RESOURCES
Most of the resources are meant to help students to complete their course assignments. History faculty members use a variety of writing assignments in the lower division courses. The following examples are typical assignments in the history department: a topic paper on a selection of primary sources, in which the students analyze the style of writing of different authors, and the subjects they treat, such as religion, government, education, and social status. Instructors will ask students to explore new creative assignments, such as the writing of a family history paper, oral interview reports, historical analyses of art works in a local museum, essays on one or more novels with a historical content, and the writing of a series of letters or the keeping a journal to record the new insights obtained in a course. In the upper division history courses, majors will be introduced to historiographical debates and an understanding of important primary and secondary sources. All majors will be able to demonstrate–orally as well as in writing–products of in-depth historical research. In the upper division courses, conceptual and methodological issues of the subject will be explained more specifically and at greater depth. The use of primary texts will allow students to develop their own judgment of major events and issues. Skills for critical analysis will be reinforced and developed; students will be introduced to some of the debates of modern historians on controversial issues. The upper division courses place greater emphasis on independent work and on the presentation of that work to the class as well as on critical investigation and on the bibliographical skills and resources for research. For these reasons, you are encouraged to make use of the history research links and the World War Studies room that contains a large collection of primary and secondary sources about the history of World War Two.