••• THE OUTLINE ASSIGNMENT •••

For this assignment, envision your paper’s component sections (about 6 to 9 sections total).  Please write in full sentences and submit the outline as a typed, double-spaced document.

1. Introduction: Write a sentence describing your research question.  Remember that good research questions need to be open-ended in nature.  Then, if you already have a sense of your thesis, present it here, along with a concise summary of the primary sources that will allow you to support this thesis and answer the research question.  If you don’t yet have a thesis, explain how you hope that your primary sources will allow you to develop an argument that answers your research question.

2. Historiography: Write 3 or 4 sentences briefly explaining how your paper will connect to the questions and debates that have animated other scholars.  Will you reinforce or challenge an existing school of thought?

3. Primary Source Analysis: Here you should divide the body of your essay into 3 to 6 sections.  For each section, write a complete sentence summarizing that section’s main point or topic.  As with the intro, you do not need to have a definite subthesis just yet, but you should have a clear topic for each section.

4. Conclusion: Write a sentence describing how you might end the essay.  You can either summarize your argument or end with an epilogue that suggestively broadens the relevance of your paper.  For instance, how might your argument relate to present-day concerns or to other historical topics?