Historians try to answer a historical question by analyzing evidence and offering their argument (thesis) based on that evidence. This is what you will do in DAP essays. To write these essays:
1. Find the question/problem posed at the beginning of each DAP chapter in “The Problem” section.
2. Read “The Background” section to gain some context. DO NOT write a summary of the Background section as your essay. Your essay is to focus on the primary sources. The Background just gives you more information and context.
3. Keeping the question/problem in mind, read the primary source evidence offered in “The Evidence” section.
4. Think about the primary source evidence. Your job is to use the primary source evidence to develop an answer to the question/problem. That answer becomes your thesis (or argument), and you use the primary sources to defend it. A good paper will show that you have thought about all the primary sources. The sources may contradict each other or complement each other. You do not have to, and should not, cite every source in your paper, but good papers and good arguments consider all the evidence.
5. State your thesis in a brief introductory paragraph. Do not use first person. Make a declarative statement without saying “I think that ….”
6. The rest of your essay should, in clear, clean, and concise prose, support your thesis with evidence (from the primary sources), and analysis of that evidence.
7. Remember: it is not necessary for you to consult any outside sources. DAP has compiled the sources for you. Also remember: you are making and supporting an argument; you are not writing a summary of the evidence or of the material in “The Background” section.
8. When you quote, cite the source in a footnote. Historians use Chicago citation style; that is what you will use. Microsoft Word will do much of the work for you.
9. A bibliography is not required. You are all using the same source.
10. Examples of Chicago-style footnotes:
If Anne Hutchinson said something on page 51 in DAP that you would like to quote as evidence, the footnote would look like this:
Anne Hutchinson, in William Wheeler and Lorri Glover, Discovering the American
Past: A Look at the Evidence, 8th ed (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2012), 51.
If you later quoted Hutchinson from DAP, the footnote would look like this:
Hutchinson, in Wheeler and Glover, 53.
Note that this is shorter. You do not have to give a full citation – with authors’ first names,
title, publishing information – for a source you have already cited.
See the bottom of this page for what footnotes will look like in your paper.
To insert footnotes:
1. Put your cursor at the end of the passage that you need to cite, just to the right of the punctuation mark at the end of the sentence you or to the right of the quotation mark you are quoting.
2. Click on References (top menu in Word).
3. Click on Insert Footnote. Word will put the footnote number in superscript at end of your sentence, and it will also put it at the bottom of the page.
4. Type your footnote at the bottom of the page next to the number created by Word. Word will automatically put your footnote in a smaller font.
You can use much of the citation I used in the examples above. Everything in your footnote from DAP can look like the example except for “Anne Hutchinson” and the page number “51” (unless you are citing Anne Hutchinson and page 51). Instead, write the source you are using and the page number on which your source appears. (This will seem obvious to most of you, but I am saying this because things have gone wrong in the past.)
Required book to use for the writing of this essay is Wheeler and Glover, Discovering the American Past, vol.1, 8th ed.
