You will research the historical context for the person. We are not interested in biographical information about the person; we want to know more about the events that the person was part of. This may include a discussion of why the person was important, but this is not necessary. For this first part of the research project, you will learn how to ask questions about your topic to know more. This will help you understand the historical context. Context means what events the person was connected to or what characterized the period during which the person lived. Historical context can be seen as a series of events or even a broader topic. An example of the first (a series of events) would be the French Revolution; an example of a broader topic would be famine in early modern Europe. So for example, if you chose Martin Luther, his historical context would be the Protestant Reformation. However, often a person has several historical contexts and the same person is connected to several events that took place. Martin Luther was linked to the Protestant Reformation, but also to the peasant uprisings, for example. To find more information, you will learn how to use proper reference works. We all use Wikipedia, but we should also be aware of the downsides of using Internet-based resources that have no principle editor. Anyone can add information to Wikipedia, and although the facts are often correct and verified, they can also be wrong or biased. It is, therefore, a safer bet to use properly edited published reference works. Many reference works are also available online; you just need to go to the U of G library website instead. You will be asked to describe the historical context of your person in both the draft and the final research project. Once you have found out more about the context, you need to start thinking about how to narrow down a research topic. For example, it is impossible to write a coherent research paper on the Protestant Reformation. If you tried, then you would end up leaving crucial things out or just summarizing the textbook. Your academic research papers are meant to present new scholarship and include an independent thesis based on this scholarship. You will not write a research paper in this course, but you will practice how to narrow down a research topic. So if we take Martin Luther as our example again, the historical context is the Protestant Reformation. To narrow it down you can choose to look at how the Reformation impacted women’s status or what happened to monasteries and the monks who lived there. You might need to narrow it down even further to a region or a specific period. Part of this is simply common sense. Compare with a newspaper: none of us like reading an article that jumps around and discusses different things in each paragraph. That is just confusing. So think about having a topic for your paper that addresses the same thing from different perspectives or brings together closely related aspects. In both the draft and the final research project you will be asked to present a narrowed down research topic. This shall be included in the 500 words that present the historical context. After you have narrowed down a research topic, you should start looking for scholarly sources to use. If you gained general knowledge in the previous stage, now you need to acquire more specialized knowledge about your research topic. You should start doing searches for articles and books. Many students go to their Internet browser and search online for sources. This may yield some good results but, in fact, it is more likely that you are wasting your time. The Internet is an endless source of information that has not been filtered in any way. When you Google your topic, you might as well end up clicking on your roommate’s blog post about Martin Luther as finding a suitable scholarly source. So what is a suitable scholarly source? “Scholarly” means in short that a scholar has written the article or a book; it is written by someone who has learned to do historical research and gotten a Ph.D. So one hint is to Google the author to find out more information about her or him. But that is not enough. Some scholars write other things too. Some write novels (stories of fiction), some write fact books for children, etc. One of the best ways to check if a book is scholarly is to look for references. In history this usually means footnotes, but it can also mean in-text citations. Usually, a scholarly article has at the minimum a couple of footnotes per page; the same goes for a scholarly book. Another way to see if an article is scholarly is to check if it has been peer reviewed. “Peer reviewed” means that it has been fact checked and evaluated by experts in the field. Google the journal to make sure that it is a peer reviewed journal (just make sure that you are reading an article and not a book review; if what you are reading is only a few pages, then it is likely a book review and not an article). More information on how to evaluate whether a source is scholarly will be given in unit 6 and a guideline is available from the Supplementary Resources tab. For your draft, you need five scholarly sources, for the finished research project you need ten. The next step is to find the thesis in these articles. This means that you find the main argument that the author is trying to make. This is usually found at the beginning of the article sometimes at the end of the introduction. Look for words like ″argue,″ ″claim,″ ″examine,″ ″analyze,″ etc. To provide a good annotation for the bibliography, you need to be specific. State the thesis and also what this is based on; which sources or which area the author researched. You should aim to include which region and which exact time period the scholar has studied. Finally, you write down why this article deserves to be included in your bibliography. What information did it provide you with that you did not already know? Each annotation shall be maximum 150 words. Use the Chicago Manual of Style to create a properly formatted bibliography. There are many resources available to help you with this. This website covers the most common forms of citations and it might be all you need: Purdue Online Writing Lab. But if you need more advice, the library has a full online version of the Chicago Manual of Style where you find different sections that deal with particular cases. Once you have chosen ten sources and written your annotations, make sure that your narrowed down research topic still fits your bibliography. In most cases, the research topic (and in your future research papers, most often your thesis) will need to be adjusted after the research is done. Edit your work. Use “spellcheck″ to make sure that all sentences are complete and avoid passive tense. Avoid longer quotations. Your final research project draft should be maximum 1400 words and your final research project maximum 2300. This includes the bibliographic information.