History 118 - United States History, 1865-Present - Fishman

After reading some preliminary materials on the Roger Young Village, you will create a research question regarding one of the key themes of this semester: gender, housing, labor, poverty or race.

Watch the video below about how to develop a good research question. 

Research is a continuous process of asking questions, finding answers, and asking more questions. You should develop questions to guide your research on your topic.

You don't want to investigate the entirety of your subject area, you want to focus on one or two areas only. For example, if writing about gender, you might ask:

How did women participate in building community in the Rodger Young Village?

In The Essential Guide to Writing History Essays, Historian Katherine Antonova identifies other categories of historical inquiry, including:

• Social identity: How did people define themselves by gender, class, race, religion, rank, ethnicity, nationality, occupation, or other social categories or affiliations? What were the relationships between different groups?  In what other ways did people identify themselves? In what ways did identities overlap? How did definitions differ from the ways we use them now?
• Culture: What were the ways that people expressed their mores, mentalities, traditions, feelings, or manners?
• Ideas/​ideology: What were people’s religious, philosophical, or political beliefs? What concepts or ideas were perceived as usually good or usually bad, strong or weak, and by whom?
• Education: Who was taught? What was taught to them? How and where? Who made the decisions? Who were the teachers and what was their place in society? What were the goals of education?
• Power: Who had power and who did not? How was it distributed among different people?
• Politics: National, international or local, official or unofficial, dominant or subversive—​ how were policies enacted and used, for what purposes, with what effects?
• Law: Whom did law privilege and whom did it punish? What principles did it value most and least?
• Institutions: What kinds of institutions were there? How were they run and who participated in them?
• Technology: What could be done and what could not? What were technological priorities? Who had technological advantages?
• Economics and labor: Who had prosperity, how much, and who paid for or produced it? How did people work, and where, under what conditions? Who worked and who did not?
• Property and material culture: What did people own, buy, and sell? How did these transactions occur, and with what meanings attached to them? How did property and things drive or express human behavior? What did people desire, how did they use things, what did things represent to people? What did people keep and what did they get rid of? Why and how?
• Demography: What were the population, mobility rate, sex ratios, age ratios, languages, or religions of a given group, and how and why did they change over time? How diverse were they?
• Geography, space, and environment: How were people’s experiences affected by climate, agriculture, natural resources, natural defenses, transportation and communication, cities, or landscape? How did people impose themselves on their environment? How did they use their environment and for what purposes, with what results?

 
Source: Antonova, Katherine Pickering. The Essential Guide to Writing History Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2020.