Hello,
I seem to be having trouble creating narrow questions for historical topics. The best example I can think of is for my History 308 class we're to pick a topic that "looks at a specific aspect of how the United States changed during the antebellum era."
My suggestion to the professor was that I do a topic on "how the US changes ... on the rise of tensions and growth in US military presence prior to the Civil War."
I suppose what I want is did the rise of social tensions regarding slaves and states rights increase US military presence in the 1800's? My goal is to try and figure out how and when the Union and Confederate soldiers started creating their armies and out of what ideals.
This is a pattern for me this semester so far - I am asking questions that I think are pretty narrow "military presence in the US in the 1800's," and I'm being told they're too broad.
After I look at what I've asked it makes sense, but is this just something that comes with time and practice - the more you look into history and ask questions about papers the more of a feel you get for proper questions for research?
Caveat: I haven't the slightest clue how the US higher education systems works, so I don't know what 'History 308' would be here.
But that aside the first thing I would say is that yes, I think it does take practice to get 'into the swing' of identifying viable research questions; but when and how that happens varies from person to person and course to course. Generally speaking, someone who has studied the same topic exclusively from the very beginning of undergrad will probably have an easier time of it - purely because they will normally have developed a more intimate understanding of their subject area, and have a better idea of what kind of research historians in that field do and where the gaps in the scholarship are.
Don't feel bad if you're struggling with developing workable research questions - part of the undergraduate learning process is getting a feel for how to develop them. Bear in mind also that your options are limited by the nature of the course and the assessment; sometimes, questions that might be workable for an academic paper are too broad (or sometimes too narrow) for a mid-term student paper.
Now, I'm certainly not a Civil War historian, but the thing that strikes me about the question in your example is that, whilst it sounds relatively niche thematically, it is very broad contextually. You've identified a topic and a period but your line of research isn't really very focused. If your word limit is 2,000 words, you're going to have a very difficult time discussing the details and impact of military presence across the entirety of the USA and more than half of the nineteenth century - especially if you intend to meaningfully engage with primary sources. Always be mindful of the word limit; you have to be able to do justice to your question within the limits of the essay.
Consider, for example, this question about a fictional country:
What was the impact of 19th century labour reforms in AskHistoriansLand?
It sounds quite specific, doesn't it? It has a topic, a geographical boundary and a time period. But that geography is huge, the time period is immense and the kind of impact is not specified. In order to do it justice, you would need to consider the full impact (political, social, economic etc.) of these reforms across the entirety of AskHistoriansLand, from 1800 - 1899 inclusive. We do however have a good starting point for developing our research question.
What we can do from there is go away and look at our topic in more detail. First, we discover that the bulk of the reforms happened before 1840. Then whilst reading, we notice that not a lot has been said about how social scientists living in AskHistoriansLand felt about this topic. Following that strand up, some further background research might reveal that most of the social scientists lived in the west of the country in this period - we also know that the reforms, which favoured historians in the job market, must have had quite an impact on them.
So we might decide to refine our question, if we have reason to believe that we can find primary sources to develop an argument from, to something like this:
How did social scientists in Western AskHistoriansLand experience the impact of labour policy changes between 1840 and 1860?
Our new question has a narrower geographical context, a much tighter time frame and is now focused specifically on the experience of one major minority. From our initial starting point, we have worked out way to a narrower, more workable question. If it is still too broad for our purposes, we could narrow it down further again, to say, something like these two:
Most of the time, it's not about being able to read the literature and then saying "Aha! There's my question!"; it's more that you engage with the material you have to discern the basis for your research (the topic that interests you) and, from there, refine it down to a more nuanced research question. Off the top of my head, we could maybe refine the example you gave down to something like these:
As stated, I'm not a Civil War historian, and I don't particularly know how viable any of those questions are myself - especially when I don't know what the learning and assessment outcomes of your specific course are. They may still be too broad for your course and assessment, or they may take an inappropriate approach (I would, for example, caution against jumping into a a comparative approach unless you are doing a comparative history module). Similarly, I may have missed the mark in terms of what you were looking for. Nonetheless, I hope you can see the pattern: they are fundamentally the same as your starting question, but they are much more focused contextually, and in some ways thematically.
Well, at that level, and based on what your professor has said I would think the narrowest you would want to get is down to a single event. Along the lines of "How did [event(s)] on [date(s)] contribute towards...?"
This could be the Raid on Harper's Ferry, for instance, in which case your question might be "How did the Raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, etc..."