ONE PAPER OPTION
2,500-3,000 words not including cover/title page, endnotes, bibliography, appendices, etc.
Due due Monday, April 24 before 11:59 pm EST
This assignment can examine any aspect of the Pacific World past or present but must involve two or more peoples/cultures/nations.
All students are required to obtain approval from the professor for their topic.
The ultimate goal of your essay is to persuade the reader to agree with your argument. As such, it is imperative that you draw on secondary scholarship and at least one primary source to substantiate/lend credibility to the assertions you make in the paper.
Option 1:
You may approach this assignment in one of two ways:
1. Examine a historical event/issue/person/etc.
2. Trace the “path to the present” of a particular issue in the history of the Pacific World – i.e., examine how the topic arrived at its present situation (how the past was the “path to the present”)
All research papers not only must examine what happened (or did not happen), they also need to address why this was the case as well as the consequences (“so what”).
Your paper must make use of secondary sources (those produced after the fact that interpret and analyze primary sources) and primary sources (broadly defined as documents produced during the time under examination, including official records, interviews, speeches, diaries, manuscripts, letters, film footage, autobiographies, as well as articles found in newspapers, magazines, and journals).
Standard Paper Format
• All papers must include an explicit and bolded thesis statement
As Professor Ben Zajicek of Towson University notes, “A ‘thesis’ is a statement of what you will prove in the paper. Every thesis statement should be the ‘solution’ to a problem, the ‘answer’ to a question. A useful tactic is to include the word ‘because’ in your thesis statement. This forces you to lay out your basic reasoning: x happened because of y.” Thus, the goal in the body of the paper is to convince the reader that the paper’s thesis statement is plausibly supported by the evidence you present.
• Double spaced
• Standard size and style font (i.e., Times New Roman 12)
• Standard margins (margins of 1 inch [top and bottom] and 1 or 1.25 inches on the sides)
• Numbered pages
• Avoid unnecessary jargon, informal expressions (slang), and use of the first person Keep quotations short and to the point; indent and single space if long citation (~ 3 sentences or longer)
• Citing sources – all quotations, as well as ideas, interpretations, conclusions, etc., that are not the original work of the student, must be properly cited. An exception can be made for facts in common knowledge (narrowly defined – e.g., the date of the events taking place at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon)
• Citations – you may use in-text citations, footnotes, or endnotes and they need to formatted using an accepted academic style (e.g., MLA, Chicago, APA)
• All papers must include a bibliography/works cited page
• Proofread the paper carefully before submitting it