Tips for History Coursework
How to Write a History Coursework Assignment
“History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.”
- Winston Churchill
History is the past recreated and thus it can have many versions. Hence, when writing a history coursework assignment, one must question assumptions or widely held truths and look for underlying prejudices that may have influenced the telling of the story.
There will be some accounts that will perhaps always be murky, such as that of Jack the Ripper; there are others that will be partially concealed such as the mystery surrounding Princess Diana’s death and some that will be widely held to be facts such as the Holocaust.
To start with, pick a topic that arouses your curiosity. Some sample coursework topics are:
- The wives of King Henry VIII
- The reign of Queen Elizabeth the First
- British imperialism in Asia, Ireland and Africa
- The causes of the Great Depression
- The weapons introduced during World War I and their impact on the war
- The influence of the Treaty of Versailles on the rise of Hitler
- Winston Churchill’s leadership during World War II
- The causes for the formation of the League of Nations or of The United Nations
-Britain’s relationship with the United States of America during World War II
Since you cannot access the people you will be writing about in the history coursework assignment, your next best option is to read books and papers on the subject such as their biographies, accounts of events in which they played a pivotal role and doubts raised by scholars.
Then jot down the points that you will focus on in your assignment. You must devote at least a paragraph to each point.
Begin writing down the elaboration of each point. It’s important that you support everything you mention. For instance, “The Treaty of Versailles is believed to have fuelled Hitler’s rise” is a very vague statement. You need to provide supporting evidence that the Treaty had caused sufficient resentment among the population to set the stage for militant nationalism, either by quoting from Hitler’s speeches, diary accounts of the people of that time or the works of renowned historians. There are always a lot of conspiracy theories surrounding important historical events, so you must use your judgement to evaluate their veracity.
In your history coursework assignment conclusion, you have two options:
- You can either stress on a particular thesis sentence that has stood up to opposing claims such as “While it is said that the League of Nations was not a complete failure since it delayed World War II even if it could not prevent it, it is clear that its limited powers and non-representative membership made it incapable of having any effect whatsoever on influencing the pace of events leading up to the War.”
- You could acknowledge that much still remains to be uncovered before a clear picture can be established.
