This guide is intended to assist students looking for information resources to support their assigned essay and research guide in the form of an annotated bibliography for Professor Horowitz's History 192 course. You will be looking for primary and secondary source information on the article you have been assigned about a significant event or person in East Asian History (almost all from 1890-1990).
Know your assignment information needs
For this project you will be given a newspaper article that relates to some significant event or development in modern East Asian history. You will need to do some detective work to figure out what the event was, and why it was important. You will need to report what you have found in a concise and carefully documented essay. You will need to put together a research guide that would be of use if you or someone else were to undertake a longer and more extensive research project.
The essay must be 900-1200 words in length, double spaced in a 12 point font. You need to have a thesis that expresses your main argument in the opening paragraph. Your thesis must explain the importance or significance of this event to the course of East Asian history. You need to provide a concise and accurate narrative of the event. Your essay needs to draw on a range of sources. You must use footnotes or endnotes following the notes/bibliography format from the Chicago Manual of Style. Good essays draw on multiple sources, and deal with problems of bias, and differing interpretations of the event in question.
The research guide will identify at least ten useful sources in the form of an annotated bibliography. You need to explain what each source is and why it may be useful. Your research guide must include:
(a) at least three contemporary accounts or accounts by participants in addition to the article I have provided. These are what historians call primary sources). One of those must be another newspaper article published at the time. The others may be newspapers articles, government documents, memoirs or oral histories by participants or witnesses. NOTE a newspaper article from a much later date (say a 2015 article about the 1911 Revolution in ) is not a primary source.
(b) At least three useful reference sources or general information sources. These might include articles from reference works in the library, useful articles on the open internet, or useful general histories that deal briefly with the event you are studying and put it in perspective, or book reviews that touch on aspects of the event in question.
(c) three scholarly works from either peer reviewed scholarly journals, or from scholarly published books that are useful in understanding these events. If you find and use more material than the minimum required, you should include these references in your research guide. NOTE: Book reviews (even in an academic journal) do not count as scholarly works, but they may help you find other source material and the can be counted as reference sources.
The article provided can serve as the tenth source.
