Writing a Senior Thesis
Each year, seniors must decide whether to write a senior thesis. The year-long course (History 99) requires intensive research in primary sources and culminates in a major piece of writing (usually 60 to 100 pages). It is a significant investment of time and energy, and typically attracts only a small percentage of graduating seniors.
If you are interested, you should seek out a thesis adviser (usually someone in the geographic or chronological speciality of interest to you), go through the mechanics of formal registration and begin designing a strategy to choose an important, feasible topic.
Why Should You Write a Thesis?
- It provides an essential experience for those planning to do graduate work, especially in history. A senior thesis means "doing" history, not just learning it; it helps you to discover how the historian conducts research and transforms that raw information into a coherent story and analysis.
- You can explore in great depth a subject that is of great interest to you, but only tangentially (if at all) broached in the general curriculum.
- If your research requires the use of non-English sources, you can improve your reading skills to the level expected in graduate work.
- The thesis is a major writing experience: with the help of your adviser, you will learn how to structure a large piece of writing and in the process of writing, have an opportunity to refine your style and to internalize the conventions and mechanics of academic prose.
Guidelines and Topics
What kind of topics are appropriate? It should be a subject in which you have a particular interest; it should also be one for which there exists a substantial and accessible base of primary documentation. While you probably have some idea of the topic that interests you, the adviser can help you link that interest to a set of primary sources (whether printed or archival), most of which are available on campus or at least in the Boston area.
Download the Honors Thesis Guidelines
Timeline
Normally, you should complete most of your research by the beginning of the second semester, and then use February and March to write and revise. The final thesis is due in April (on a specific date set by the department, normally after the second spring vacation). The thesis is then discussed at a formal defense attended by the adviser, another member of the history department and one reader from outside.
Previous Senior Thesis Topics
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- Ruhi Roy, "No Facts, Only Interpretations: Knowledge Production, Argument, and Imperial Policy in Late Nineteenth-Century India"
- Elias Trout, "Justice and Justification: Historical Renderings of Republic of Austria v. Altmann, NationalSelf-Identities, and the Framing of American Moral Authority on the Global Stage"
- Michael Atkins, "The Ultimate Institution: The History of Solitary Confinement for Incarcerated People with Disabilities"
- Ryan Shaffer, "The Chase and Waite Courts: Hindering the Reconstruction Promise of Racial Equality, 1864-1888"
- Isaiah D. Johnson, "Keystone of Revolution: Cuban Socialism and the Special Period"
- Cynthia Cheloff, "A Voice of Their Own: A study on the strategic development of Anglo-Jewry’s political strategies and rhetoric concerning immigration policy, 1902-1906"
- Alexander Diwan, "Irreconcilable Perspectives: The Memory of WWI and the Franco-American War Debts Issue as Seen Through the French and American Press"
- Sarah Scott, "Public Art and Re-Conceptualizing National Identity in Normalized Czechoslovakia From August 1968-December 1976"
- Jennifer Sun, "The Courtesan As a Transitional Figure during the Qing Dynasty: Studying Qing Modernization from a Gendered Angle"
- William Amara, "Women at the Looms: An Analysis of Gender, Capital, and Textiles in 19th Century New England"
- Daniel Leon, "The Neoconservative Persuasion"
- Henry Snow, "From Republics of Wood to Prisons of Steel: Labor in the English Royal Dockyards, 1730-1790"
- Aliya Bean, "These Girlish Devotions: Women's Colleges, the Evolution of Female Friendship and the Development of Lesbian Identity (1890-1939)"
- Noah Coolidge, "Profit and Power: The Revolutionary Forces Behind American Middle Class Ideology"
- Nathan Goldwag, "When the West Looked East: British Observations on the Russo-Japanese"
- Arielle Gordon, "The Woman with a Gun: A History of the Iranian Revolution's Most Famous Icon"
- Catherine Rosch, "Irish Blood, American Heart, The Development of the Irish-American Political Identity and Political Power and its Effect on the Good Friday Agreement"
- Veronica Saltzman, "Breaking Through the Red Line: The NAACP'S Litigation Strategy for Combating Housing Discrimination Between 1909-1948"
- Robert Santamaria, "The Imperial Russian Navy in the First World War: The Myth and the Reality"
- Zoe Waldman, "Toward the Heart of America: The Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Development of American Identity"
- Michael Abrams, "What the Land and People Have Been Devastated For: The Civilian Experience During the Thirty Years' War"
- Jason Desimone, "The Illegitimacy of Sterilization: the Merging of Welfare and Eugenics in North Carolina, 1929-2015"
- Ryan Kacani, "Ragnar Lothbrok and the Semi-Legendary History of Denmark"
- Jordan Roth, "Heterodoxy and Orthodox Conceptions of the Good Life: Egyptian Monasticism in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries"
- Danielle Stubbe, "Articulating Relativism: An Intellectual History of Relativist Anthropology in the Work of Franz Boas, 1883-1928"
- Zi Jing Teoh, "The Chinese Business: A History of Chinese Immigration to the Northeastern United States through the U.S.-Canadian Border in the Early Chinese Exclusion Era, 1882-1910"