A GUIDE TO WRITING A HISTORICAL ESSAY
What is A Historical Essay?: Writing a historical essay is not merely listing a chronology of events and facts. A historical essay involves with stating of one�fs own opinion in a thesis, defending the thesis statement with supporting evidence with detailed explanations and proving a point or several points in the questions in the study of history. Historians are like detectives. Like the detectives, historians collect information using various evidences like artifacts, documents, arts, and literatures. Historians construct historical facts using evidence. By using historical facts and evidence, historians prove their theory or main points or thesis. In academic settings, you need to follow certain rules.
Organization: Academic historical essay is comprised of three major parts: introduction, body and conclusion. The purpose of this is to give your essay a direction for the audiences to follow.
- Introduction: Introduction or introductory paragraph introduces the readers the perimeter of the theme of the essay you are writing. You need to introduce the topic of the essay, the major themes and your thesis.
- Theme: A topic or a subject of your essay. You need to introduce the audiences with the topic or subject of your essay in the introductory paragraph.
- Setting a Perimeter: Specify the topic or subject of your essay by setting a perimeter, time period, specific historical figures, or specific events.
- Thesis Statement: Thesis statement is the sentence that presents the subject. It states or implies the division of that subject into sub-topics as they will be developed. The thesis statement is also a main point of your essay.
- Body: Body or body paragraph presents your defense of your thesis statement. Each paragraph deals with one topic. You need to develop several paragraphs to support your case. Each body paragraph consists of a topic sentence, historical facts, historical evidence and explanations to support your topic sentence and the thesis statement.
- Topic Sentence: Topic sentence introduces the audience the subject of the paragraph and may state or imply the attitude, time and place of the subject that supports your thesis statement.
- Historical Facts: Historical facts are things that are or were factual in the past. They serve as evidence to explain or support a main idea.
- Historical Evidence: Historical evidence is something that makes another thing easy to see or perceive, makes it clear, obvious, plain. In historical essay, evidence comprise of artifacts, documents, art and historical facts.
- Conclusion: Conclusion or a concluding paragraph is a final paragraph of your essay that summarizes your essay as a whole. It includes the restatement of thesis, brief summary of your essay. In addition to these, you can include your own interpretations, assessment and analysis of reading materials and existing historical evidences.
Warning about Plagiarism: Plagiarism is the act of stealing ideas or words from another. Plagiarism is prohibited in the academic settings. To avoid plagiarism, you need to cite the sources if you use quotes from books or you need to paraphrase ideas and words.
Sources: The following sources are used for writing this simple guide.
Becker, Marc. The Writing of a Historical Essay or Research Paper. Illinois State University, 1991, 1997 [cited June 9 2009]. Available from http://www.ilstu.edu/class/hist127/guide.html.
Cleve, Robert L. History of the West to 1500. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 2004.
Schultz, Norman. Historical Facts Beyond Intractability, 2003 [cited June 9 2009]. Available from http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/historical_facts/.
Sorenson, Sharon. Webster's New World Student Writing Handbook. 4th ed. Cleveland, Ohio: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2000, 1997, 1992, 1988.