Your topic should do the following things:
1. Choose an amendment (or portion of an Amendment) from 1-15, inclusive. For our purposes, we will discuss the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms.
2. For the first part of your paper, you should discuss the history of the Amendment, including (but not limited to): the reason it was included in the Bill of Rights, why the Founders thought this was an important inclusion, the voting process, any interesting debates surrounding the Amendments passage, and so on. Straight down the line historical fact finding.
3. Now, try to determine what professional historians have written about the topic. You should look in Jstor and/or Project Muse (databases available via our library) to determine how much scholarship exists on the topic. By scholarship, this means that you must find articles written by academics or other credentialed people (usually Ph.D.s) in a certain field. If a person meets any of these criteria, they can be considered legitimate authors:
A. What academic degrees does the person hold? From what universities? (If you cannot find this information easily and with minimal searching, this is a bad sign. Also, if you are not familiar with the university, it’s wise to look it up and make sure it is a legitimate school.)
B. What does this person do for a living? Does s/he teach? Write/research? Run a foundation? Work in private practice? You should be able to locate any of this basic information quickly in a general biography which should be easily available on any professional person.
C. What other books/articles has this person authored?
D. What personal experience does the author have with the topic? This is a particularly important question if the author does not have professional qualifications, but has a personal tie to the subject (such as a family member or close friend of someone who was murdered by the owner of an AK-47).
Note: Certain people are never legitimate sources for a history paper. People such as Jon Stewart, Glen Beck, Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Ann Coulter, and other media entertainers, are just that. They are not credible *historical* sources because they are media personalities who entertain. If you are unclear about whether a person is a legitimate source or expert on a topic, please ask your instructor for clarification.
You should investigate the broader themes as well, to give you a better understanding of the social norms during the period. In our example, a smart researcher would use keyword terms such as 2nd Amendment, gun control, murder rates, assault weapons, and other such terms to get a running start to have a better understanding of the history of the Amendment.
General guidelines:
a. Makesurethatyouareabletocitealloftheinformationandclaimsinyourpaper.
b. Avoid making spurious claims such as Everyone agrees that the 2nd amendment is the most important of all the amendments. Unless you have a source that can prove this,
its best to leave such conjecture out of your paper.
c. Make use of the Online Writing Community to help you edit your paper for clarity, tone,
and logical topic progression. Please ask your instructor if this might be of interest to you.
The Brandman library has a wonderful collection of resources for you to consult. You can visit the following links:
To view a general library guide, you can visit this link:
http://chapman.libguides.com/brandman/
To view a list of the history databases you have free access to, click on this link:
http://chapman.libguides.com/content.php?pid=25628&sid=184819
To view the universitys plagiarism guide, you can visit this site:
http://chapman.libguides.com/plagiarism
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What must be in the topic proposal?
First, keep in mind that this is a formal proposal. You cannot type this out in 30 minutes and expect to have your topic approved or to get a decent grade. It requires a significant amount of thought and consideration in order to be approved. Please know that the instructor will return your proposal with either an approval of your topic, or suggestions for modification.
Please be aware that no topic is guaranteed to be approved. If two students propose the same topic, the instructor will evaluate both proposals and make alternate suggestions as needed. Oftentimes, when students have similar ideas, the approach to the topic can be adjusted so that neither student’s research is overlapping the other, which would require the students to jockey for access to resources.
The format for the topic proposal should be presented thusly: ———————-
Name
Date
Research Paper Topic Proposal
Working title of paper: In a few concise words, you should be able to give the reader an idea of what you would like to discuss. You should at least have a few descriptive nouns and verbs in the working title.
Your proposal, at minimum, should be double spaced and address the following points (although you would “not” number them)
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