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Proposal

Deadline

Friday, February 25, 4:30 pm in your instructor's mailbox (403 Young Hall) and your peer review group's hands.

Proposal

Your project proposal explains in 3-5 pages the place you intend to study, your connection to it, its significance, and a few important resources you will use to build an analysis. It must indicate that you have chosen a place, developed a line of argument to pursue, and located evidence that will help make your case.

Argument

Here is a hypothetical argument:

Springfield, Illinois, claims to be Abraham Lincoln's "home town" and final resting place, but in fact he lived there relatively few years and won his fame in other locations, from Kentucky to the District of Columbia. Yet Lincoln knew that the public saw him as a man of the West, born in a log cabin and self-trained to become a shrewd lawyer and politician. He needed Springfield, a bustling commercial center and state capitol, to give him an air of refinement and success. Throughout his political career he carefully associated the prairie town and its nearby river villages (New Salem and Petersburg) with his civic values, which evolved as rapidly as his former home. Ironically, a visit to today's Springfield, where the "Lincoln shrines" attract international tourists, suggests that the town now needs him as much as he needed it.

Sources

Sources for this paper might include a wide variety of materials, from books and articles to maps, images, Web sites, and pictures or interviews made on site, to help the place come alive in both past and present terms. (It helps to choose a place that you may visit in person, during breaks, weekends or holidays, but that is not essential. A final project can also  be based entirely on Library and Internet research; interviews could be obtained through phone and email.) Local libraries will be excellent sources, as will historical societies (the latter would even be interested in receiving a copy of what you write--extra credit if you do so). Look for opportunities to get history first hand through interviews of elderly residents or residents involved in professions that are key to the identity or economy of the community.

The final project bibliography must refer to at least 15 sources. In this proposal, list at least 5-8 sources (from your annotations) and briefly describe why they should be helpful.

The Research Process

You need to define a place, and then narrow it to a specific area, so as not to get overwhelmed with information. (In the Springfield paper, the focus would be on "Lincoln shrines," not the entire city.) Once you have a search term like "New York Chinatown" or "Boston North End" or "Chicago Stock Yard," try the following resources:

Web search: http://www.dogpile.com. Another good source is http://www.hotbot.com. Be sure to select "the page title" and ask for 25 full descriptions. Explore the links and whatever they lead to; then Bookmark them or Print them or Send them to yourself as a file.

Library catalog: find subject "boston north end"--look especially for any books classified as Description and Travel. Skim them, copy useful pages and also title and copyright pages.

Site visit: Use your Web & Library finds to locate places or people you need to see. Any state, county, or town libraries will be valuable, as well as historical societies, if they have research files. Make copies, take pictures, ask questions, hold interviews, make notes of your sensory impressions--how the place looks, smells, tastes, feels--you'll begin to sense what you want to write about.

Writing the Proposal

1. You should consider these questions (not necessarily in this order):

Where is this place, and why is it there?
What are its spatial features, and how do they fit in a larger regional context?
What do previous researchers, writers, thinkers say about it, and do they agree?
Who were prime movers in creating or shaping it, and why?
What sort of changes did it experience, and why?
When did it acquire its present character, and why?
How does it seem American, and what meaning does it give to that term?

2. Put those questions in an order that seems appropriate to your place. Using what you've found so far, sketch some possible lines of inquiry you will follow.

3. Comment on how this project will explain the place and your relation to it.

4. Using MLA form, list and briefly describe the sources you will use (from your annotations). Here are examples for a book and a web site:

Peters, Arthur King. Seven Trails West. New York: Abbeville Press, 1996. A lavishly-illustrated history of major Western trails, from the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803-06 to the transcontinental railway of 1863-69. I plan to make extensive use of a chapter on the Pony Express trail, pp. 147-72.

http://www.lyrics.ch/: The Lyrics Server, a massive database of song lyrics (over 107,000) dating from the latest back to the early 1800s. I will be using lyrics from songs written by Woodie Guthrie, during his hobo-minstrel days in the 1930s.

For more help, see these guidelines for writing English papers, and contact the Writing Center.