Research Paper, Due Wednesday, May 11^th, 2024 (30% of grade):

Topic: Choose an event, process, movement, or institution relevant to the Israeli-Palestine Conflict that interests you. Using your own research of contemporary scholarship, write a short “article” explaining it, geared to a fellow (smart, interested, but new to the subject) student.

Length, Format and Expectations:

1.    This paper should be about 8-10 pages, using the same citation, line spacing, font rules as the previous two papers.

2.     This should draw upon your own research. Find 8-12 contemporary, relevant, scholarly sources. This means academic journal articles or books.

3.     Make it a history research paper, as opposed to, say, a political science or sociology paper. Here are some tips:

a.     Define and research a specific historical period. It is often a good idea to include the date range covered in the title of the paper.

b.     Write about continuity and/or change over time, not the situation as it is now. In other words, what movement/conflict/party began, continued, ended, developed, etc. during this defined period. How did a certain ethnic nationalism become more powerful between the years X and Y? How did women influence a resistance movement when it emerged in 20XX? Do not use the body of the paper to describe the present moment and/or offer speculations for the future. If you wish to offer some thoughts about the current moment, save it for the conclusion.

c.     Try to focus on something specific enough to get into some detail about. “Zionism” or “Palestinian Culture, 1850-2024” would be a bit too broad.

One of the great things about our library is that it offers services that allow you to find many sources not currently physically stored at the library. DO NOT RELY SOLELY on the books that happen to be in the Vassar College Library’s collection. It is an excellent collection, but you MUST use ILL and/or the scholarly databases to which our library subscribes.

• For this class, you are strongly encouraged to schedule a research consultation to get some help through the process of working with sources. You can do that at the Ask a Librarian page. For the Spring 2024 semester, you'll meet with Carollynn Costella, the history librarian (ccostella@vassar.edu) or Naima Saini, the library admin fellow (lsaini@vassar.edu).
• Gathering sources is a process that takes time. For this assignment, you're asked to use 8-12 sources, which means you might have to look at 20 sources over the course of narrowing things down. So the earlier you start the better!
• When you have a research consultation at the library or an office hours appointment with Professor Schreier, it's really useful to come with a list of sources that you've been looking at, even if it's short and even if you might not actually use them all in your final paper. 
• Refer back to the assignment description as you go. Remember that this is a history paper—that means you should primarily be looking for sources by history scholars.