Apologies in advance if this is an inappropriate question for this subreddit.

Hey there. I'm currently in the process of thinking about the focus of a 12k word history dissertation which I'll need to be completing next academic year and am finding the whole task a little daunting. Hopefully users on this subreddit will be able to help...

For starters, how 'original' does it have to be? I understand that a dissertation is not like an essay in the sense that I am not simply synthesizing secondary materials, but does my focus have to be upon virtually untrodden ground?

Also, what's the best way of finding a collection of sources to form the foundation of a dissertation? I have a feeling I'm approaching this step poorly, since nothing I find is really catching my eye...

Thanks guys.

Recently, in the Danish TV series '1864', Helmuth von Moltke and Otto von Bismarck are portrayed discussing strategy concerning Denmark and then enjoying a game of two soldiers, with a very congenial back and forth between them. It is very much a portrayal of friendship.

What evidence is there to suggest that they were actually more than political allies and Bismarck, as Chancellor, Moltke's superior? Was there a mutual respect, or did they dislike one another?

Mainly interested in the legal basis of slavery, as opposed to logistical/institutional issues.

Not sure if this belongs here or ask science, but was the tobacco grown in colonial America the same as the tobacco we grow now or have we altered it in 240 years?

I was taught in high school history class that the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War was orchestrated to catch the attention of western media in the hopes that it would cause more public outcry to bring US troops home. I was also taught that if it weren't for the media coverage of the offensive, the U.S. would have achieved victory. How true are these statements?

One of the core tenants of Anabaptism is adult baptism. The Anabaptists believed that since infants were neither cognizant of the nature of sin nor capable of confessing that they were not supposed to be baptized. However, during the time that the Anabaptists came to prominence Europe had very high rates of infant mortality. How would an Anabaptist pastor explain what happened to the child's soul? Did it simply go to a relatively benign form of Hell like in Dante's Inferno? And do we know how Anabaptist parents dealt with the frequent deaths of their children?

I've been reading Peter Wilson's The Thirty Years War and he says that at one point, Wallenstein simply planted his troops in Silesia and did not move for years, until his baffling behavior coupled with court politics got him killed. He doesn't offer much in the way of explanation. What are the leading theories as to Wallenstein's thought process?

I am currently doing a brief for my argumentation class and am briefing the case Hustler Magazine v. Falwell. Why is it that Justice Kennedy did not vote? That would interfere with the process and could possibly create a tie. How is this allowed?

I've read a lot about the near by ships and the various reports of why they didn't show up during the Titanic's SOS calls, but I was curious what they would physically do if they arrived prior to sinking?

I assume a ship of that size would suck down small rescue ships if they were close enough. Was there a procedure in place for such a rescue?

For standard of living, I'm mostly concerned with citizens at this time. While I don't mean to erase their plight, I'd like to keep African American slaves and indigenous Mexicans out of the discussion.

I work with music, and as such have come into frequent contact with works that use intellectual thinking about music to talk about the way people think about music. Karol Berger, for instance, in his Bach's Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, argues that there was a fundamental shift in thinking about time in the eighteenth century, a "transformation in the way educated Europeans began to conceive of time: just as their experience and image of historical time shifted from cyclical to linear, composers dropped the predominantly cyclical model of time in favor of a predominantly linear one" (Berger, 9). The argument is that thinking about how time is directed within music reveals important differences in the interpretive and aesthetic shades of music in the early vs. late eighteenth century, and that we can see this in the intellectual discussions of the time. That a "cyclical" approach to time is in some way more authentic of an approach to music by Bach or Handel whereas a linear or teleological approach is more appropriate to thinking about the music of Haydn or Mozart.

The problem is that you are using thinkers like Acquinas or Rousseau to ground claims about how Bach's churchgoing audience reacted to his compositions. But how much of the intellectual debates of the day are indicative of, much less influencing the way the general public is thinking about time? As Varwig notes in her "Metaphors of Time and Modernity in Bach," it isn't at all clear what it might mean for time to be cyclical to a general populace. And that the difficulty of ascertaining the relevance of Intellectual trends on general aesthetic thought in a populace is "one of the many pitfalls associated with reading musical forms or styles as being representative of larger intellectual trends." (Varwig, 178).

My question for this subreddit is how are these issues generally navigated in the historical field? How does one determine what intellectual currents are just that, a discourses that occupy intellectuals but not something the general populace is feeling at all, and which might have an actual impact upon the way normal people interact with the world.

Of course, this would vary from place to place and time period to time period, but I'm asking more about how one navigates this question than seeking an answer. What is the critical discourse on this subject in the literature of historiography? What pieces really want to say intellectual currents have a direct impact on day-to-day lives (I hear Jonathan Israel kind of wants to say this in his Radical Enlightenment series) and what are the critiques of that line of thought?

I'm especially interested in the eighteenth century, but discussions that deal with earlier or later periods are also welcome!

Thank you for any clarification you can provide!

Edit: for the record, I have no problem with intellectual currents being used to think about music. If reading a music theorist reveals some insight or mechanism for thinking about this music that is interesting, then it isn't a problem to incorporate that into how we talk about or theorize about music today. What I am wary of is going further to claim that the differences in the way theorists or philosophers from the past thought about music or time or anything else reflects a fundamental difference in the way everyone thought about these issues. To use a historical source not to say "Hey, here's the way one person thought about something in an interesting way" or even "this issue was really important for a group of really smart and well-educated philosophers," but rather to say "See? This shows how differently people at this time thought about a subject than we do today."