It starts with a question, which likely evolves from a getting to know a specific subject's secondary works fairly well. For me, it was the War of 1812, a topic which I began studying when I worked at a historic site that was involved in the war. We led tours and had to try to compress the causes of the war with some of the actions that took place at the fort into one 15-minute tour. It was tough.

Anyway, that led me to read a lot of the contemporary secondary works about the war, as well as some of the older ones (Teddy Roosevelt wrote a history of it, matter of fact), and I kept seeing certain things repeated, nearly word for word, in these histories. Something like this: "The militia, arguing for their constitutional rights, refused to cross the border into Canada." Virtually nothing else about it at all. Just, militia refused, battles were lost, end of story.

Some of them even related these events with an implicit guffaw: "they argued for their supposed rights" &c. (emphasis mine). But this repetitive dismissal got me thinking. Why did the militia refuse to cross?

So I read more. I read political history, I read about the ideology of American revolutionaries, and I read about the "glorious revolution" of 1688 and about Shays's rebellion and the whiskey rebellion and tenant riots and military theory and congressional debates.

And after all that, there was still the question: why did the militia refuse to cross? There is a great deal of political thought that revolves around civilian control of the military, about fears of a standing army, about the negotiation of political dominion between the state and the individual, and about the individual and the community and the state. So I thought "Eureka!"

Then I started reading the primary sources. Tried to find the words of the men themselves, how did they respond to allegations of cowardice and moral failure? How did they see themselves in the context of the war, and their relationship to the regular army?

And oh boy, did that open a can of worms.

I'll stop there. Basically, the process is this:

1. Identify a topic you enjoy studying

2. Read all that is easily accessible about that topic

3. Identify areas of that topic that seem superficial, glossed over, or repetitive

4. Historiography - do a lot of the popular secondary histories use the same source to discuss this question? Read that source. Where does it get its information?

5. Are you still interested? If not, maybe restart from #1

6. Talk to the professors at your school that have expertise in that subject, and plumb them for sources, thoughts, and direction

If you've gotten that far and you're still interested and your professors haven't tried to steer you away, and you still think that this is a worthwhile topic that has something important to say, you've got a topic.

This also depends heavily on the level you're working at. A Bachelor's thesis might not have the same requirements as a master's, and a master's won't be held to the same level as a PhD dissertation. Talk to your professors.

I try to see if there are questions I have that people haven't answered. Sometimes it's a manuscript that hasn't gotten a lot of attention, a group of people who are underrepresented in research, a question that needs to be asked again because the answer everyone assumed was right turns out to be based on incorrect ideas. I would look at your interests and see where the gaps are. Maybe talk to a supervisor about ideas too.

Personally, I just ask a question I want to know the answer to. Shy away from popular questions, but as long as it's something you want to know, go nuts

I formulated my dissertation topic in conversation with professors and from a trend I had noticed in the literature in my field, namely discounting the contributions of Latin Christology to the Nestorian debate.

My advice to students:

• Find a broad topic you are interested in. Probe why you are interested in it — try to figure out why it appeals to you.

• Do some background reading so you get a sense of what sorts of things have been said. Don't feel obligated to try and grok the entire published literature. It's not possible in your time frame (it takes years to really master a literature), you don't need to for this assignment.

• Find someone who knows more than you do and start talking to them about what you're interested in. Their job is to help you figure out what to do, and they have more experience at it than you do. Take advantage of this! Everyone professor you have now had a professor help them originally. It is how these things work. No one learns how to do this totally on their own.

• Lastly, try to find a good question to ask. Personally I find the simplest questions are often the best; overly complex questions tend to get pretty in the weeds. The argument of your thesis is the answer to the question it poses (explicitly or implicitly). Use the aforementioned professor/advisor to help calibrate your question — some questions are too big for an undergrad thesis ("how did science and technology change world history?"), some are too small ("what was Charles Darwin's third dog named?"), and some are just right. Again, that is a judgment one learns over time — it is hard to know it without having written a lot of papers. Hence getting an advisor's input.

Again, find something you are motivated by. You have to put in the time. You will have to explain it to other people. You will be potentially using your experience here to think about future work, etc. Pick something you find fascinating to learn about, and you won't regret a moment of the work. If you choose something fashionable but not exciting, it gets tiresome real quick. Trying to writing a paper you hate is the worst.

Should I assume that you are using the term "dissertation" colloquially? Because if you are a 4th year PhD student without an approved project and no clue of where to start, I would have to judge that your university has substantially failed you. Otherwise, should I assume that you are an undergrad?

But I guess to your question, I would decide which area you prefer to study, either Civil Rights, or Antebellum America. You would then have to be familiar with the historiography of your chosen field and look for an aspect that appears to be unexplored/under-explored. From there, you would form some sort of hypothesis, and do primary research to see if it is supported. What will likely happen is that once you dive into the research, something new will emerge and you'll take it from there.

But that's really the most basic of sketches for historical research. My interests revolve around 19th century American history, so I can tell you that if you are interested in Antebellum African-Americans, you have to start narrowing it down now. Are you interested in slavery or the lives of free blacks? Is there a particular region you want to look at, such as the northern or southern states? Or perhaps a particular state, or a broadly defined region (like Appalachia)?

Once you do that, then what exactly about African Americans interests you? Are you interested in things like abolition, labor, slave resistance, material cultural, literacy, education, colonization, gender, etc etc.?

After you get through that, then your supervisor/advisor could help you formulate a topic.