how to start a history essay example

how to start a history essay example

Effective Strategies for Starting a History Essay

1. Introduction: The Importance of a Strong Opening

Your opening paragraph is the most important. The reader of your essay is fatefully engaged when they begin reading your essay. If they decide to read the entire essay, you have created enough interest. If not, they are trying to fulfill other duties and they have gone on to other things. They are not interested enough. The main purpose of the introductory paragraph is to clarify and explain a problem. The introduction is perfect for this task.

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Some of the basic freedoms in our society are the freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion. One of the primary ways of exercising our freedom of speech is through the writing of an essay. An essay can help us to express ourselves and to demonstrate the extent to which we have read, selected, organized, and synthesized our thoughts. A strong essay offers insight, creativity, and originality – eventually growing beyond a series of plot summaries into a comprehensive summary paper.

2. Strategies for Engaging Introductions

Exercise: Study the introductions in the history essays in your textbook. What types of information do they use to introduce the essay? For instance, did the author quote anyone? Use a surprising fact to stimulate your interest? Use a dated question? If so, which one? A summary of a situation? If so, which one? A vignette or brief narrative? If so, which one? A sophisticated informational sentence? If so, which one? No introduction? Before proceeding, type or neatly print the examples so that you can compare them easily. If your conclusions differ substantially from the following, you may need to reconsider your understanding of this section’s goal.

Introduction: Introductions are your opportunity to signal why your reader might want to invest the time with this essay. It is about persuasion. Framing your introduction with a solidly argumentative thesis statement forces you to stay on point in the essay. If you’re not sure what your essay is trying to say, your thesis needs improvement. Sometimes the best way to establish this focus or theme is at the end of the introduction, and it should occur somewhere within the first paragraph.

3. Examples of Compelling Opening Lines

Tell your readers what your main arguments are and strategies that you will use. It is surprising how few drafts of essays tell the reader which way the writer is heading, and the reader wants to know. You wouldn’t set off with a bunch of people on a hike unless they knew what sort of country you were going to encounter. Similarly, your readers need you to guide and reassure them before they venture into woods of evidence, examples, and complexities. It is dreadful to get lost and not have the guide to ask. The guide can even point out that interesting plant, that man-eating animal trap or those beautiful clouds of data. Keeping the reader posted about which way you are heading and what strategies you are using in the rest of the essay can pay off handsomely.

Here are two sample opening lines from history essays. Comparing both essays, the first engages you and the second, well, doesn’t. Try using the techniques or others you have used when writing opening lines to make your writing more compelling. The first example is filled with dramatic imagination and tension. In writing for a popular audience, authors often begin with incidents and then explain how these came about or were resolved. Drama works quite well in history essays; we often want to make the scene of crisis in the introduction because the main body of the essay is used to explain the causes and significance of the crisis. If you read this essay by Larry Wolff, you will see that it is used effectively as an introduction.

4. Crafting a Thesis Statement: Setting the Tone for the Essay

The lives of pets were far freer than the lives of the 1950s youths, who worried about the nuclear war, censorship of books, music, and movies, and other issues that the rest of the nation did not want to think about. It is crucial that your thesis be one centralized idea. Think back to the example of the dog… it had a straightforward and focused argument that freed it from wandering all over the paper. Remember another key issue at this point: the thesis is not going to concern itself with factual information but your interpretation of the factual information. At this point, you do not have to offer any tactics used to reach your conclusion or a conclusion at all. Now is certainly not the time to introduce new ideas.

Example: Thesis Statement

Crafting a thesis can be both the most intimidating and the most rewarding aspect of writing an effective history essay. When you begin to think of your idea, put the whole topic of your essay out of your mind and focus strictly on the question at hand. Without analyzing the evidence you have to support your idea or what point you are trying to make, write down a basic statement that captures the essence of your idea. Do not be critical at this time of how effective your argument(s) are at this point or whether you have made a particularly persuasive case.

Take the title you just wrote and twist it towards your central argument or question. Example: How were the lives of youths in the freer 1950s far more restricted than the lives of pets?

The words that strike fear into the hearts of many high school students: the thesis statement.

5. Conclusion: Recapitulating the Significance of a Powerful Start

Second, a good introduction establishes the relevance of your topic and provides some context. In addition to not knowing what the writer will say, the reader wants to know why the writer’s topic is worthy of investigation or discussion. Third, good introductions suggest the unique feature of a history essay: what you are going to argue. What is the point of writing about it? To put it in different words, historical essays are evaluative. Your thesis introduces the external reader to an important evaluation, a closely reasoned interpretation based on the firm evidence of a great many primary and secondary sources. But your reader should know almost as clearly when you start how you propose to develop your argument. Your essay will be absurd and transparent if you assert at the outset that Hannibal emerged as a great general, but the bulk of your essay is an excursus on the Roman army. Consider, also, how you will conform the significance of various elements to your emerging interpretation. Finally, good history essays engage your readers in imaginative explorations. Your essay is not an explanation of simple historical facts or explanation, for example, that Mussolini created a fascist state.

One of the first things all students learn about history is that they certainly cannot discuss every event that has ever occurred in any given area of the world in any amount of time—there’s just so much of it! Consequently, the process of shaping the historical enterprise into the more manageable form of a history essay is inevitably an act of reduction. A strong opening to any history essay makes it clear where your essay is going. If at first glance your reader cannot tell what your purpose is in writing the essay, the reader will very quickly be irritated by the absence of any clear guiding structure, and the frustrated reader’s first response will be to stop reading!