My undergrad dissertation was on the history of foreign correspondents during the Spanish Civil War, and the role of journalism in framing contemporary and modern understandings of that war.

Coming up with the specific theme was challenging, because you have to do a basic amount of reading and understanding in order to be able to identify a great question or area to analyse. But coming up with the general topic was pretty easy — it was just a combination of two things that fascinate me: I've worked as a journalist for the last few years, and the Spanish Civil War was just a period of history that had always seemed interesting to me, long before I studied it in any detail.

I eventually came up with my actual thesis while I was thinking about a much-recycled Philip Graham quote about the purpose of journalism: that it's the 'first rough draft of history' (a phrase I ended up using as my dissertation title.) It struck me as a really interesting prism through which to look at modern history: how does the narrative established by contemporary correspondents and editors affect the historiography?

The other thing I noticed was that while war correspondents aren't some kind of forgotten class, and particularly in Spain people like Orwell and George Steer have gone down in history as heroes, they're far better served in popular cultural memory than in actual scholarship. There was essentially one major scholarly text focusing specifically on correspondents in Spain — Paul Preston's We Saw Spain Die — and a scattering of chapters in other journalistic histories. To me, it looked like a gap in the scholarship.

Unlike Ph.D theses, undergrad dissertations aren't expected to make an actual "contribution to knowledge". But I came away from writing my dissertation thinking that if I was going to do a Ph.D (an idea I've been playing with more and more recently), that'd be the niche I'd want to write about.

So I guess the tl;dr is:

• start with areas, periods or themes that genuinely interest you. If you're not a nerd for that period of history, it's going to be harder work — you're going to spend the next six months or so reading about it; you better love it!
• hone in: the general formula is X theme within Y period. You're not writing a history of the Second World War; you're writing an analysis of how Soviet economic policy evolved over the course of the war (for example.)
• try to find a gap in the scholarship: it means you have to do more widely-dispersed reading to piece together your lit review, but it makes things a lot more interesting.
• know where your primary sources are, and how you can get to them: if all the key archival material on which your study is going to be based is in China, and you're in America, how are you going to get access to them? Also, do you speak Chinese? This isn't an insurmountable obstacle, but just know where your material is at and how you'll be able to use it (because your supervisor will ask!) So, I deliberately structured my proposal around newspaper archival material that was largely — 75+% — available online.

Edit: typos/grammar.

I wrote mine on the Roman Imperial Cult (surprise!). I was originally going to write it with focus on Roman military history but I changed my mind to something that's less studied and more niched. I limited my work to a specific province (Lusitania) with the thought that the specific region had been properly integrated in the Roman empire by the 1st century AD (unlike eg. Asturia et Gallaicia), which made it an interesting point of study.

I limited myself in time to just the Julio-Claudian period, which turned out to be a good choice when I read more about about the cult during the study. My objective was to research how the cult was recieved by the local populace, ie. the Iberians who lived there before the Romans settled in the region. I also wanted to figure out how long it took before it was properly integrated with the local populace. There is of course a big difference between the time a ruling power - in any kind of state - decides upon something, and the time when it is commonly accepted by the people living there.

try to find a gap in the scholarship: it means you have to do more widely-dispersed reading to piece together your lit review, but it makes things a lot more interesting.

To add on to /u/k1990's point here: there is a rather clear difference in the finished studies between the students who've made an effort before starting the study and those who just picked someone and went with it (or worse, those who change subject midway). Like pointed out, this doesn't mean that you have to have a completely unique subject, but rather a subject that you can properly explore and do something with. Just because the Holocaust has been studied before doesn't mean that it has been fully explored, or that what's been concluded is now absolute truth. Or just because it is generally accepted that the Roman empire didn't fall because of lead in the pipes, it doesn't mean that you can't do a study on that subject.

However, if you choose a subject like that, ie. a subject that's been well studied in the past, it is important that it is your data that is presented in the study, not another author's. It is very common in my experience that students do studies which, when they're done, doesn't present a single thing that the student himself/herself has come up with. Instead there is a myriad of references such as "as X says" or "I agree with X when they say". Such additions are of course not forbidden, and are even encouraged, but they should not make the whole study.

I can go on for ages about stuff that you shouldn't do in your study, but I figure you may be interested in knowing what you can do to be remembered as a good student instead. First off, take advantage of what you know from before. Way too many students commit to a study in a field they know nothing at all about. That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in my experience it turns out to be significantly better if you have some sort of foundation where you start off from.

Secondly, and tangent with what k1990 says, do you have any language skills? That may not necessarily mean that you are fluent in 5 different languages, but perhaps you're especially adept in reading old handwriting? Or maybe you possess an above-average skill in using inscriptions?

Thirdly, and something that's been reiterated by almost every professor I've ever had: don't put off your work. I can't stress how important that part is, and something that becomes more and more visible the longer the dissertation period is. Some people don't even have a clear subject when they're supposed to start, but disregarding those, there are a lot of people who can take weeks before writing a single word. It is way better to write several pages that you later have to erase (or hopefully just change), than it is to just put off writign completely because you feel that you don't have anything substantial to say yet. I have a friend who, when he wrote his master's thesis, started off with writing 250 pages and then spent the rest of the time compromising that text to 100 pages (which was the upper limit).

I hope that helps you out somewhat. And last but not least, remember to have fun while doing your study, this is a chance to study whatever you want and still get credit for it!

I've done my undergratuate work on J.F.C. Fuller's interpretation of Hannibal's campaign and battles in Italy. Fuller used Hannibal as an example in his The Foundations of the Science of War (1926), a book which has heavily influenced modern day military thought.

I was basically hedging, still in doubt whether I'd continue with Military History or Ancient History. (As you can see from my flair, I ended up going for Ancient History.)

I wrote my undergrad thesis on a two seventh-century saints, one from Anglo-Saxon England and one from Palestine, and used their lives to illustrate broader changes in Christendom, particularly on the rise of the Papacy as a political body and the the conflict between the sacred and the secular. It sounds complicated, but all I did was pick two contemporary saints, one of whom I read about for a module in first year and the other in second year, and mashed them together. I found both St Wilfrid and Maximus Confessor super-interesting and decided to see if I could find some links between them - turns out there were! So yeah, I really encourage you to look at the work you've done so far and see if you have a perspective on them that other historians overlooked or disagree with. I don't think anyone has ever been mad enough to draw connections between two seemingly random individuals before, so like /u/k1990, writing my thesis made me want to research the same sort of thing in my Master's right now and hopefully at a doctorate level next year.

My buddy who was a history major wrote about Crispus Attucks, and how all facts and history about him were made up after he was shot to make him some sort of folk hero for the civil rights movement.

I did mine on the interpretations of ancient theologians during the Renaissance. Pretty good since I could touch upon two separate periods and combine them. Also more to write about.

I did my undergrad dissertation on English print invective during the 1670s and 1680s. Basically I was interested in the development of newspaper and pamphlet debates around the time of the Popish Plot, and ways that this might have contributed to the development of a Habermasian Public Sphere in England prior to the 1690s. Writers like Roger L'Estrange and his contemporaries, not to mention the print debates between Whigs and Tories, made this a very colourful period to study and it was actually a lot of fun reading through the mountains of newsprint from the period and noting the increasingly inventive ways they found to insult one another. At the start of the project I just wanted to write a dissertation on the beginnings of coffee-house culture during the later seventeenth century, but the project evolved to something more refined, like most do - what I mean is, don't assume that the project you start with will bear any resemblance to what you eventually produce :)

My sister wrote on the French exhibit in the 1959 Moscow World Fair, and how France attempted to portray itself to the Soviets.

My undergrad dissertation was an exploration of how the introduction of Roman and Mediterranean influences on diet and food affected the transition between the Late Iron Age in Britain to the Early Roman period (and breathe). The advice /u/k1990 gives is really excellent in summing up the approach to take. I feel like I rushed slightly into the topic choice and that this adversely affected the overall dissertation.

My advice is write to your strengths. Don't (necessarily) try to be clever in finding new techniques or knowledge to the discipline. Try going over your previous modules and notes and highlighting aspects that you particularly enjoyed or found interesting. Then do a spot of background reading. If you have an area of interest and can demonstrate some background work go to see the person you want to supervise the dissertation (or an academic tutor). Most academics will help you smooth out what you have as a rough plan and streamline it into a viable dissertation topic.

Ultimately I chose my topic because I am interested in food and diet in a more general sense and wanted to see how it would apply to the specifics of my area of interest.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

I wrote about the effects of the Industrial Revolution on gender roles in Victorian England

Hjalmar Schacht and the rejuvenation of the German economy in the 1930s; how he enabled the rise of Nazism without intent.

Just as a point of order, who calls undergraduate history essays dissertations. I am an American and I know of no school that uses calls any undergraduate writing a dissertation. Generally we would call a senior level research project a thesis paper. Only at the Ph.D. level do we use the term dissertation.

I wasn't a history major as an undergrad, but I wrote a senior thesis in Anthropology on anthropological approaches to understanding Franciscan missionaries in early New Spain (colonial Mexico).

Here's one: How did the importation of Indian labourers affect the development of the Rastafari Movement? The dreadlocks, the spiritual use of cannabis, the strict diet are all characteristic of Shaivist Sadhus

My undergrad degree was in Classics, so a slightly different scholarly tradition than History. I did a textual analysis of the way Caesar treated his descriptions of people and groups that changed sides in his Commentarii de Bello Civili. I looked at each description of such an event and categorized it as an individual vs a group (such as a city or an army) and also whether the description was a defection to his side or from his side. Then I used that data to try to draw some conclusions about the propaganda message he was trying to communicate with such descriptions.

The long and the short of it was (surprise) that groups and people that defected to him were usually represented as good people who had been compelled through fear or a misunderstanding of the true situation to join the other side but had since come to see the light, so to speak. On the other hand people who defected away from him (most notably Titus Labienus) were represented as having some moral failing.

I struggled coming up with a theme because the Late Roman Republic has been exhaustively examined by scholars for 2000 years and I felt that it was impossible to come up with something truly unique and interesting.

In my undergraduate studies, I did some work on "captivity narratives" -- primarily accounts of white settlers (often women) living amongst the native population during the early settlement of America. There is a wealth of primary-source material and many ways to approach the topic!

I did a "practice" one in a research class last semester. We were given some rough guidelines about choosing a topic, but we had to go with something relating to medicine and the history of disease. My professor explained that often, medical records and reports are sometimes easier to obtain then other primary sources, so I recommend that as well. People chose a variety of topics including the Spanish Flu epidemic in the early 20th century and the AIDs concern in San Francisco in the 80s.

I ended up choosing to focus on the Justinianic Plague that lasted from the the 540s CE to the middle of the 8th c. CE. I felt that this topic allowed me to explore not only a medical emergency in the Byzantine Empire, but also gave me the chance to trace the route of the plague, and in turn, it's effect on the populations of the empire (I.e. the Mediterranean world) as well as its long term effects on history. Not only was it extremely interesting, but it also gave me a better understanding of the causes of population movements as well as its declines and increases over the years leading to the dark ages.

One thing I will warn you about; although there was some scholarly work done, there has not been much work done on it (with many plague historians focusing on the Black Death), and in addition, I was forced to mostly rely on secondary sources other then the works of the Byzantine historian Procopius. His primary works were very insightful, but lacked the accuracy of death rates like many other primary sources from antiquity. As a topic, the Justinianic Plague is under researched and, in my opinion, deserves more scholarly research because of its role in an ever shifting Mediterranean world at this period in history, and serves as a marking point, as one historian I used for my research (unfortunately I can't remember his name) called as "the end of antiquity".

I did my undergrad capstone on battlefield technique and training in the first 4 crusades. It didn't pan out as well as id hoped due to lack of primary sources directly addressing the issue and my focus on fighting technique instead of more on the training side.

When picking your end subject, get a general idea on topic, read a bunch of modern secondary sources (delve into their primary sources if its relevant), and THEN pick a more specific question to address/expound upon. Don't go in thinking you can do something specific and come up short in the end like I did.

Good luck!

I did my undergraduate dissertation on the Second Punic War, specifically on Carthaginian force projection (that was the other half of my joint honours degree showing its War Studies face there!). Just narrowing it down was a major struggle! I started out by- rather idiotically- telling my dissertation supervisor that I wanted to do something like compare lots of different cultural styles and forms of war in the classical Mediterranean. After he had smacked me about (that idea? In 10k words? HAHAHAHAHA), I eventually narrowed it down to what I ended up working on.

In hindsight, whilst I think it was a decent dissertation (I got a 2.1), there wasn't much point to it. Most interesting things about the Second Punic War have, I decided, already been said, and I was constantly paranoid I was veering too close to "What If" history. I would love to do another one at some point, though without the enforced deadlines and guidelines of academia I certainly won't do it by myself.

My undergrad paper was a tongue-in-cheek look at the modern cult of personality in fascist states. I called it "Build a cult of personality in 10 easy steps" .

I wrote my undergrad thesis on the intellectual heritage of the Scottish Covenanters, specifically with regards to political thought. I argued that the Covenanting movement was broadly divided between a moderate, secular and more aristocratic wing that drew heavily from traditional Scottish conceptions of an 'ancient constitution' and civic humanism and a more religiously devout wing that drew on Calvinist resistance theory, Old Testament covenantalism (hence the name, really) and, to a degree, millenarian prophecy. The former rebelled in 1637 to reassert rights and privileges (whether or not those rights had actually traditionally existed in Scotland is up for debate) of political participation in the face of an autocratic and distant monarchy, and the latter to correct religious error and overthrow Scotland's bishops, and eventually to safeguard Presbyterianism in Scotland by imposing it throughout Britain (in Ireland through invasion and settlement and in England through the Solemn League and Covenant). The failure of these two sides to work together after initial victories led to the Engagement and then to the Cromwellian conquest after 1650.

It wasn't really all that hard to do, honestly, but it is a lot of work and you have to stay on top of it. I spent a couple hours at the library most weekday evenings on top of my other work doing the bulk of my research. Be organized in your notes, and be sure that if you're writing something down you know exactly where to find it again: otherwise you're going to be very, very frustrated when it comes time to do your footnotes and bibliography. Start with broader secondary sources on your topic, and read the relevant chapters. From there get into the more detailed monographs alongside your primary sources. Learn your primary sources inside-out, and understand everything you can about them: the context of the writer's life and the intellectual/political/whatever climate in which it was produced. (I'm in intellectual history so this an absolute must for us, other disciplines might be a little less stringent in this regard).

By the time the end of the first semester rolled around I had about 80% of my research done, I wrote a 25-page chapter over winter break (a chapter about the political and social context of the Covenanting Revolution; writing an overview/context chapter first worked out well for me because it enabled me to get my thoughts in order further). Over the next few months I wrote the other three (all roughly around the same length), and because I already had well-organized research notes, they pretty much wrote themselves.

As other people have said, make sure you pick something that actually interests you. Otherwise you will be bored to tears and you will have great difficulty putting in a sustained effort. And make no mistake, a thesis/dissertation is more a test of your work ethic and ability to track down sources than it is a truly difficult intellectual thing. It's obviously challenging to write a very long, good paper but if you put in the work to have an absolutely rock-solid research foundation in the first few months of school you will have a much, much easier time of it.

The Huk rebellion in the Philippines.