| Completion date | Number of pages | Project component |
| First Week Report back Friday 19 | 10-15 | 1. Background summary: A historical summary of significant dates and events of your topic, including names of people who played an important role. This section should serve as a reference for the rest of your paper. It is important to have a good understanding of the overall historical events before you can interpret the declassified record correctly. It is recommended to use at least 4 sources (FRUS, history books, etc) for this part of your project. This is to avoid historian bias. |
| First Week Report back Friday 19 | 3 |
2. Archive Estimate: What are the documentary archives relevant to your topic? What periods do they cover? What is their completeness? Do they include many deleted documents? How were they obtained? (Freedom of Information, court cases, etc) What fraction of the complete documentary record do you estimate is available to you? What documents are accessible to you that were not available to historians five or ten years ago? This section should be a summary and assessment of the declassified record you intend to study. Having such an estimate as early as possibly in your project will allow you to budget your research of the documents. |
| First and Second Week Report back Friday 19, 26 | 2 |
3. What questions will you be looking for answers to? Once you have an idea of the history and available documents, you should have an idea about what questions your research might be able to answer. It is good to keep these questions in mind when you are going through the document record. Some general questions might be: "What was the level of involvement of U.S. top brass military with different groups?" or "How closely were the President or presidential advisors involved in the decision making process that led up to this event?" or "What was the level of concern of policy makers for international law and human rights?" or "What measures, if any, were taken to make the presentation of these actions acceptable to the public?" You should have some idea of why the answer to your questions might be in the archives, and also estimate how central these questions are to the overall history of your topic. If you have specific questions that you think the archives cannot contain the answer to, it is also interesting to note these. |
| Second Week Report back Friday 26 | 5 |
4. Present and past media coverage What is the mainstream presentation of the topic you are covering? This section is not intended to take you very long or necessitate much research. The goal is to list movies, books, documentaries, magazine articles that have shaped public perception of your topic. Are these versions of the history consistent? Are they fair? Are they flawed, and if so, are they flawed in similar ways? |
| Second and Third Week Report back Friday 26, 2 | 15-20-30 ... |
5. Your research What you find (and don't find) in the declassified record. Should include analysis of the significance of your findings. Make sure to make a complete list of the documents you quote, and include this as a guide to your research. (A nice example of this is in the COINTELPRO papers.) Elements to consider: |
| Third week Report back Friday 2 | 5-10 |
6. Conclusion and further studies What is the current relevance of your research results? Do you think that a knowledge of your findings would alter the way this topic is commonly perceived? What further directions of research can you outline? Did you find hints of the existence of documents not currently declassified? As a historian, do you think you could use the Freedom of Information Act to request these documents from the government? What is the relevance of your research to people outside the U.S., or in non academic circles? What is your opinion of this class? |