Historians Assignment.

    We have read about three very different historians, each of whom had a very different reason for writing history. For this assignment each of you needs to write a short (4+ page) paper on one or more of these historians. With all the assignments you do for this class you will need to thing about what the topic of your paper is. I do not want a string of observations about the reading, but rather an essay which has a clear thesis, a well developed argument, and is supported by evidence. There are any number of possible topics you can pick for this.

-Compare and contrast two of them and their approach to history.
-Explain what questions one or more of them thought historians should answer.
-Explain their audiences and how this shaped the type of history they wrote.
-Something else.

Things to be careful about
-You will need to support your points with evidence. It is not enough to say that "Ssu-ma thought that the purpose of history was to offer moral instruction." You need actual evidence that this is true.
-These readings are very different. For Ienaga we have a newspaper obituary, for Thucydides we have his own statement about why he does history, and for Ssu-ma we have bits and pieces of his work and an introduciton by a later historian. You will thus be able to say different things about each of them, and you will have to work around this. It is important to think about this as you are coming up with a topic.
-Feel free to do some more research. The more you know about these people the easier the assignment is to do. Be sure to cite any outside sources you use.