I am hoping I am in the right place for this..
I am hopelessly lost in my Intro to Historical Thought class. The only assignment for the semester was to write a 12-15 pg "primary source based, original research paper." This is my first time doing anything like this (or any paper of this length), and I thought I was doing well, until I sat down to actually write the paper...I only had about 5 crappy pages, and when I met with my prof to show it to him he pretty much threw out a couple of my main points.
I have been staring at my material, trying to figure something out for the past several days, but am starting to get very discouraged. I have a paper due this Wednesday (12/17) and feel like I'm starting completely over.
I have about 15 pages of an annotated bibliography, ~30 books, 8-12 primary sources, and countless articles. My original topic was "Why did Ohio repeal their medical licensure laws in 1833?," (answer: bickering amongst medical sects, rise of Jacksonian Democracy, and logistical difficulties) but now I'm realizing I apparently need to broaden my topic. My primary sources are a string of laws between 1811 and 1896, some of Daniel Drakes papers, some medical school histories, and some papers from the Thomsonians and Eclectics.
Thanks for any help/motivation you can provide.
I'd love to start a chain and help you through this but I don't see why you're only drawing only five pages. The important thing about giving a historical argument is context. I presume that you're directly answering the question but what I would want to see is why those answers that you gave are important to the repeal. So, I ask you to do this for me: explain your answers.
Why was there bickering among the medical community, what were the saying, was this happening in other places around the nation/world or was it only a regional/local problem. What were the arguments and how were they formed, were the arguments political or medical in nature?
How does the rise of Jacskonian democracy relate to the topic? Is this influencing laws such as the repeal in other places of hte nation and was there a general push among the people to repeal such laws? Is this a unique event within Jacksonian Democracy or was it common?
You talk about logistics but what are they? Is it a matter of paperwork or movement of material? Why is it a problem and were there any attempts to fix the logistics? Was it happening in other areas or is it unique to Ohio?
So, I think what I am trying to say is, do you have context to your paper? History isn't a vacuum, it's infintely influencing itself, so find those influnces and explain how it led to that. Mobility won't be that common but it still happened, people moved and talked, discuss what the people did rather than simply talking about it.