history essay example introduction

history essay example introduction

Analyzing the Evolution of Historical Essay Introductions

1. Introduction: The Significance of Historical Essay Introductions

Though many students do not trot out the light-hearted openers of such essayist greats as Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Joyce, or John F. Kennedy, historical essays often begin with statements that typically outline a given research question, the historiography on that question or construct an argument that the essay will address. First-year students often begin an essay by restating the essay prompt itself. Graduate students often begin a paper by stating a research topic. Otherwise, a scholarly introduction might include a brief historiographical discussion that foreshadows the ensuing paper. The argument that I make in this paper is that not only do students’ introductions lack both of the aforementioned sections, but that the question and historiography sections of essay introductions have evolved significantly since around 1800. This statement, though not particularly revolutionary, is a claim that is easily investigated using current technology.

The historical essay is a ubiquitous inventory of many university history courses. These essays are often the vehicles through which history students are taught to contextualize facts within arguments, interpret conflicting information, and critically evaluate different explanations. An essay prompt often requires students to research an event or process from historical literature, and then to construct an argument based on the facts. In addition, these essays often require students to think systematically and, depending on the depth of the prompt, critically. Unfortunately, many students’ essays are only a summary of one or two authors’ writing.

2. Key Components of an Effective Introduction

An effective introduction draws attention to the author’s chosen aspect of the past and investigates the history of the issue. It first makes a general statement about the topic and then narrows the focus to reveal the author’s reasoning. The introduction then presents the thesis statement, known as the “guiding idea” of the paper. The thesis sentence must contain the student’s assertion and may or may not also include the historical concept, utilizing appropriately chosen category signal words. For example, the thesis sentence “Ray Kroc, with the help of Harry Sonneborn who created the real estate strategy, structured McDonald’s as a successful company using business principles such as budget management and strategic partnerships” scores much better than the intrusive thesis sentence “Ray Kroc who created a strong involvement between the franchisees and the McDonald brothers.” It also presents a game plan for the essay. Finally, the introduction directly answers the topic posed by the instructor and presents a premise of the paper.

In this paper, we have developed new methods to identify part of the writing strategies and tactics used by authors of historical essays that result in higher quality scores and describe significant word usage changes over time. To accomplish these goals, we first define an effective historical essay introduction by extracting examples from a corpus of over 1,000 American high school and college term papers. The results of this analysis demonstrate that the 100 to 200-word document introduction is characterized by a majority of the sentences being significant (assertion/conclusion, explanation, and evidence) three to five sentence components, which focus on statements that justify the importance and relevance of the essay’s topic. Next, we compute essay thesis sentence quality scores by combining student performance grades with mechanical text-based criteria. Finally, we analyze the word content of a balanced set of higher and lower value thesis sentences using a novel, joint word selection and estimation of word importance model.

3. Historical Examples of Engaging Introductions

It is important to have strong and engaging introductions in a historical essay, and all of these examples are indeed interesting yet formal.

– History and Sexual Violence: Transatlantic Perspectives on the History of Sexual Violence in the Nazi and the Soviet Occupied Countries – Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives – “Notwithstanding the implicit calls, implicit understandings of the implicit intentions, recognizing or understanding the implicit implications, peculiarities of the rights and implicit influences, the common law root concepts emerge. Reform, Adoption, and the Myth of the Volitional Order” – “Just what are we to do with our understanding, for instance, of the concept of implied consent to sexual penetration? Experience prepared me to expect little, or nothing, and that generally those who attempted to model history by impudent and ill-conceived analogies had only the most superficial historical understanding. Historical mist of pusillanimity!” – “Most scholars of the common law were defacing ancient historical documents for codifications of ahistorical and constitutionally dangerous policies.” – “For example, a line of scholarly inquiry that asks what, if anything, the common law can teach us about modern conceptions of sexual privacy, and whether the ‘modern’ answer is constrained by the essentiality of any ‘presumed intent’ regarding the ‘presumed deliberality’ of means and CB emitters, can provide a wisp of aldious perspective, and particularly elicit information about the existence of broad propositions expressed by the exercise of an illicit and irrelevant judicial authority.”

– Taking Sides: Clashing Views in United States History: Volume 1: The Colonial Period to Reconstruction – “Chapter 1: What caused the Salem Witch Trials?” – Apocalyptic Witchcraft – “In the first chapter of Susan Juster’s important book, Disorderly Women, discussing the problem of witchcraft in colonial America, she writes:…” – “Winthrop’s 1630 preface declares that God chastises His people in stages, with the elect and their leaders suffering first and worst. And Further Increase of This Condition” – “In a previous essay, I suggested that interpreting New England as the apocalypse in full procedure sheds useful light on a number of baffling historical controversies, including Calvinism, witchcraft, Cotton Mather’s cellphone with God, and a few others.”

Throughout time, historians have written engaging and strong introductions in their historical essays. While the majority of these essays often tend to have long and winding introductions, there are also numerous shorter and more to the point introductions. Outlined below are numerous examples of formal and informal historical essays and engaging and strong introductions from certain primary resources that can be found by doing some research.

4. The Evolution of Introductions in Historical Scholarship

Why do authors perform the introduction function within the manuscript? Authors are not the primary audience of papers. There are more new readers out in the world than people who have heard a presentation or sat in a seminar. Editors and referees are also in the uncertain position of not knowing quite what the author did and what the primary contribution of the paper is. The introduction is the principal tool authors use to clarify a paper’s content for all of these potential future readers of a paper. Of course, authors also know that the careful reader of a paper will use the introduction to shortcut through sections of a paper that may not be of interest, obviating the need to go through a long and detailed explanation of every concept and result. Amenities aside, we really know that the major reason people go to the supermarket is to buy food. The key aspect of the introduction is what it is introducing.

It has long been observed that the nature of historical scholarship has evolved. I argue that the evolving nature of other types of written style and the impact of increased competition can explain the general trends in essay introductions. But was the introduction of history essays influenced just by the evolution of other essays or was it influenced by other factors that have caused publication behavior in general to evolve? First, a crucial reason why essays are longer today is that they are more complicated, and authors need to spend extra words explaining how all of the additional moving parts in the essays are connected.

5. Conclusion: Implications for Future Research and Writing

What, for example, are the implications for the ways that reading and writing may be integrated or taught together? Historical readers, by definition, already know more about the world that historical essayists are trying to reach and persuade. Yet, the evidence presented here and elsewhere shows clearly that they also face the same framing challenges that students’ diary writers face. Understanding whether introductory framing issues are central to historical texts as well as to historical essays written in the present, or controlled in some way by factors modern historians do not share with students, such as a different order of reasoning or place of writing in their research, could give use to the idea of a certain amount of detachment from subject issues that students lecture about in the present moment.

Understanding much more about historical essay introductions yields numerous implications for the way instructors teach writing and reading for historical understanding, and provides further opportunities for collaborative work across the disciplines. As I have mentioned, historical scholarship offers much more recent and dense introspective writing to compare and contrast with student historical writing, and the large body of primary source historical writing and thinking that historians read offer even more significant potential connections for present-day student writers.