In this section, Prof. Anne McCants describes her motivation for developing the archive-based research project students completed in the course. She also discusses the risks and great benefits of assigning an open-ended research project.
Rethinking a Standard Assignment
In the past, the final writing assignment for this course has typically been in the form of a historiographical essay rather than an archive-based research paper. A historiographical essay is the most common assignment format for first-year history graduate students taking a general “methods” or “historiography” course. If our students were all the typical kind of history graduate student—that is, if they came from undergraduate backgrounds in history and were planning to pursue careers as professional historians—I think the standard assignment would make a lot of sense. Such students need to immerse themselves deeply in a literature with a long tradition already, be able to identify the major strands and figures in that literature, and develop a critical understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of that literature. However, for our students (and especially this particular year with no incoming students identified as having a historical focus), this kind of exercise might seem superfluous to what they are going to study next, and may even be off-putting for the study of history.
Involving Students in Being Historians
If this was possibly the only history course my students might take, I wanted them to actually try being historians, and not just glorified undergraduate students in history, reading more or longer books, but still just situating the people doing the real work. I wanted my students to have a chance to think about a real problem and to actually try their hand at solving it with archival materials that they had themselves identified. Of course, I knew they would still needed to put their particular problem into its own historical context, so I could not disregard the literature review entirely, but I wanted it to be nested within a very hands-on project. Ulimately, I developed the archive-based research project that asked students to do the following things:
"I wanted my students to have a chance to think about a real problem and to actually try their hand at solving it with archival materials that they had themselves identified."
- Find an archive easily accessible within the confines of the semester.
- Determine if there is an existing literature that addresses this archive in particular or is relevant to its contents. If there is such a literature, consult it as one would for any course research paper.
- Establish what questions seem well settled in that literature, and what questions remain open.
- Decide which of these open questions the archive could help answer.
- Articulate which of these questions they wanted to investigate using the archive (or really, which questions interested them and why).
- Share the answers they found in the archive (either preliminary research findings, or historiographical in nature) in a final paper and oral presentation.
Risks and Benefits of the Archive-based Research Paper
The dangers of this kind of assignment are, of course, several: students may never manage to identify a problem, or an archive to address their problem, or they might fail to understand what the literature has already said about their problem so that it becomes a trivial exercise. Still, even with those potential problems, I think the value of the assignment for building real confidence in being an historian, and frankly, for having a lot more fun, outweighs the risks. All of the students, with the exception of one, who really knew what he wanted to do before stepping into the class, did in fact struggle with finding an archive. But we met regularly, or emailed regularly, until they figured something out, and all of them came up with entirely reasonable projects for the final analysis.
While none of their papers would yet stand the scrutiny of outside review, they did in fact all produce work that would constitute legitimate historical analysis—and their archives ended up being pretty cool, too. They ranged from an internet collection of oral history interviews with early women astronomers, to a content analysis of Artificial Intelligence research in popular science journals from the 1970s, to a comparative word analysis of changing references to mosquitoes in Time Magazine and the Economist between 1920 and 1950, to a study focused on a set of drawings for building tuberculosis sanitoria in the early 20th century, to a full archive survey of a Harvard collection relating to the creation of GIS software systems.
The fact that we had such a wide range of types of archives (some found, some made) generating such diverse types of questions, made our discussion of each student’s work at the end of the term incredibly interesting and, I think, educational.
