Eugenics

Research Practice Assignment

Research Topic Options:

COINTELPRO

The American invasion of Canada during the War of 1812

Eugenics

Industrial Workers of the World/Wobblies (articles with an American focus, please)

There are several parts to this assignment. First, choose a research topic from among the above list. Next, find two peer-reviewed journal articles on the topic you choose. Peer-reviewed journal articles are published in academic journals that use the peer-review process. In essence, a board of historians (for a history journal) reviews potential work for publication and only allows articles that meet high research/practice-of-history standards to be published. This is beneficial because it means peer-reviewed journal articles are more likely (though not guaranteed) to be accurate and not someone’s made-up fantasy.

In order to find peer-reviewed journal articles, it’s best to start with SLCC’s library website: libweb.slcc.edu . You’ll want to click on the “Research Databases” icon, NOT the “Journals” icon. (The Research Databases icon looks like discs stacked on top of each other… or maybe a barrel.) For history, the two most useful databases are Academic Search Premier (EBSCO) and JSTOR. Pick one of these databases and click on their name to go to their website. If you’re at an off-campus computer, you will have to log in with a PIN number the library assigns to you. This is almost always the last four digits of the telephone number you gave to the college. Librarians can solve PIN issues; if necessary, visit the library to make sure one is working.

Both Academic Search Premier and JSTOR are powerful search engines, so you may not get the articles you want right away. You should also note that not all of the publications in these databases are peer-reviewed. You’ll have to make sure that they are (if necessary, find their home website and check for their publication guidelines). Newspapers and popular (for-profit) magazines like Foreign Affairs are not peer-reviewed. Most magazines titled something like The New England History Quarterly are peer-reviewed. Both Academic Search Premier and JSTOR have options in their advanced search options to limit selections to academic journals. Note, however, this doesn’t mean you’re going to get a full quality article and not something like, say, a book review or a two-page summary of upcoming research.

Eventually one or both databases should produce articles related to your topic that are worth a read. Pick two to read and summarize. Note that you should try to pick articles that look interesting, so as to not get bored and frustrated with this assignment. Journal articles are generally 10-30 pages in length. Articles 5 pages or shorter will not count for this assignment.

At the top of the paper you turn in to me, you will need to provide proper citations for the articles you choose to read. I expect the citations to generally follow the Chicago Manual of Style, beginning with the author’s name:

Lastname, Firstname. “The name of the article in quotation marks,” The Publication the Article            is From in Italics Edition (year): page numbers.

For example:

Wilson, Diana. “Psuedo-Citations in the Modern World,” Fiction Quarterly 86 (Fall 2017):     13-31.

If you need additional help with citations, the following website provides guidance for the notes-bibliography style of citation (footnotes are used to link a particular body of text to a citation at the bottom of the page, bibliography-style citations are used for general citations not linked to a footnote).

http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html

The guide starts out with how to cite various types of books, then goes on to journal articles and other sources, so you have to scroll down a bit if you want to copy the journal article format.

Once you have cited the two journal articles you chose, the next thing to do for your assignment is to summarize the articles’ content and arguments. Most journal articles have a central argument: something they are trying to convince the reader is true. Ponder the main argument for a minute. For instance, a journal article detailing excavations of an ancient Norse settlement in northern Canada may be presenting an argument like this: Evidence from the new excavations on Baffin Island prove that Scandinavian explorers, not Christopher Columbus, were the first Europeans to discover the Americas.

The summary of your journal articles’ argument and content should take about a page, maybe two pages per article. Spend most of your time explaining the author’s argument – what they want the reader to learn – and mention the evidence the article uses (details like people, events, sources) where useful to explain the author’s argument. Your summary should not be a blow-by-blow accounting of events mentioned in the article. If I wanted that, I’d just read the whole article & not a summary.

Once you have completed those summaries, the next step in the assignment is to locate two books related to your topic. Unlike the journal articles, you won’t need to check these books out of the library and read them, as this is just a practice assignment. Still, you should try to find books at local libraries you have access to. One of the best local libraries is at the University of Utah: www.lib.utah.edu . As an SLCC student, you have borrowing privileges at the U’s library. Another common way to find additional material on your topic is to look at the sources cited in the journal articles you just read. It’s likely they referenced books on their topic.

Once you have located two books related to your topic, provide citations for them in your assignment. Book citations follow a slightly different format. Review the Chicago Manual of Style guide I linked above or follow the below examples:

Lastname, Firstname. The Publication Title in Italics. Publisher Information, year published.

For example:

Wilson, Diana. Title of a Fake Book. Salt Lake City: SLCC Press, 2014.

The above is the style for a bibliography citation. If you were creating a footnote tying the book to a specific part of the text, the format would be a little different & you’d include page numbers to guide readers to the relevant part of the book (so they don’t have to search the whole thing for the information you were citing!) But you shouldn’t need to do that for this assignment, as you won’t be reading the books.

After providing citations for two books, you must find one more source and provide one more citation: a primary source related to your research topic. Primary sources come from people that were actually involved in the event or time period being discussed, not experts writing much later. You might get an idea about what primary sources are available by looking at any that might be cited in the journal articles you read. Other possible resources might include: memoirs, journals, or letters of historical actors, speeches by politicians or newspaper articles from the era, texts of treaties or other related official documents, etc.

Now you won’t want to take the effort to go and search special archives at a research institution, but you should be able to find some of the more easily-available primary sources. Some places you might want to look:

• The New York Times online archives (SLCC students have free access to the New York Times. For instructions, see: http://libguides.slcc.edu/NYTinCollege )
• The National Archives: www.archives.gov/research/search/
• The Library of Congress: loc.gov
• org : this website doesn’t have a very good search function, but if a historical figure published something, you can often find it here.
• Perhaps most importantly, pay attention when doing other research on your topic, and make a note whenever a primary source is mentioned so you can locate it later.

Depending on the source you find, the rules for citations can be very similar to a journal article, or very different. Do the best you can. You might find help from a detailed overview of citations found here:

http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/16/ch14/ch14_toc.html

An example of citing a paper document in a historical archive:

U.S. Food Administration, American Protective League file, master correspondence file, records           group 4. Paper. Located at the National Archives at San Francisco. National Archives    identification number: 295921

But I won’t be very strict for primary-source citations, as long as I get a reasonable idea of where to find the source. The general rule for citations is that if they included enough information for your reader to find the source material themselves, it was a good citation. If they can’t figure out how to find whatever you were citing on their own, it was a bad citation.

Like many assignments, this one will be easy if you’ve done research before. It will be hard if you have not. Your grade will be based on three things: the relevance and usefulness of your sources for your topic, the quality of your summary of the articles you read, and correct citation style. (I’ll be picky about this last one, so take care.) Do not be afraid to ask me questions in person or through e-mail!