How the American Media covered the firing of General MacArthur

Title:  How the American Media covered the firing of General MacArthur

Description:

1. Your essay will be a thesis paper; this means you must provide an argument about your topic. As this is a history paper, your thesis/argument must describe a historical event. You must explain why a historical event occurred, historical change over time, or an explanation of the past. Editorials about modern events and topics (especially politics) or what someone should do in the future are NOT history papers.

2. You must offer us something “new” in terms of argument, evidence, method, or approach; just rehashing what secondary source authors have already argued is not acceptable. That is how an original research paper, what we are doing is different from a term paper. In this paper you need to create a new argument about a historical event and base that argument primarily on primary sources.

3. Your paper must have an introduction paragraph which contains your thesis statement. Your thesis must be in the first paragraph of your paper. It must be clear to me what your argument is. It is ok to say, “In this paper I will argue that …”. In this paragraph also introduce your main supporting points that you will use to prove your thesis.

4. Immediately after your introduction/thesis you must have a historiography of your historical subject. The historiography (also called survey) section should be between 1000 and 2000 words long (4 to 8 pages). You must describe what past scholars have written about your subject so that the reader will know where your argument and research fit in the larger historical debates about your topic. Your historiography section is a refined version of your survey paper. Like your survey paper, you must describe the arguments of at least eight secondary sources related to your paper topic.

5. Immediately after your survey section, you should include 1 to 2 paragraphs in which you tell the reader what is new about your project, how is it different from the 8+ secondary sources related to your topic that you have just summarized in your survey section. You also need to define what historical approaches you are using in your paper; remember that this also might be what is new about your project. Historical approaches are those you studied in History 289 and include the following: economic history, Annales School, labor history, sociological history, quantitative history, social history, cultural history, gender approach, post-structural history, post-modern approach or post-colonial approach. Everyone should be using some of the empiricist approach, so there is no need to note that unless you are taking a totally different approach like the post-modern approach which denies some of the empiricist models. Also fields of History like Military History or Women’s History are not historical approaches.

6. You must have a conclusion. It should not be one or two sentences but, rather, detailed enough for the reader to review the essential points made in the paper. Your conclusion should restate your thesis or main idea in the very first sentence. It should then revisit the main supporting arguments and evidence that you have established in the body of your paper and show how they buttress your thesis. Your conclusion should be between 1 and 2 pages in length.

7. Your research paper must be at least 5,000 words (20 pages) long; the main body should be approximately 2,500 to 4,000 words, and the introduction and conclusion should be approximately 300 to 500 words each. Your historiography section should be 1000 to 2000 words long. Each double spaced page is about 250 words if you use Times New Roman font with 1″ margins. Endnotes and Bibliography do not count to the word/page minimums for this paper. I will actually word count check your paper’s length when I grade it. Additionally, your paper can be longer than 5,000 words, that is just the minimum.

8. You should number every page in the upper right hand corner. Word allows you to do this (click on Insert and then Page Number). Put the page number in the header rather than the body of the page.

9. For this paper, you must use at least 15 major sources: with at least 8 secondary sources in your historiographical survey section), and the body/main argument section of your paper must include at least seven primary sources as well as supporting secondary sources. Your main argument must be primarily based on primary sources. Papers that do not use the minimum required sources will be automatically downgraded. I’ll add that this means more than one citation from each of the seven primary sources. Seven primary sources is the minimum, the more the better (for your grade).

10. You must use citations and they must use the endnote form. We will be using the Chicago Style method of citations, but you can also use the related Turabian form of citations that most of you learned in History 309. Good scholarship in this area will help your grade. Lack of citations to the sources you used will lower your grade. A few citations will not satisfy the requirement for properly referencing your term paper. A 20 page paper will have between 40 and 80 endnotes. All citations must conform to the models provided in the Chicago Style link or Turabian. Do not place notes at the bottom of the page or in parentheses inside the text. The endnotes should be titled “Endnotes,” and they do not count as part of the required length of the paper.

11. You must include a formal bibliography at the end of your paper which conforms to the models for bibliographic entries and bibliographies as presented in the Chicago Style link or Turabian. This is not an annotated bibliography, but instead a bibliographical listing of the sources you used in your paper. Do not include sources in your bibliography that you did not cite in your endnotes.

12. You may subdivide the main body into two or more subsections to add structure and clarity. Make sure you use paragraphs to break up your ideas, and pay attention to their order once you have an initial draft of the entire paper. Check to see if your paragraph structure/order is consistent with your methodological statement in the introduction. Run-on paragraphs will result in a grade reduction. As a rule, no paragraph should be longer than one page (250 words). The paper must be in essay form.

13. Papers must be submitted as a Word (either .doc or .docx file is acceptable) file uploaded the assignment in the Week 8 Module.

14. I am more than willing to look at rough drafts of any part of your paper or any assignment at any point along the way.