Write a term paper on how Darwinism shaped racial ideologies in the late nineteenth century, because that question is too broad and not manageable in the confines of a 10-12 page paper.

Chicago style Turbian 8-10 pages with sources

Your major writing assignment for this semester is a term paper based on primary-source research. Your paper may address any aspect of racial thought in American history, including transnational discourses that include American writers and thinkers.

In crafting a paper, you need to make several important decisions. Your paper must be framed to address a significant problem in the history of racial and racist thought, but at the same time be focused and narrow enough to be practicable.

You need to find and use a body of relevant primary sources to answer a question about the past in a circumscribed way that avoids over-generalization, on the one hand, and overly specific informational compilation of detail, on the other.

So, for instance, it would not be reasonable to write a term paper on how Darwinism shaped racial ideologies in the late nineteenth century, because that question is too broad and not manageable in the confines of a 10-12 page paper.

But, you could frame a problem about Darwinism and late nineteenth-century racial thought and use a case example of a particular writer to illuminate that issue. That is, your paper needs to both address an important historical problem or question, but do so in a very specific way.