Choosing a History Project Question
A student must submit a History Project proposal in two weeks. She has three possible topics and a 4,000-word limit. Topic 1: 'The causes of the First World War' - she has read widely and feels confident. Topic 2: 'How a local migrant community remembers its arrival in the 1970s' - she has access to five elderly community members willing to be interviewed, but no written archive. Topic 3: 'Was the 1990s welfare reform a success?' - she has a large online collection of government reports and newspaper articles but no primary documents beyond published sources. Her teacher warns that the project must be original inquiry, not a summary.
1. Evaluate each topic against the requirement for original inquiry and a feasible 4,000-word scope.
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The test is whether the student can produce a question only she can answer with her evidence, not a synthesis of existing scholarship.
- Topic 1 fails on originality. 'The causes of WWI' has been answered exhaustively; her project would be a literature review. It also exceeds 4,000 words by an order of magnitude. Confidence is not the same as a viable question.
- Topic 2 is the strongest candidate for original inquiry. Oral history with five community members is primary evidence that does not exist in written form, so her project genuinely adds to the record. The risk is scope and ethics: five interviews yield far more material than 4,000 words can carry, and she needs consent, recording protocols, and a plan for how to handle memory and contradiction. She should narrow to one question - for example, how memories of arrival differ between those who came as children and as adults - rather than 'how the community remembers.'
- Topic 3 has a feasible source base but a weak originality claim if she only reads published reports. It becomes original if she analyses the rhetoric of the reports rather than judging the policy - e.g. how 'success' was defined and by whom. Without that framing it collapses into summary.
Ranking: Topic 2 (with narrowing) > Topic 3 (with reframing) > Topic 1 (reject).
2. If she chooses Topic 2, what methodological problems must her proposal anticipate, and how should she address them?
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An oral history project on 1970s migration must anticipate four problems and say how it will handle them in the proposal.
- Memory and time. Recollections from fifty years ago are shaped by later experience and by the community's shared story. She should treat interviews as evidence of how the past is remembered, not as a transparent record of events. That reframing turns the weakness into the project's actual question.
- Sample bias. Five volunteers are self-selected - likely the most engaged or most available members. She must not generalise to 'the community.' She should state the limitation explicitly and, if possible, seek one or two voices outside the obvious network.
- Corroboration. With no written archive, she needs a second evidentiary strand: census data, newspaper coverage from the period, church or club records, or photographs. Even a small amount lets her compare memory against record, which is where the analysis lives.
- Ethics and consent. She needs informed consent, the right to withdraw, secure storage, and a decision about anonymity. The proposal should include a consent form and a data-handling statement.
She should also plan her word budget: roughly 800 words on method and ethics, 2,000 on analysis of the interviews, 800 on context, and 400 on conclusion. A proposal that names its own limits is more likely to be approved than one that promises a definitive community history.