Welcome to HistoryProfessor.Org.

This site is designed as a user's manual for undergraduate and graduate courses in United States history. Such courses generally feature their own instructions, known as syllabi. But syllabi--my own included--are filled with instructions like "read this book" and "write an essay" that, in practice, often need elaboration. The same goes for instructor's comments on student work: I may write, "work on your topic sentences," but those five words alone may not be helpful without more detailed explanation and models to follow. The goal of this site, then, is to provide more detailed instructions for common tasks than any syllabus could.

Obviously, these instructions reflect some of my own opinions and tastes. But I frequently cite the published works of respected scholars to suggest that historians, as a profession, share many basic ideas about what makes good argument, evidence, and style. The same goes for college professors, and I am grateful for the many messages I have received from other instructors telling me that they found this guidance useful for their students. Professors vary a great deal in the assignments they give and their goals for their courses. Yet they are pretty consistent in what they want from a thesis statement, topic sentence, or the critical reading of a document.

Some of the documents on this site were first drafted more than a decade ago, but the site remains a work in progress. I welcome suggestions for how pages on this site could be improved or what new topics could be addressed.

Zachary Schrag
George Mason University

News

Welcome

Welcome to HistoryProfessor.Org. This site will be the new home for Zachary Schrag’s Guidelines for History Students.

• Pages

  • Argument
    • A Thesis-Statement Template
    • Dialectical Thesis Statements
    • Elements of a Thesis Statement
  • Exams
    • How to Take an Exam
    • The Comprehensive Exam
  • Format
    • Pre-Submission Checklist
    • Style Guidelines
  • Miscellaneous
    • Grading Standards
    • Syllabus Archive
    • Washington, D.C.: Spelling, Punctuation, and Capitalization
    • When Thomas Takes His Pen
  • Organization
    • How to Write an Essay
    • The Anatomy of a Ten-Page Paper
    • Topic Sentences
  • Reading
    • How to Read a History Book
    • How to Write a Reading Response
    • How to Write a Review
  • Research
    • Examples of Critical Reading
    • How to Read a Primary Source
    • How to Research a History Paper
    • Image Analysis

• External Links

  • Guide to Grammar and Style by Jack Lynch
  • How to Give an Academic Talk, by Paul N. Edwards (PDF)
  • Plagiarism: What It is and How to Recognize and Avoid It (Indiana U.)
  • Reading, Writing, and Researching for History: A Guide for College Students by Patrick Rael
  • Turabian Style – Sample Footnotes and Bibliographic Entries (6th edition)
  • William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Speech

• George Mason University

  • George Mason University Writing Center Individual tutoring and on-line help.
  • Writing in History Mostly for HIST 100, but useful for other courses.

This site is maintained by Zachary M. Schrag, Associate Professor of History at George Mason University. While its advice is designed primarily for undergraduate and graduate students of United States history, I hope it will prove useful to all those who wish to study history and related disciplines. This material was formerly posted at www.schrag.info and was moved to this domain in the summer of 2010. Please use this site for the most recent versions. Except where noted otherwise, all original material on this site is copyright © 2002-2010 Zachary M. Schrag. It may be used for non-commercial personal and educational purposes provided it is attributed to Zachary M. Schrag. If you are an educator who finds this site useful for classroom teaching, I would appreciate your sending me a note at zschrag (at) gmu.edu telling me how you are using it and how it might be improved.