1.  Based on your reading of the past five years of two academic journals, what do you see as the most important intellectual trends and developments in academic history writing today?  How do those relate to the reading you have done for this course? In what ways do “general” and “specialist” history writing/publishing relate to each other?
If you decide to write on this topic, make sure that you read one specialist journal from your own field, and one general historical journal (such as American Historical Review, Journal of Social History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, History Workshop Journal, The Historical Journal,etc.). 

2.) Explore a historiographical development (e.g., studies of “identity” or models of state formation or the definition of “totalitarian” regimes, etc.) within a particular historical context. What are the issues and debates at stake here?  How have historians applied “theory” in this context?  How would you do things differently? For instance, historians of Russia and of Italy have taken Edward Said's notion of "Orientalism" and applied it within a new context-you might want to consider the advantages (and disadvantages) of this approach. In writing this sort of essay, you should not simply re-hash the evidence used (guidebooks published in Florence referred to Sicilians as "black savages," bemoaned their laziness, said nothing ever happened south of Rome, etc.) Rather, you should ask what happens to Said's argument when it's transferred into a different context (did something important get omitted, for instance?) and what happens to Italian history when it's treated as a case of internal colonization.

3.) Why are you here (at IU, in the MA or PhD program in the History Department)? How can you answer this question historically? Please, please do not write an application letter or a "statement of purpose." Rather, try to analyze your own trajectory historically. (Kate Brown's essay "A Place in Biography for Oneself" is part of the inspiration for this question.) You will need to use a range of primary sources, drawn both from your own family and from a broader historical context in order to answer this question. (For instance, you could try reading relevant newspapers for the days of your, your parents', your grandparents', and your great-grandparents' birth, marriage, death, etc.) In writing your paper, try to draw on some of the approaches to historical writing we have discussed.

An other Example: . Your argument and line of analysis ought to emerge from your careful engagement with some text or texts. For instance, maybe you have read J.B. Bury's lecture on "The Science of History" and noticed that he usually refers to "History" as a classical Muse and, hence, as feminine. You might also note that Bury assumes the historian to be male-the historian/history relationship in Bury's text is hence structured as male/female.
At that point, you might e-mail me or meet with me to say that you're working on how Bury genders history. But even if I respond "nifty" (or words to that effect), this is not the end of your paper (or, it shouldn't be). Rather, having worked through Bury's lecture several more times-and, probably, having turned to some of Bury's other published work, in order to get a sense of how routinely this pattern emerges-you will have amassed pages and pages of relevant examples (e.g., History as the "mother" of all the sciences; as fitful and temperamental; as source of spiritual nourishment). If you string those examples (and perhaps some counter-examples, e.g., the historian as one who weaves an intricate cloth) into some coherent paragraphs, you will have a convenient index of Bury's gendering of history, but you will still not have a very good paper.
Your next step must be to ask yourself that dread two-word question: "So what?" In effect, there are two ways to address that question. One is to ask the follow-up question, "Why?" (In this case, "Why did Bury write of History as feminine, the historian as masculine?") An answer might spring to mind: because he was at Cambridge in 1902! If that becomes your working hypothesis, you then need to ask yourself a further question: Did all turn-of-the-century Cantabridgians gender history in this manner? Of course you can't read everything written by members of the Cambridge professoriate of 1902, but you might try to find a few other texts and see if they support your hypothesis. (You could also compare Bury's lecture with one given at Oxford, Johns Hopkins, or the University of Chicago, in order to see whether "Cambridge" can really carry the full explanatory weight. Or perhaps compare Bury's text with a Cambridge inaugural lecture given in the 1870s and another from the 1950s.) Of course, you might have other thoughts about "why" this pattern emerges-maybe you want to attribute it to Bury's personal circumstances (youngest of seven sons, notorious invalid, famous womanizer, cousin of suffragettes—whatever! [to the best of my knowledge, none of those are true]) or maybe you see it as being very specifically related to departmental politics at Cambridge at the time. In either of these cases, you will only find your explanation (and, hence, your thesis statement and argument) by doing further reading (either biographies of Bury or histories of Cambridge). And then your challenge will be to integrate your reading of Bury's texts with those specific contexts you have identified.
There is, however, a second possible response to "so what?" Rather than looking for causes (why?) you can look for effects. That is, what might be the consequences of Bury's choice (intentional or otherwise) of gendered language? Once he's writing within the framework set by those metaphors, are there things he literally can't write? Are there approaches to history that he thereby implicitly (or, explicitly) invalidates?