The first step in preparing your 25-page research paper is to develop a proposal. The one-page proposal should be typed, in complete sentences and double-spaced. It should include the following information:
1) A short working title for the project.
2) A brief description or summary of the topic.
3) A description of the
issues and questions you will be examining.
4) A description of the
types of primary source material on which you hope to
rely.
5) Some indication of your
next step. How do you plan to start work?
6) A short bibliography of secondary sources that will provide useful background information about your topic (at least two books and scholarly articles that you have obtained and looked at).
In evaluating your work, I will ask the following questions:
Here are a few examples of potential topics:
1) Shopping for Luxury Goods in American Cities, 1800-1820
2) Hiring a Servant Girl in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America
3) Coping with Severe Winter Weather: Northeastern Cities in 1836.
4) Life in a Boarding House
5) Staying at a Hotel in the Early [or mid or late] Nineteenth Century
6) Brothel Riots as Community Policing
7) Going to the Theater in the 1840s.
8) Fires as Entertainment Events in the Mid Nineteenth Century
9) Rat Baiting and Dog Fighting
10) The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853 in New Orleans
11) African Americans in [New York, Brooklyn, or Hartford] during the Civil War.
12) Shopping for Food [time period?]
13) The First Suburb: Life in Brooklyn before 1860.
14) "Ladies Insulted": Sexual Harassment in Nineteenth Century Cities
15) Controlling Stray Pigs in Nineteenth Century New York
16) Squatters in New York's Central Park, Before the Park was Built.
17) Nineteenth Century Homeless Shelters
18) Early Air Pollution in Pittsburgh, "The Smoky City"
19) The Experience of Riding the Horse Railroads in Nineteenth Century Cities
20) The Great Horse Epidemic of 1872: Its Effect on Northeastern Cities
21) The Blizzard of 1888 in Hartford.
22) The 1895 Trolley Strike in Brooklyn
23) The Telephone in Urban America Before 1930
24) The 1917 Food Protests in New York: Jewish Housewives as Activists
25) Italian Immigrant Life in New Haven, 1890-1930
What kinds of primary sources should you look for?
Here is a list of the main types of primary sources that we will be examining this semester, with links to more information. This is not an exhaustive list of primary sources
Studies of Urban Conditions by Contemporary Observers
City Directories and Census Schedules
How do you find secondary source material?
Students have traditionally relied mainly on books, locating appropriate titles with the help of the Homer online catalog. Although this is a fine method, it is not the only one.
A particularly valuable search method is to use the "America: History and Life" database, which is available through the library's website. This database lists virtually all the history articles published in significant scholarly journals; it also lists book reviews, and thus will direct you to relevant books. Click here: http://norman.lib.uconn.edu/NewSpirit/Databases/DatabaseInfo.cfm?ID=506
Journal articles are often more useful than books, partly because they tend to be more tightly focused on a single topic and partly because they are a lot shorter. Some journal articles are available electronically through JStor or other electronic services available at UConn. In addition, most leading journals are available in paper form at the Babbidge Library. They are shelved alphabetically on the third floor.
Three of the most prestigious journals that publish articles on American urban history are the following:
Increasingly, some students have used web pages as secondary sources. This is usually a mistake. Secondary source material that is available only the Internet is often of very poor quality. Since anyone can put anything on the Internet, history web pages are often incompetently researched and written by hobbyists, cranks, and other amateurs. For the purposes of this assignment, DO NOT USE ANY SECONDARY SOURCES FROM THE INTERNET, unless you first discuss the matter with me in person and explain why this is necessary.