History 12 -- Research Competencies
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- How to translate and synthesize this into knowledge
- How to produce a research product worthy of the genre
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This guide concentrates on how you turn your reading into writing. Not all writing --of course--is reading-based. You may be familiar with writing from first hand experience or from the need to express your opinions or feelings. Sometimes you may have written to influence other people's convictions. This guide, however, is specifically intended to help you with writing tasks that depend on written sources of information.
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Introduction: Using Multiple Texts in History
Research assignments are assigned for two aims—the first is to build the skills necessary for university because in university you’ll do a lot of research without support. The idea is to be able to investigate a topic and to be thoughtful about it, and to write and discuss it in a way that’s meaningful and not superficial. The other reason is in terms of content. I am looking for you to find an aspect of a topic that interests you and to investigate it much further and to see where you can go with it. I want you to try and make connections between the overall context and the in-depth knowledge so that you can see the human element of the history you are studying--it’s not just flat characters in a book but real life in the news and affecting someone in very important ways everyday…and I think that papers on the Middle East really do that.
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Students often believe that history research is about learning important names, events and dates; however students often don't consider that they will have to consider these "facts" critically.
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I often observe students taking notes about the events of history, but see them put down their pens when the historian starts talking about interpretations--what it all means. It is the analysis of history, however, that historians value.
- History is not one story, but a number of stories that depend on which sources historians choose to reconstruct what took place.
- When historians read texts, they compare and contrast the viewpoint in that text with those encountered in other texts they have read. Historians interpret texts as illustrations of perspectives, rather than as facts to be learned.
You will be asked to illustrate various position and to bring relevant textual information in as evidence.
You will have to use news sources because the history is changing so rapidly. If you were writing a paper about the Treaty of Versailles, print resources are actually better…there’s a lot of really good thoughtful books…enough history has passed that people can be thoughtful about it, reflect upon it and see some of the short terms effects and the beginning patterns of the long term effects..with the Middle East that’s very hard...looking at a modern history and that starts at about 1948 forward.
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News sources are primary sources: they are not history until they are absorbed into a historical discourse. These kinds of sources can only "say" so much about the past. For example, a newspaper article about a historical event might seem like a great way to learn about the event, but how much can an article say about the past? Journalism is often called the "first draft" of history, but like most "first drafts" there is much editing to be done — a newspaper article will often lack historical consciousness, much less a good deal of less-obvious facts about a given event, orientated around a goal of selling newspapers. This doesn't invalidate a newspaper article as a source, but it does place limitations on what you can use it for.
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A newspaper article could provide some factual information about an event itself, but it must always be interpreted through the lens of a historian aware of its limitations; such a source would be perhaps best used (and thought about) as evidence of how an event was reported, rather than how an event actually occurred.
1. You will be required to learn background knowledge on your own: you should have an understanding of the events and controversies.
2. We will be discussing the methods historians use, and we will create a template which you will use in analysing sources that you find.
- You will search for newspaper and magazine articles, and discuss different viewpoints you find in your essay.
University Skill Set Requirements
Your critical examination of examples of good history is the best way to learn about the relationship between a topic and a thesis, and the research, thinking and argument that build a good history product.
When students are asked to write opinion papers, they mainly write generalizations without support. When asked to write descriptive papers, students mainly are unable to represent the different viewpoints in different documents.
What we are going to do is to look at several examples of student research papers that were carried out in the library. We will look at their performance of historical rhetoric. While some people people believe that research begins with the location of resources, in many ways, this is putting the cart before the course. We first need to make sense of the history research essay genre, and what is required for it to approach history as a specific discipline. We will foreground research as a kind of process that depends of the purpose of writing. Historians ask different kinds of questions about events than journalists or sociologists.
From this starting point, the research process will make more sense, and we will look at things such as:
- the development of research questions
- the location and retrieval of pertinent research
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The ways in which knowledge is organized in different disciplines determine, among other things, the scope of the research questions that can be asked,
the rules of evidence that are recognized within the discipline as
valid for supporting claims,
the kind of criteria that can be used to evaluate claims critically,
the sources researchers consult to
find information,
and the nature of the statements that
must be cited. . . .
An understanding of the discipline, and not simply abstract critical thinking skills, is what will provide you with the tools to evaluate research critically in your discipline.
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OVERVIEW
Issue: The Palestinians want full statehood with all the rights of an independent nation. They want to control their own borders and military. Israel fears that its security will be compromised and that the new state will be used as a staging ground for attacks. Both peoples want control over Jerusalem. Israel has claimed complete control, and the city has been its capital since 1980. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as their capital because of the large population that lives there. The Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights are other subjects of dispute. The area of the Gaza Strip and West Bank is not large, yet is inhabited by 2.2 million Palestinians and only 145,000 Israeli's. There are 3 million more Palestinians in the Arab world, primarily in Jordan, as well as 850,000 in Israel alone.
A. Concept Objectives
1. Understand how differing perceptions of people, places, and resources
have affected events and conditions in the past through competition and
conflict.
2. Develop an awareness of how religious and philosophical ideas have
been powerful forces for defending military aggression throughout
history.
You’re going to need someone to almost start to digest the information for you…the textbook does a pretty good job..but it doesn’t give enough depth on a specific topic. ..the problem is that it is difficult when first exploring such a complex topic to put it into context in a way that really makes sense.
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