gender history
Order Description

Now that you’ve learned different approaches to history, how to use electronic databases, and the basic facts about mood-altering substances and modernity, it’s time to be creative! Your final paper of the course requires you to think like an entrepreneur: to propose a new research topic on the basis of this course’s subject matter. What do we, as historians, still not know about stimulants, depressants, and their relationship to the modern world/to how people experience modernity?

To do this, write three paragraphs of 150-200 words each answering the following broad questions:

1. What? What is the question your proposed research paper would answer? How does it relate to the themes and subject matter of this course?

2. Why? What is new about the question you are proposing? Has it never been addressed before? Have other scholars gotten things wrong? How does it build upon the things you have already learned? Bottom line: why should anyone but you care about this question? YOU WILL NEED TO MAKE USE OF ELECTRONIC DATABASES LIKE JSTOR IN ORDER TO DO THIS PARAGRAPH SUCCESSFULLY.

3. How? Of the research methods we’ve learned in this course, which one best suits your question? (Are you, perhaps, combining two or several approaches – if so, how?) What kind of evidence would you need, from primary and secondary sources, to answer it?