the court, an institution that is supposed to be impartial, sparked Rene to focus on the court for her senior thesis in the Humanities Scholars Program (HSP). She presented her work, along with 34 other students at the HSP Spring Research Conference May 3 at the A.D. White House.

“This year’s HSP conference was spectacular. The range of topics covered, the diversity of approaches, and the level of mastery demonstrated by the students were inspiring,” said Lawrence B. Glickman , Stephen and Evalyn Milman Professor of American Studies in the Department of History and interim director of the Humanities Scholars Program. “So too was the support that their friends, classmates, and teachers demonstrated with their presence and their questions. It was a marvelous demonstration that humanistic scholarship at Cornell is thriving.”

VerityPlatt , professor of classics, will take over as HSP director this fall.

“It has been very exciting to see the HSP develop under the inspired leadership of Durba Ghosh and Larry Glickman into a dynamic program that nurtures undergraduate research in the humanities,” she said. “I am honored to be taking on this new role and look forward to working closely with the dedicated, creative, and inspiring students of the HSP.”

At the May event, students covered topics focused on countries around the globe and ranging from immigration, home care workers and female sports culture to the U.S.-China relationship, the repatriation of cultural objects and AI and literature.

Victoria Rinn ’24 used the resources of the Cornell Law Library, as well as an interview with her grandmother, as she compared the way legal language impacts identity politics and freedom of expression in China and Hong Kong.

“I've always been interested in the history of Hong Kong because my family escaped communist China—when Mao Zedong began persecuting the land-owning members of society—to Hong Kong not only because of the economic freedoms but also due to the larger degree of individual autonomy due to its colonial status,” she said. “Following the 2019 National Security Law protests in Hong Kong, I began to question the intersection between legislation and individual expression.”

Rinn, who plans to attend law school, said the research methods course offered to HSP students, as well as many of her classes in the China and Asia-Pacific Studies Program, were instrumental as she worked on her project.

“My government major seminar focused on China, Tibet and Xinjiang, thereby granting me the research tools necessary for my Humanities Scholars research topic,” she said. “Moreover, the Humanities Scholars Program granted me a cohort of intellectually-alike students who share a passion for the arts as I do.”

Ethan Kovnat ’24, a philosophy major, centered his work on autism and moral psychology, responding to a paper by philosopher Jeanette Kennett, who argued that since people with autism experience empathy in a different way, they cannot be considered “moral agents” under the traditional philosophical definition put forth by philosopher David Hume.

“I read this paper and thought ‘something doesn’t seem quite right,’ “ Kovnat said. “One of the things that I appreciate about Kennett is that she cites myriad psychological evidence to support her conception, but I encountered more recent literature and found empirical evidence that better reflected the actual experiences of autistic people.

“I’m arguing that Hume’s conception of agency, slightly amended, is able to accommodate autistic moral agents.”

Kovnat said his HSP cohort provided a valuable network for peer review. “Whenever I wrote something, I had this community I could go to for advice and feedback,” he said.

Rene’s research project focused on two justices, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, and their different understandings of “originalism,” a way of interpreting the U.S. Constitution following how it would have been understood at the time it was written.

“Originalism rose as a theory after the conservative backlash following the Warren court,” Rene said, referring to the period between 1953-1969 when Earl Warren served as chief justice of the court and the court handled such landmark cases as Brown v. Board of Education, Plessy v. Ferguson and Miranda v. Arizona.

Rene studied five major cases that set precedent during the Warren court, including 15 others to better understand the actions and motivations of Thomas and Scalia.

“Clarence Thomas has a tendency to encourage the court to reverse a whole bunch of precedents set decades and decades ago,” she said. “My analysis consisted of looking back and forth at moments in history to see why that precedent was so important to be established in the first place and then looking at the modern era to see how it’s been threatened by the conservative supermajority on the court today.”

The conservatives on the court, Rene argues, claim that their opinions are neutral using originalism at their defense, but the numerous inconsistencies in the way these interpretations happen allow strong polarizations to impact the court’s decisions.

“Justices are always going to possess some degree of political bias, but the degree to which the supreme court is intertwined with other branches is a recent development,” she said.

Her classes in constitutional law, along with a class taught by Alexander Livingston , associate professor of government and a member of the HSP Faculty Advisory Board, focused on W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King, helped her craft her work, as they “taught me how to extrapolate someone’s writing, but also the background of the life they lived before writing that,” she said.

Rene said she also appreciated the close relationship she developed with her advisors because of HSP.

“As HSP students, we were actively seeing our advisors, who were really making sure we were using all of the resources available to us,” she said.

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university of new orleans
campus news
uno and innsbruck students create ‘history exchange,’ an oral history

CAMPUS NEWS: MAY 20, 2024

Uno-innsbruck podcast, uno and innsbruck students create ‘history exchange,’ an oral history podcast.

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The “History Exchange” podcast series marks a new digital chapter for UNO’s longstanding partnership with the Austrian university.

History students at the University of New Orleans and the University of Innsbruck, Austria have produced an oral history podcast series, marking a new development in their decades-long partnership. Students at the two universities collaborated to produce History Exchange.

History Exchange is conceived as a platform that will allow the two universities to collaborate on public history content in the future, said Marc Landry, UNO history professor and director of the Austrian Center for European Studies.

History Exchange is an idea that grew out of a collaboration between Landry and Innsbruck history professor Eva Pfanzelter, who was teaching on exchange at UNO in 2023.

Pfanzelter wanted to collaboratively teach a public history course at UNO and the University of Innsbruck, with the goal being the production of public history podcasts. The new course would be an example of the new Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) pedagogy. COIL helps students develop intercultural competency without having to leave campus by taking advantage of digital technologies like video conferencing, Landry said.

“Our idea was to create a joint platform between the universities called History Exchange, where students can continue to post podcasts and videos,” Landry said. “The first season was made as a tribute to (former UNO history professor) Guenter Bischof for his retirement, and we interviewed people like Nick Mueller and many other well-known historians.”

Bischof, who retired from UNO last year, spent nearly 35 years as a faculty member in the history department and was the longtime director of Center Austria.

Twelve UNO students joined with their counterparts in Innsbruck in the course, titled “UNO’s Special Topics in Public History: From Oral History to Podcasts.” Working in groups, the students researched each participants’ career, formulated questions and then recorded an interview aimed at eliciting their connection to Bischof, as well as their own impact in their field.

The students have created and posted seven podcasts, including an hour-long interview with Gordon H. “Nick” Mueller, former UNO history professor, founder of the UNO-Innsbruck International Summer School, and founding president and CEO of the National WWII Museum.

“New episodes continue to arrive monthly,” Landry said.

Currently, History Exchange is being hosted online at the University of Innsbruck , but Center Austria plans to make the podcasts available on its website as well, Landry said.

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Peer Reviewed

US-skepticism and transnational conspiracy in the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election

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Taiwan has one of the highest freedom of speech indexes while it also encounters the largest amount of foreign interference due to its contentious history with China. Because of the large influx of misinformation, Taiwan has taken a public crowdsourcing approach to combatting misinformation, using both fact-checking ChatBots and public dataset called CoFacts. Combining CoFacts with large-language models (LLM), we investigated misinformation across three platforms (Line, PTT, and Facebook) during the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election. We found that most misinformation appears within China-friendly political groups and attacks US-Taiwan relations through visual media like images and videos. A considerable proportion of misinformation does not question U.S. foreign policy directly. Rather, it exaggerates domestic issues in the United States to create a sense of declining U.S. state capacity. Curiously, we found misinformation rhetoric that references conspiracy groups in the West.

Program in Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College, USA

Department of Political Science, University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA

Department of Computer Science, Barnard College, USA

Research Questions

What are the misinformation narratives surrounding the election in Taiwan and how do they target international relations with the United States?
What geographical or temporal patterns emerge from misinformation data?
Who are the targets of these misinformation narratives and through what modalities?

Essay Summary

We leveraged a dataset of 41,291 labeled articles from Line, 911,510 posts from Facebook, and 2,005,972 posts and comments from PTT to understand misinformation dynamics through topic modeling and network analysis.
The primary form of misinformation is narratives that attack international relations with the United States (henceforth referred to as US-skepticism), specifically referencing the economy, health policy, the threat of war through Ukraine, and other U.S. domestic issues.
Temporal and spatial evidence suggests VPN-based coordination, focused on U.S. issues and addresses.
Misinformation is most common among pan-Blue and ROC identity groups on social media and is spread through visual media. These groups share many themes with conspiracy groups in Western countries.
Our study shows the prevalence of misinformation strategies using visual media and fake news websites. It also highlights how crowdsourcing and advances in large-language models can be used to identify misinformation in cross-platform workflows.

Implications

According to Freedom House, Taiwan has one of the highest indices for free speech in Asia (Freedom House, 2022). Additionally, due to its contentious history with China, it receives significant foreign interference and misinformation, especially during its presidential elections. Due to the large influx of dis- and misinformation, Taiwan has developed many strategies to counter misleading narratives, including fact-checking ChatBots on its most popular chatroom app (Chang et al., 2020). Under this information environment, the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election emerged as one of the most divisive elections in Taiwan’s history, featuring at one point a doubling of presidential candidates in a typically two-party race, from two to four. As such, Taiwan is regarded as a “canary for disinformation” against elections in 2024, as a first indicator to how foreign interference may take place in other democracies (Welch, 2024).

In this paper, we study the misinformation ecosystem in Taiwan starting a year prior to the election. First, our findings highlight the interaction between misinformation and international relations. As was reported in The Economist and The New York Times , a considerable portion of the misinformation spread in Taiwan before the 2024 election is about US-skepticism, which aims at undermining the reputation of the United States among Taiwanese people (“China is flooding Taiwan with disinformation,” 2023; Hsu, Chien, and Myers, 2023). This phenomenon is significant because it does not target specific candidates or parties in the election but may indirectly influence the vote choice between pro- and anti-U.S. parties. Given the US-China global competition and the Russia-Ukraine ongoing conflict, the reputation of the United States is crucial for the strength and reliability of democratic allies (Cohen, 2003). Hence, it is not surprising that misinformation about the United States may propagate globally and influence elections across democracies. However, our findings surprisingly show that US-skepticism also includes a considerable number of attacks on U.S. domestic politics. Such content does not question the U.S. foreign policy but undermines the perceived reliability and state capacity of the United States. Here, s tate capacity is defined as whether a state is capable of mobilizing its resources to realize its goal, which is conceptually different from motivation and trust.

US-skepticism is commonly characterized as mistrusting the motivations of the United States, as illustrated in the Latin American context due to long histories of political influence (see dependency theory; Galeano, 1997), but our findings suggest that perceived U.S. state capacity is also an important narrative. As most foreign disinformation arises from China, this indicates a greater trend where authoritarian countries turn to sharp power tactics to distort information and defame global competitors rather than winning hearts and minds through soft power. Sharp power refers to the ways in which authoritarian regimes project their influence abroad to pierce, penetrate, or perforate the informational environments in targeted countries (Walker, 2018). In Taiwan’s case, China may not be able to tell China’s story well, but can still influence Taiwanese voters by making them believe that the United States is declining. Our findings suggest that future work analyzing the topics and keywords of misinformation in elections outside the United States should also consider the US-skepticism as one latent category, not just the politicians and countries as is common with electoral misinformation (Tenove et al., 2018). These findings are corroborated by narratives identified by a recent report including drug issues, race relations, and urban decay (Microsoft Threat Intelligence, 2024).

Additionally, our research investigates both misinformation and conspiracy theories, which are closely related. Whereas misinformation is broadly described as “false or inaccurate information” (Jerit & Zhao, 2020), a conspiracy theory is the belief that harmful events are caused by a powerful, often secretive, group. In particular, conspiracy communities often coalesce around activities of “truth-seeking,” embodying a contrarian view toward commonly held beliefs (Enders et al., 2022; Harambam, 2020; Konkes & Lester, 2017). Our findings also provide evidence of transnational similarities between conspiracy groups in Taiwan and the United States. Whereas the domestic context has been explored (Chen et al., 2023; Jerit & Zhao, 2020), the intersection of partisanship and conspiracy groups as conduits for cross-national misinformation flow deserves further investigation.

Second, our findings reemphasize that an IP address is not a reliable criterion for attributing foreign intervention. Previous studies on Chinese cyber armies show that they use a VPN for their activities on Twitter (now X) (Wang et al., 2020) and Facebook (Frenkel, 2023). Commonly known as the Reddit of Taiwan, PTT is a public forum in Taiwan that by default contains the IP address of the poster. Our analysis of PTT located a group of accounts with US IP addresses that have the same activity pattern as other Taiwan-based accounts. Therefore, it is likely that these accounts use VPN to hide their geolocation. Our results provide additional evidence that this VPN strategy also appears on secondary and localized social media platforms. Our results suggest that the analysis of the originating location of misinformation should not be based entirely on IP addresses.

Third, our findings show that text is far from the only format used in the spread of misinformation. A considerable amount of misinformation identified on Facebook is spread through links (47%), videos (21%), and photos (15%). These items may echo each other’s content or even feature cross-platform flow. Proper tools are needed to extract and juxtapose content from different types of media so that researchers can have a holistic analysis of the spread and development of misinformation (Tucker et al., 2018). Such tools are urgent since mainstream social media has adopted and highly encouraged short videos—a crucial area for researchers to assess how misinformation spreads across platforms in the upcoming year of elections. This understanding is also important for fact-check agencies because they must prepare for collecting and reviewing information on various topics found in multiple media types across platforms. Crowdsourcing, data science, expert inputs, and international collaboration are all needed to deal with multi-format misinformation environments.

With prior studies showing that the aggregated fact checks (known as wisdom of the crowds) perform on par with expert ratings (see Arechar et al., 2023; Martel et al., 2023), our case study also evidences how crowdsourcing and LLM approaches can not only quickly fact-check but also summarize larger narrative trends. In Taiwan, this takes form of the CoFacts open dataset, which we use to identify misinformation narratives. CoFacts is a project initiated by g0v (pronounced “gov zero”), a civic hacktivism community in Taiwan that started in 2012. CoFacts started as a fact-checking ChatBot that circumvents the closed nature of chatroom apps, where users can forward suspicious messages or integrate the ChatBot into private rooms. These narratives are then sent to a database. Individual narratives are subsequently reviewed by more than 2,000 volunteers, including teachers, doctors, students, engineers, and retirees (Haime, 2022). As a citizen-initiated project, it is not affiliated with any government entity or party.

Crucially, these reviews provide valuable labels that are used to train AI models and fine-tune LLMs. The dataset is available open source on the popular deep-learning platform HuggingFace. Just as AI and automation can be used to spread misinformation (Chang, 2023; Chang & Ferrara, 2022; Ferrara et al., 2020; Monaco & Woolley, 2022), it can also help combat “fake news” through human-AI collaboration.

Finding 1: The primary form of misinformation is narratives that attack international relations with the United States (henceforth referred to as US-skepticism), specifically referencing the economy, health policy, the threat of war through Ukraine, and other U.S. domestic issues.

The status quo between China and Taiwan is marked by Taiwan’s self-identification as a sovereign state, which is in contrast to China’s view of Taiwan as part of its territory under the “One China” policy. As brief context, China has claimed Taiwan as its territory since 1949, but the United States has helped maintain the status quo and peace after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. After democratization in 1987, Taiwan’s politics have been dominated by a clear blue-green division. The blue camp is led by Kuomintang (Nationalist Party, KMT hereafter), the founding party of the Republic of China (ROC, the formal name of Taiwan’s government based on its constitution) who was defeated by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and retreated to Taiwan in 1949. The green camp is led by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which pursues revising the ROC Constitution and changing the country’s name to Taiwan. The political cleavage between the blue and green camps is dictated by Taiwan’s relationship with the PRC and the United States. The blue camp’s position is that the PRC and ROC are under civil war but belong to the same Chinese nation, and thus the blue camp appreciates military support from the United States while enhancing economic and cultural cooperation with the PRC. The green camp believes that the necessary conditions for Taiwan to be free and independent are to stand firmly with the United States and maintain distance from the PRC. After 2020, the two major camps’ insufficient attention to domestic and social issues caused the rise of nonpartisans and a third party, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP or the white camp), which strategically avoids discussing foreign policies. In the 2024 election, the ruling DPP party (green) was reelected with 40% of votes for the third consecutive presidency (from 2016 to 2028), while KMT (blue) and TPP (white) received 33% and 26% of votes, respectively.

The U.S. “One China” policy since 1979 indicates that the United States opposes any change to the status quo unless it is solved peacefully. This has motivated the PRC to persuade Taiwanese citizens to support unification using misinformation targeted at China-friendly political groups, as the cost of unification would be greatly reduced if sufficient Taiwanese citizens opposed U.S. military intervention. This history between the United States and Taiwan serves as the foundation of US-skepticism. In the literature, US-skepticism in Taiwan is composed of two key psychological elements: trust and motivation (Wu & Lin, 2019; Wu, 2023). First, many Taiwanese no longer trust the United States after the United States switched diplomatic ties from Taiwan (ROC) to the PRC in 1979. Many blue-camp supporters doubt the commitment of the United States to send troops should China invade, per the Taiwan Relations Act (Wu & Lin, 2019). Second, Taiwanese citizens question Taiwan’s role as a proxy in a potential war with China instead of sincerely protecting democracy and human rights in Taiwan (Wu, 2023).

The CoFacts dataset contains 140,314 articles submitted by Line users, which are then fact-checked by volunteers as rumor (47%), not a rumor (21%), not an article (19%), and opinion (13%). Here, rumor is synonymous with misinformation. Using the CoFacts dataset, we trained a BERTopic model to identify 34 forms of misinformation and then ranked them by their overlap with the word “elections” in Mandarin Chinese (George & Sumathy, 2023; Nguyen et al., 2020). Table 1 shows the top nine narratives.

Many of these narratives are directly related to political parties or the democratic process. For instance, the highest-ranked topic is attacking the incumbent party (the DPP) at 18.1%, which contains 2,371 total posts. The subsequent misinformation topics focus on policy issues and specific narratives—international relations, issues of marriage and birth rate, vaccines, nuclear energy, biometrics, egg imports, and the war in Ukraine. These are known cleavage issues and overlap with the eight central concerns during the election cycle—economic prosperity, cross-strait affairs, wealth distribution, political corruption, national security, social reform/stability, and environmental protection (Achen & Wang, 2017; Achen & Wang, 2019; Chang & Fang, 2023).

We focus on the third type of misinformation, which is the relationship between Taiwan, the United States, and China. US-skepticism is not only the largest at 10,826 individual posts, but one flagged by journalists, policymakers, and politicians as one of the most crucial themes. This is a relatively new phenomenon in terms of proportion, which aims to sow distrust toward the United States (“China is flooding Taiwan with disinformation,” 2023). In contrast, questioning the fairness of process (i.e. ballot numbers) and policy positions (i.e. gay marriage) are common during elections. However, US-skeptical misinformation diverges in that there is no explicit political candidate or party targeted. By sampling the topic articles within this category and validating using an LLM-summarizer through the ChatGPT API, we identified three specific narratives:

(a) The United States and the threat of war: Ukraine intersects frequently in this topic, with videos of direct military actions. Example: “Did you hear former USA military strategist Jack Keane say the Ukrainian war is an investment. The USA spends just $66,000,000,000 and can make Ukraine and Russia fight… Keane then mentions Taiwan is the same, where Taiwanese citizens are an ‘investment’ for Americans to fight a cheap war. The USA is cold and calculating, without any actual intent to help Taiwan!”

(b) Economic atrophy due to fiscal actions by the United States: These narratives focus on domestic policy issues in Taiwan such as minimum wage and housing costs. Example: “The USA printed 4 trillion dollars and bought stocks everywhere in the world, including Taiwan, and caused inflation and depressed wages. Be prepared!”

(c) Vaccine supply and the United States: While some narratives focus on the efficacy of vaccines, several describe the United States intentionally limiting supply during the pandemic. Example: “Taiwanese Dr. Lin is a leading scientist at Moderna, yet sells domestically at $39 per two doses, $50 to Israel. Taiwan must bid at least $60! The United States clearly does not value Taiwan.”

These narratives reveal a new element to US-skepticism: state capacity. As previously mentioned, state capacity is defined as whether a state is capable of mobilizing its resources to realize its goal. The Ukraine war and vaccine supply narratives both question the United States’ motivations in foreign policies and perceived trustworthiness. Meanwhile, the economic atrophy narrative is based on the United States’ domestic budgetary deficit and downstream impact on Taiwanese economy. These narratives frame U.S. state capacity as declining and imply that the United States could no longer realize any other commitment due to its lack of resources and capacity. The goal of such a narrative is to lower the Taiwanese audience’s belief that the United States will help. But such a narrative does not include keywords of its target group (e.g., Taiwan) nor the PCR’s goal (e.g., unification) and only works through framing and priming as an example of sharp power.

The specific focus of misinformation narratives related to the United States is composed of Ukraine (28.8%), the economy and fiscal policies (33.1%), technology (25.2%), and vaccine supply (9.9%). Misinformation related to state capacity takes up approximately 52.4%, more than half of all narratives (see Figure A1, part a in the Appendix). In all narratives, political parties are only referenced 27.8% of the time with the DPP the primary target (26.2%), which is almost half of the proportion for state capacity. China is only mentioned in tandem with the United States in 38.4% of the posts (see Figure A1, part b in the Appendix).

Finding 2: Temporal and spatial evidence suggests VPN-based coordination, focused on U.S. issues and addresses.

Once we identified the top misinformation narratives using Line, we investigated information operations or coordination. Line is one of Taiwan’s most popular communication apps featuring chatrooms (similar to WhatsApp), with 83% usage. One limitation of Line is that although we can analyze message content, Line chatrooms can be seen as conversations behind “closed doors”—platforms cannot impose content moderation and researchers have no access to the users themselves nor to the private chatroom in which users engage with misinformation (Chang et al., 2020). PTT, on the other hand, provides a public forum-like environment in which users can interact. Figure 1 shows the co-occurrence network of users who post comments under the same forum. Each circle (node) represents a user who posts on PTT. If two users make mutual comments on more than 200 posts, then they are connected (form a tie). Intuitively, this means if two users are connected or “close” to each other by mutual connections, then they are likely coordinating or have extremely similar behaviors. The placement of the users reflects this and is determined by their connections.

Using the Louvain algorithm (Traag, 2015), a common method to identify communities on social networks, five communities emerged from our dataset. Each community is colored separately, with clear clusters, except for teal which is more integrated. In particular, the yellow cluster is significantly separate from the others. This means they share significant activity amongst their own community, but less so with other communities. This suggests premeditated coordination rather than organic discussion, as the users would have to target the same post with high frequency. Prior studies have shown analyzing temporal patterns can provide insight into information operations. Specifically, overseas content farms often follow a regular cadence, posting content before peak hours in Taiwan on Twitter (Wang et al., 2020) and YouTube (Hsu & Lin, 2023).

To better understand the temporal dynamics on PTT, we plotted the distribution of posts and comments over a 24-hour period. Specifically, we focused on the top two countries by volume—Taiwan and the United States. Figure 2, part a shows the time of posting. Taiwan’s activity increases from 6 in the morning until it peaks at noon (when people are on lunch break), then steadily declines into the night. In contrast, posts from the United States peak at midnight and 8 a.m. Taipei time, which corresponds to around noon and 8 p.m. in New York, respectively. This provides an organic baseline as to when we might expect people to post.

However, in Figure 2, part b, while the distribution for Taiwan (blue) remains unchanged, the peak for the United States (orange) occurs at the same time as Taiwan. One explanation is that users are responding to posts in Taiwan. The second is that users in Asia—potentially China—are using a VPN to appear as if they are in the United States. This coincides with a report by Meta Platforms that found large numbers of CCP-operated Facebook accounts and subsequently removed them (Frenkel, 2023).

The more curious issue is when considering the activity of the yellow group from Figure 1, the temporal pattern (green) shows a sharp increase in activity at 10 a.m., which then coincides with both the peaks for Taiwan (12) and the United States (22). The sudden burst of activity is consistent with prior findings on content farms from China, where posting behavior occurs when content farm workers clock in regularly for work (Wang et al., 2020). While it is difficult to prove the authenticity of these accounts, the structural and temporal aspects suggest coordination. Figure A2 in the appendix shows further evidence of coordination through the frequency distribution of counts for co-occurring posts. For the US-based group, a distribution akin to a power law appears, commonly found within social systems (Adamic & Huberman, 2000; Chang et al., 2023; Clauset et al., 2009). In contrast, the coordinated group features a significantly heavier tail, with a secondary, “unnatural,” peak at around 15 co-occurrences.

To better understand the content of these groups, Table A1 shows the summary of comments of each group and the originating post, using a large-language model for abstractive summarization (see Methods). We report the top points for comments and posts in Table A1. The coordinated community focuses on businessman Terry Gou, who considered running as a blue-leaning independent. The comments attack the incumbent DPP and their stance toward foreign policy. One popular post features President Tsai’s controversial meeting with Kevin McCarthy, then the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. When a journalist asked McCarthy if he would “invite President Tsai to Congress… or… Washington,” McCarthy replied, “I don’t have any invitation out there right now. Today we were able to meet her as she transits through America, I thought that was very productive.” While this was positively framed, the title of the post itself was translated as “McCarthy will not invite Tsai to the United States” (Doomdied, 2023). This takes on a common tactic in misinformation where statements are intentionally distorted to produce negative framings of a particular candidate.

Comments from U.S. IP addresses between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. focus on the potential alliance between the KMT and TPP. These posts are KMT-leaning with criticism toward both Lai and Ko, who are two oppositional candidates to the KMT. Some users argue that while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a negative force, the United States is not automatically a positive force, as the United States does not explicitly support Taiwan’s international recognition or economic integration. In general, both posts and comments express that Taiwan should not rely too heavily on either China or the United States. This echoes the element of trust in the US-skepticism from the historical experience between ROC and the United States.

Both the U.S.-based and coordinated groups appear as blue-leaning audiences. What differentiates the first and second case is clear evidence of misinformation in the former through inaccurate framing. While US-skepticism may be a valid political stance, if the ambient information environment contains inaccurate information, then the democratic deliberative process is at risk. The case of US-skepticism is also one where stance and truth-value are often conflated, which may influence the process of voter deliberation.

Finding 3: Misinformation is most common among pan-Blue and ROC identity groups on social media and is spread through visual media. These groups share themes with conspiracy groups in Western countries.

Lastly, we considered the groups in which misinformation is common and the way misinformation is delivered. To do so, we queried CrowdTangle using the titles and links from the CoFacts dataset specific to US-Taiwan relations. This yielded 4,632 posts from public groups. Table 2 shows the groups ranked by the total number of misinformation articles identified.

There are two themes to these groups. First, they are often pan-Blue media outlets ( CTI News ), politician support groups ( Wang Yo-Zeng Support Group ), and ROC national identity groups ( I’m an ROC Fan ). The second type is somewhat unexpected but extremely interesting; it consists of groups that espouse freedom of speech ( Support CTI News and Free Speech ) and truth-seeking ( Truth Engineering Taiwan Graduate School ), topics often regarded as conspiracies. These topics are reminiscent of those in the West, such as the rhetoric around “fake news” and “truthers,” and paint a transnational picture of how misinformation coalesces. The second largest group is Trump for the World , which supports a politician known to court conspiracy theory groups such as QAnon. These groups also serve as the “capacity” element of US-skepticism, implying that the United States is in trouble for its domestic issues and is not a reliable partner to Taiwan. Furthermore, these groups have sizable followings—ranging from 8,279 to 43,481. We show the mean, as the total number of members fluctuated over our one-year period.

Lastly, we found that the majority of misinformation contains some form of multimedia, such as video (36%) or photos (15%), as shown in Figure 3, part a. Only 1% is a direct status. This may be due to CrowdTangle not surfacing results from normal users, but the ratio of multimedia to text is quite high. This aligns with extant studies showing the growth of multimodal misinformation (Micallef et al., 2022) and also user behavior in algorithm optimization (Chang et al., 2022; Dhanesh et al., 2022; Pulley, 2020)—posts with multimedia tend to do better than posts with only text.

Moreover, 47% contain a URL. Figure 3, part b shows one of the top domains containing misinformation (beyondnews852.com) after filtering out common domains such as YouTube. The site is named “Beyond News Net” and is visually formatted like a legitimate news site to increase the perceived credibility of information (Flanagin & Metzger, 2007; Wölker & Powell, 2021). The ability to rapidly generate legitimate-looking news sites as a tactic for misinformation may become a challenge for both media literacy and technical approaches to fight misinformation.

We utilized three unique misinformation datasets—Line, Facebook, and PTT—with dates between 01/12/2023 and 11/10/2023. The CoFacts dataset includes 140,193 received messages, 96,432 that have been labeled as misinformation, facts, opinion, or not relevant. Of this, 41,564 entries are misinformation. The CoFacts dataset is not only methodologically useful but exemplifies a crowd-sourced approach to fact-checking misinformation as an actual platform intervention. Moreover, it is public and transparent, allowing for replicability. Using a subset of articles and posts containing misinformation, we trained a topic model using BERTopic (Grootendorst, 2022). On a high level, using BERTopic involves five steps: 1) extract embeddings using a sentence transformer, 2) reduce dimensionality, 3) cluster reduced embeddings, 4) tokenize topics, and 5) create topic representation.

We conducted several trials, experimenting with parameters such as different sentence transformer models and minimum cluster sizes for the HDBSCAN clustering algorithm. The model used to extract topics for this paper utilized paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 for our sentence embedding model (Reimers & Gurevych, 2019), had a minimum cluster size of 80 for the clustering algorithm, and used tokenize_zh for our tokenizer. Our model yielded 34 topics. We also trained a model based on latent-Dirichlet allocation (LDA) (Blei et al., 2003), but found the BERTopic results to be more interpretable. We then labeled all messages to indicate whether they included reference to the election or not, and ranked the topics by their election-related percentage to measure electoral salience. For our subsequent analysis, we focused on topic 3 (see Table 1), which captures general discourse about the relations between the United States, China, and Taiwan.

The Facebook dataset was extracted using CrowdTangle. We queried posts containing links and headlines from topic 3. We also cross-sectioned these links and headlines with a general election-based dataset with 911,510 posts. This yielded a total of 4,632 of posts shared on public Facebook groups and 227,125 engagements. Due to privacy concerns, it is not possible to obtain private posts from users on their own Facebook timelines, private groups, or messages. However, public groups are a good proxy for general discourse, in addition to providing ethnic or partisan affiliations via their group name (Chang & Fang, 2023). In other words, while CoFacts provides the misinformation narratives, Facebook public groups give insight into the targets of misinformation.

Lastly, we scraped PTT using Selenium. Commonly known as the Reddit of Taiwan, PTT is unique in that it contains the IP address of the poster, though this could be shrouded by proxy farms or VPNs. First, we scraped all posts that contained reference to the United States and the election, which yielded 22,576 posts and 1,983,396 comments, all with IP addresses, addresses provided by PTT, and the time of posting. We expanded the scope of this analysis as we were interested in the general discourse directly related to the United States, and the geospatial and temporal patterns that arose.

Due to the large amount of data, there are three general approaches we could have taken—local extractive summarization with LLMs, local abstractive summarization with LLMs, and server-based abstractive summarization (such as ChatGPT). Local extractive summarization is a method that embeds each of the input sentences and then outputs five of the most representative sentences. However, this approach is often too coarse, as it returns sentences with the highest centrality but does not summarize general themes across all the different comments or posts. On the other hand, abstractive summarization works by considering the entire context by ingesting many documents and then summarizing across them. This provides a more generalized characterization of key themes. However, the input size is the primary bottleneck as large-language models can only ingest so many tokens (or words), which also need to be held in memory—the case for our project, as we are summarizing more than 10,000 posts.

To circumvent these issues, we sampled the maximum number of posts or comments that could fit within 16,000 tokens and then made a query call using the ChatGPT API. This provided a summary based on a probabilistic sample of the posts and comments.

/ Elections

Cite this Essay

Chang, H. C. H., Wang, A. H. E., & Fang Y. S. (2024). US-skepticism and transnational conspiracy in the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-144

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No funding has been received to conduct this research.

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

No human subjects were included in this study.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

Data Availability

All materials needed to replicate this study are available via the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5SPGDY . The Cofacts database is available on HuggingFace and Facebook via CrowdTangle per regulation of Meta Platforms.

Acknowledgements

H. C. would like to thank Brendan Nyhan, Sharanya Majumder, John Carey, and Adrian Rauschfleish for their comments. H. C. would like to thank the Dartmouth Burke Research Initiation Award.

All authors contributed equally.

Green infrastructure plans need to consider historical racial inequalities

Urban planners increasingly are interested in green infrastructure projects for the health and climate benefits they bring to cities. But without attention to historical development patterns and existing power structures, such projects may not benefit all residents equally and may exacerbate social and racial inequalities, says a group of researchers and practitioners of nature-based solutions for urban areas.

The researchers outlined their recommendations for a justice-oriented approach to urban greening projects in a paper published in the journal Urban Forestry and Urban Greening .

"For the environmental and ecological questions, we have a pretty good handle on what we need to do. The questions that are the hardest and the most important for people to tackle are how to work well with communities, particularly marginalized communities," said Rebecca Walker, a co-lead author of the paper and a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The other lead authors of the paper are Kate Derickson, a professor of geography, environment and society at the University of Minnesota and the co-director of the CREATE Initiative to address equitable access to environmental amenities; and Maike Hamann, a lecturer in development and sustainability at the Centre for Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

Green infrastructure can benefit the ecosystem in multiple ways, such as flood and heat mitigation, carbon storage and sequestration, and opportunities for recreation and improvement in mental and physical health, said the researchers. But urban landscapes are unequal in the distribution of environmental benefits and harms.

For example, water quality standards for rivers in St. Louis, Missouri, reflect the city's racial geographies, with waterways in white neighborhoods historically managed for recreation and those in Black neighborhoods historically managed for industrial uses. Today the water quality standards for bodies of water in white neighborhoods remain higher than for those in Black neighborhoods, according to the paper.

"Plans must contend with the histories of discriminatory policies and practices that produced underlying inequalities, and be attentive to the ways that contemporary efforts might reproduce or undermine the structures driving inequities in urban greenspace. This is true for new greenspace developments, as well as changes to existing urban nature," the researchers wrote.

A variety of disciplines need to contribute to urban green infrastructure, including those that ask questions about the social implications of ecological and economic projects, they said.

"If they are already disproportionately located near more advantaged communities, as we invest and expand in those areas, the inequities get doubled down," Walker said.

Among the factors that planners should consider is the scale of a project and how a particular community might be affected by a project, the researchers said. For example, a wetlands mitigation program in Mississippi allowed developers to fill in wetlands in one location while buying wetland mitigation credits elsewhere. Residents of the small, Black community of Turkey Creek, Mississippi, argued that the practice harmed their neighborhood, which was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina, by removing wetlands that could absorb stormwater.

"This suggests that … attempting to address large-scale issues (such as global climate change) cannot be done equitably without careful attention to local-scale issues (such as neighborhood flooding)," the researchers wrote.

Their research emphasizes the importance of building relationships with communities and accepting uncertainty about the outcomes of their work. While Derickson and Walker were working with a community on water quality and flooding issues, the community members repeatedly raised concerns about gentrification related to green infrastructure solutions. The researchers shifted their focus and developed an antigentrification toolkit offering ways to invest in urban greening without driving displacement of residents. Being open to ambiguity in defining a problem led to a new opportunity for their work to lead to justice-oriented policies, they said.

Finally, the researchers advocate for an approach that promotes modest projects that address the needs and priorities of a community's residents and allows them to help shape the projects over large developer-oriented infrastructure investments.

"While the uptake of urban green infrastructure represents a promising development in urban sustainability and development practices, it cannot be assumed that these projects will benefit all residents or promote urban equity. Indeed, the history of urban development and infrastructure projects shows that there is a tendency for such projects to consolidate benefits for powerful groups, often at the expense of the vulnerable or marginalized," the researchers wrote.

Sustainability
Environmental Issues
Air Quality
Urbanization
Land Management
Environmental Policies
Disaster Plan
Urban planning
Sustainable land management
Environmental impact assessment
Energy development
Timeline of environmental events
Environmental engineering
Social inequality

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau . Original written by Jodi Heckel. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

Kate Derickson, Rebecca Walker, Maike Hamann, Pippin Anderson, Olumuyiwa Bayode Adegun, Adriana Castillo-Castillo, Anne Guerry, Bonnie Keeler, Liz Llewellyn, Austin Matheney, Nontsikelelo Mogosetsi-Gabriel, Seema Mundoli, Sumetee Pahwa Gajjar, Nadia Sitas, Linjun Xie. The intersection of justice and urban greening: Future directions and opportunities for research and practice . Urban Forestry & Urban Greening , 2024; 95: 128279 DOI: 10.1016/j.ufug.2024.128279

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Education Producer

Madison, Wisconsin
PUBLIC MEDIA/PBS WISCONSIN
Public Broadcasting
Partially Remote
Staff-Full Time
Opening at: May 21 2024 at 14:50 CDT
Closing at: Jun 4 2024 at 23:55 CDT

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PBS Wisconsin Education's Education Producer develops and produces classroom media for upper elementary and middle school science, social studies, local history and culture, and English Language Arts studies. This may include identifying topics, themes, and/or learning goals, conducting research, writing scripts, interviewing guests, or directing hosts. This position primarily produces in video format, but may also produce interactives, animations, and educational text supports. In this hybrid role you will bring your aesthetic and creative skills to select stories and generate ideas for in-classroom learning media, manage logistics for and lead in the production of that media, and oversee and/or participate in post-production tasks all the way through media publishing. We are looking to fill two Education Producer positions. One position will primarily be focusing on producing science education content, while the other position will focus on Arts and Culture content produced for ELA classrooms. Both producers will be expected to assist with the production of media that focuses on other curricular content areas produced by our team. This position works with colleagues across the educational ecosystem to ensure that the content we create is aligned with educational standards in use in Wisconsin and works with advisors to ensure that the content is accurate and inclusive. This position reports to the Executive Producer of Education.

Responsibilities:

25% Researches and develops production strategy for one or more programs across broadcast and digital platforms
35% Produces, develops, and edits content that may include identifying topics, themes, guests, conducting pre-interviews and/or interviews, writing, and/or integrating content for multimedia platforms
10% Performs daily operational activities for live and pre-recorded content, and may direct the editorial and creative process of production activities
15% Collaborates with other content creators in pre- to post-production processes, prepares materials, and handles logistics for broadcast and/or digital publications
5% Maintains familiarity with studio equipment and/or applicable technology for production
5% May schedule and direct operational activities for content production, including live/recorded studio or field productions
5% Collaborate with project partners, educators, and cross-department units to ensure produced media aligns with agreed upon or desired learning goals.

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Diversity is a source of strength, creativity, and innovation for UW-Madison. We value the contributions of each person and respect the profound ways their identity, culture, background, experience, status, abilities, and opinion enrich the university community. We commit ourselves to the pursuit of excellence in teaching, research, outreach, and diversity as inextricably linked goals. The University of Wisconsin-Madison fulfills its public mission by creating a welcoming and inclusive community for people from every background - people who as students, faculty, and staff serve Wisconsin and the world. For more information on diversity and inclusion on campus, please visit: Diversity and Inclusion

Preferred Bachelor's Degree in media production and/or science education/ELA curricular areas.

Qualifications:

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS - Experience producing video and/or creating educational resources. - Competency in video production; experience with pre-production, production, and/or post-production processes. - Strong written communication skills as needed for the pre-production process. e.g. Script development, curriculum development etc. - Proven ability to translate topics into easily understood material, with an ability to employ engaging, creative approaches. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS - Technical cinematography skills, including knowledge of DSLR and/or cinema-style cameras, lenses, and lighting. - Technical knowledge of video editing post-production, including familiarity with Adobe Premiere and motion graphics. - Familiarity communicating topics for learning, familiarity with National or Wisconsin state standards - For the Education Science Producer; experience communicating science topics for learning, familiarity with National or Wisconsin state science standards, and familiarity with environmental education and climate science. - For the Education Arts & Culture Producer, familiarity communicating ELA topics for learning, familiarity with National or Wisconsin state ELA standards, and familiarity with ELA education.

Full Time: 100% This position may require some work to be performed in-person, onsite, at a designated campus work location. Some work may be performed remotely, at an offsite, non-campus work location.

Appointment Type, Duration:

Ongoing/Renewable

Minimum $56,112 ANNUAL (12 months) Depending on Qualifications We expect to pay in the mid to high 50's to low 60's. Actual pay will depend on qualifications.

Additional Information:

The person in this position will be required to comply with the Ethical Guidelines for All Staff of Wisconsin Public Radio and Television located here: https://www.wpr.org/wpr-ethical-guidelines , in addition to the UW-Madison code of ethics. Please note that successful applicants are responsible for ensuring their eligibility to work in the United States (i.e. a citizen or national of the United States, a lawful permanent resident, a foreign national authorized to work in the United States without need of employer sponsorship) on or before the effective date of appointment. #PBS

How to Apply:

The following must be received for your application to be complete: 1) Resume 2) A cover letter detailing your interest in the position, including additional information on any of the required or preferred experience bullet points that connect to your experience and background. 3) A portfolio that includes two to four video pieces that you have worked on. We will also accept other media formats, such as animations, interactives, or other educational media. Choose samples where the intent of the piece is to explain or educate on a topic. Include a paragraph explaining your exact role in creating the resource or media, what aspects you were not directly responsible for or involved in, and what you think is successful about the work. 4) Optional (not required to complete application): Samples of lesson plans or curriculum development, or a cinematography reel. Finalists will be asked to provide a list of at least three professional references with titles, emails, and phone numbers (including at least one supervisory reference). Note that references will not be contacted without your prior knowledge.

Amanda Vinova [email protected] 608-262-0598 Relay Access (WTRS): 7-1-1. See RELAY_SERVICE for further information.

Official Title:

Multimedia Producer II(PB007)

Department(s):

A46-PUBLIC MEDIA/PBS WISCONSIN

Employment Class:

Academic Staff-Renewable

Job Number:

The university of wisconsin-madison is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer..

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Gender and soliloquy: analyzing the internal lives of women on screen

Karla Oeler

How can cinema – a fundamentally visual and auditory medium – convey interiority? This was the question at the heart of the Clayman Institute faculty research fellows talk given last month by Karla Oeler, associate professor of film and media studies at Stanford University. Throughout her talk, Oeler gave a sneak peek of her upcoming book, The Surface of Things: Cinema and the Devices of Interiority . She investigated the ways films depict the act of thinking that the thinker does not share. This effort proves particularly challenging when the on-screen thinker is a woman, given cinema’s historical fixation with women’s surface appearance and patriarchal assumptions about women’s agency and subjectivity.

According to Oeler, since the silent era, film critics have claimed soliloquy for the cinema, arguing that such cinematic techniques as the close-up and the point-of-view sequence fulfill soliloquy’s function—to show characters talking with themselves without expressing their thoughts to another character. In this sense, film adopts a device that initially emerged in literature and theater. Yet, Oeler argued, early filmmakers and theorists like Béla Balázs believed that film was better suited for internalizing than other media. To convey interiority, films paradoxically used close-up shots of the face – that is, a visual surface – to convey the thoughts happening below that very surface.

To explore these contradictions, Oeler analyzed and interpreted two differing works of art by women artists, each of which grapples with female interiority on screen. The first, by Candice Breitz, is titled The Soliloquy Trilogy (2000). In the work, Breitz removes the reverse shots from the movies Dirty Harry, Witches of Eastwick, and Basic Instinct, instead only including shots of the respective main characters. Oeler noted that the new version of Basic Instinct, featuring only shots of Sharon Stone, is reduced to a mere seven and a half minutes of film. On one hand, Oeler argued, the new version of the movie becomes close to the literal meaning of “soliloquy”: a character talking alone on screen. On the other hand, the lines spoken by Stone are still communicated to others, making the “soliloquy” title somewhat ironic. According to Oeler, the only interiority truly on display in the art is Breitz’s own: Despite the mechanical nature of the re-edited film, the new choices reveal something of Breitz’s own subjectivity.

Oeler also explored a second work of art, this one by Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat, titled Soliloquy (1999). In her piece, Neshat appears on two massive screens that face each other. On the right screen, she shows herself moving through various locations in New York State; on the left, she appears in Mardin, Turkey. At various points in the installation, each visual of herself stops, seemingly to contemplate the other one. According to Oeler, Neshat invented a powerful new way of conveying distanced self-reflection. By having two images of Neshat looking at each other from two different locations, the work of art presents a subjective reflection on her multiple senses of identity. For Oeler, this film exceeds soliloquy, since Neshat both makes the soliloquy and appears in it.

Taken together, Oeler’s analyses reveal the thought-provoking ways that these women artists have moved beyond depictions of the woman as object on screen, as well as the differing approaches to filmic interiority. Through varied approaches, Oeler argues, women have inventively brought their own interiorities to bear on a fundamentally visual medium.

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The History Research Process

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HIST H270 What is History?

Developing a Research Question

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