BEDFORD CUSTOM TUTORIAL FOR HISTORY
Planning and Preparing a Long
Essay in History
If this is your first college-level history class, there is a good chance that
you have never written an essay on a historical topic. This tutorial will
help you learn to do the following:
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•
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Understand the essay assignment
Read historical material strategically and analytically
Organize your thoughts and ideas
Write a history essay
Even if you have written history essays before, there are many different
types of essay questions that your college instructor might ask you to
answer. You might, for example, be asked to do one of the following:
• Consider a question about historical cause and effect
• Analyze change and continuity over time
• Respond to an existing historical interpretation of a period or event
This tutorial will help you prepare for these types of writing assignments; in turn, you can apply the approaches you learn here to other types
of assignments in your history classes and other college coursework. The
first section of this tutorial provides strategies to help you write essays that
answer historical questions, assess the strengths and limitations of historical interpretations, and form new historical questions and interpretations
of your own. The second section of the tutorial offers strategies for writing
answers to essay questions that appear on history exams.
Many students come to college-level history classes assuming that they
already know quite a bit about history from their previous twelve years in
school. In elementary and high school, history education typically emphasizes “what happened,” leading students to assume that history is a collection of facts about kings and queens, popes and presidents, wars and
revolutions, and that memorizing and regurgitating such facts are the keys
to earning good grades in their history courses.
Copyright © Bedford/St. Martin’s. Distributed by Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Strictly for use with its products. Not for redistribution.
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2 Planning and Preparing a Long Essay in History
History instructors assign essays not only to ensure that their students
learn about the events and developments of the past but also to provide
them with opportunities to practice and demonstrate their historical thinking and writing abilities. Thus, although you will still learn a great number
of facts about the people, places, and periods that are the focus of your
college history course, you will also learn a specific set of historical skills
that will help you understand and evaluate change and continuity over
time, make appropriate use of historical evidence in answering questions,
and develop coherent interpretations and arguments.
How to Plan and Prepare History Essay Assignments
When it is time to begin working on an essay assignment for your history
course, it is important to remember that your instructor has assigned the
essay for two different but related reasons. First, she or he wants to assess
your understanding of the facts connected to a particular topic and the ways
they relate to one another. In a unit on the Columbian exchange, for example, an instructor might ask students to write an essay to show that they can
list the distinctive types of empires that existed in Europe, Africa, and the
Americas before 1492, describe how the interactions among those empires
in the sixteenth century altered each of them individually, and recapitulate
the ways that expanded global exchange transformed the entire world.
Second, your instructor has assigned the essay because she or he wants
to see that you can take all the information you have learned about burgeoning European trade and exploration, the ambitions of the Spanish
monarchy, the Roman Catholic Church, the Aztec empire, and African
kingdoms, and put them all into a larger framework that offers a well-­
supported argument in answer to a historical question. In other words, any
instructor who asks students to write an essay is looking for more than a
laundry list of personalities, institutions, and events. The instructor wants
to see that students have begun to develop the ability to form their own
thoughts and reach their own conclusions about the ways in which historical change takes place.
Planning and preparing to write a history essay consists of more than
examining and taking notes on the sources or texts that serve as the basis
for the assignment. It also requires you to engage in some rigorous thinking in order to produce your own historical arguments. The process of
preparing for and writing an out-of-class essay typically requires a considerable commitment of time, so be sure to give yourself several days to
follow the steps below and engage in the reading, thinking, and writing
necessary to finish the project.
Copyright © Bedford/St. Martin’s. Distributed by Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Strictly for use with its products. Not for redistribution.
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