Research assignment

    The final product of this assignment will be a brief, 5-8 page "paper" and a 2-page bibliography.  Basically you will begin the process of doing a research paper, and complete at least part of it. You will need to pick a topic, narrow it down, do at least some of the research, and write up part of the paper. These are pretty much the same stages you will have to go through for any research project. I have listed them here as three separate stages, but in fact they tend to inform each other and you will end up going back and forth between them.

Picking a topic
    This is always the trickiest part of a paper. Usually you need to start with something broad and narrow it down as you do your research. You need to come up with a topic that you want to say something about and a topic that you are capable of doing the research on with you abilities and resources and in the time given. You may start off with something fairly broad, like "Colonialism in Africa," but obviously that needs to be narrowed down. If you narrow it down (via "German colonialism") to "the Herro massacres" that is considerably better, but you still have two major things to deal with. First, what do you want to say about this event? A narrative of what happened is unlikely to be very interesting, and will probably end up just being a summary of someone else's work. This paper does not have to be a major piece of original research, but you do need to have something to say. What questions about this event or problem do the existing secondary sources not answer clearly enough? How is this thing part of some larger trend, or linked to something beyond itself? Comparative topics are usually not a good idea, since to do them well you need to do the research for two papers, but you do need to  come  up with something.
    Tied to the question of what you are trying to say is the question of sources. What are you going to be able to find, from Indiana, that will let you do this paper? Some of your natural tendencies will tend to betray you here. Yes, it would be nice to have a paper on the Herro perspective on the massacres, but what will your sources be? There may be some sources, either primary or secondary, but there may not be, and you will need to adjust your topic directly. Topics like "Contemporary reactions to the Herro massacres," have the advantage of being based on fairly public and thus easily available sources. "The German government's reaction to the Herro massacres" might work if there are secondary sources to work from, but if there are not it would require both going to the German archives and knowing German.
    Picking a topic is a very important part of the process of doing a research project, and one that you need to get started on as soon as possible. This is a fairly small project, so there are lots of ways you can save yourself even if you end up with a bad topic, but with a larger project a bad topic and a bad question will doom you to a semester or more of boredom and, most likely, a poor final product.

Doing the Research
    In this case you are compiling a bibliography more than actually doing research. You will have to read some of the stuff to write the paper, but a fair amount of it will just be entered into the bibliography. The point is that you should do most of the research that would be necessary to write a full-length research paper. Generally, the more research you do, the easier the writing is, so you will need to dig pretty deep to make this convincing. In an actual research paper your bibliography would have only the works you actually cited, but in this case I would like you to cite everything you find, general works, monographs, articles, etc.

Writing the paper
    All you need to write for this assignment is a chunk of the paper. It could explain some of the causes of the event, outcomes, source problems, be a short narrative, whatever. Regardless you will want to  pick something that you can deal with well and that will show off the quality of your research. You may or may not want to include a short part where you explain what would have come before or after this part.

Grades
    Your grade for this project will be based on the quality of the bibliography and the final paper.