History 317 Research Assignment

The research assignment must be based, at least in part, on primary sources - ie. sources that were created at the time the essay focuses on. Good essays will be situated in one of the approaches to the history of technology, key-actor, social construction, actor-network, systems theory, etc. The research assignment may be an essay, a website, a tour, a video, exhibit or other research project of 2,000-3,000 words or the equivalent. Group projects will be considered. Two copies of a preliminary outline and bibliography are to be submitted by 4pm October 8th one in hard copy to the history office and one electronic. Two copies of the final research assignment are due by 4pm Friday Novermber 9^th, one hard copy and one electronic. The final electronic paper is to be submitted through www.Turnitin.com. You must keep your research notes until the paper is returned and be prepared to hand them in if questions arise about sources. The penalty for late outlines and papers is 1% a day.

Bibliography and footnotes should follow the UVic history style guide linked to the course website.

If you are citing a source that you have not seen but is mentioned in one that you are using, you are citing second hand and use this style:

Citations Second Hand: R.M. Galois, “The Indian Rights Association, Native Protest Activity and the ‘Land Question’ in British Columbia,” Native Studies Review 8 (1992), 1-34 in Jeffrey Keshen, Age of Connection: Readings in Canadian Social History (Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 266-283.

TOPICS

Here are some topics to get you started. Others are listed on the Research Assignment Link on the Class website. You will have to develop a thesis or argument within these broader topics.

• Auto-biography: A description of the role that automobiles and other automobiles have played in the history of your family. For example, you could explain how the acquisition of a car represented change in social or financial status, or a change in family size or requirements. The main purpose is to illustrate, by way of a family history, the larger changes in North American society over your lifetime, your parents or grand parents. Students can interview family members and are encouraged to include photographs. (thanks to Steve Koerner for this assignment idea). You may see samples linked to the class outline. Well done assignments will be archived with students’ permission.
• Design a Car. Create your own design for a car and submit a drawing along with a research paper which shows where it fits in auto history showing the historic or other inspirations for the design and how it differs from or is derived from other vehicles and why.
• Read a Car;  using the model provided by Michael Mahoney at  http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/h398/readmach/modeltfr.html , choose a car make and model and “read it” and write what you discover about the ideas of the designers, the technology of the builders, the assumptions about the users. 
• The automobile (or a particular brand/model) in American art, literature or film.
• Choose one or two decades and argue how the automobile has affected:
  American house design, urban design, eating habits, education, vacation habits, courting habits, etc….
• Link Victoria history to automobile history. The British Colonist at www.britishcolonist.ca is now on line to 1910 and will be a great new source:

• Do a history of one or more early automobile dealers or gas stations in Victoria

• Write about the transition from horses to cars in Victoria.

• Look at the impact of automobile tourism in Victoria.

• Do a history of the first cars or car races in Victoria, first fast food restaurants

• The First Automobiles in Victoria.

• When and why did Victoria shift from driving on the left to driving on the right?

• History of Victoria’s drive inns, drive inn theatres or motels.

• Many early US newspapers are online and fully searchable for the period 1880-1910. See http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/index.html. Do a paper that looks at the American reception to the automobile or compare the response on the east coast, west coast, and mid west, for ie. What can we learn about the attraction to, the resistance to, the health benefits of, the danger of… the auto in these years. A few major newspapers are on-line for longer periods - New York Times (1851 – 2003), Washington Post (1877-1990), Wall Street Journal (1889-1999) which would other projects.
• Write about the history of the use of automobiles for rituals in North American life: coming of age, graduation, marriage, death.
• How did famous women drivers like Emily Post, Edith Wharton, and those who made well-publicized transcontinental journeys in the early decades of the twentieth century affect the relationship of women to the car. Investigate one or more of these women drivers and, if possible, the news coverage accorded them. What was significant about these women as drivers, and what effects did their driving have on attitudes to women taking the wheel? Alternatively, investigate the role of the automobile in the campaign for women’s rights, and especially women’s suffrage (the right to vote) in these same decades.
• Choose a decade and analyze the advertisements for cars from a popular magazine of the day, or compare two magazines. What messages are the ads conveying? Do they tell us anything about gender or racial expectations about car buyers? Be sure to pay attention to both the text or spoken material of the ad and its pictures or visual material.
• The 1964 uprising in the Watts district of south-central Los Angeles began when police pulled over a black woman suspected of drunk driving. Twenty-eight years later, south-central L.A. erupted again after the acquittal of four police officers charged with beating African American motorist Rodney King during a traffic stop. Investigate both of these events. How did race and cars come together in each? What do they reveal about “driving while black”?
• Thomas Sugrue argues that “Black popular culture appropriated the automobile—as both a symbol of the American ‘good life’ and as a sign of a distinctive, separate black culture.” Analyze one or more of the examples he cites—Motown performers and songs, “blaxploitation” films of the 1970s, in the work of African American rap or hip-hop artists—or select one of your own.
• Choose a period, early 20th century or 1970-80s and make an argument why the electric car was displaced by the internal combustion powered car.
• Investigate the history of the Interstate system—when was it conceived and for what reasons? how was it paid for? who determined where the interstates would be?—and some of its effects in greater detail.
• Choose a period and investigate how American automobile culture/design/manufacture compared to that in another country in the same period.
• Why have Asian car makers cars become so popular in America and when did this trend begin?
• Make an argument about how Ford’s were designed based on interviews with the design team available at http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu
• Compare the depiction of factory work in a movie—such as Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile, Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar, Ron Howard’s Gung Ho, or Jonathan Demme’s Swing Shift—to the accounts and experiences of a real-life workers.
• The Mexican artist Diego Rivera created a group of murals called Detroit Industry for the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1932-33 including scenes of the Ford River Rouge Plant. Analyze his depictions of autoworkers, autowork, and machines. What characteristics of the work are portrayed? What are conditions like inside the factory? What seems to be the relationship between the workers and the machines? Among the workers themselves? How are bosses, foremen, managers, owners portrayed?  
• Interview someone who works or has worked in factory. How does the nature of that person’s work tasks and routines, relationships with other workers and with foremen, ways of coping with the work, etc. compare to the experiences of autoworkers found in biographies?
• What made the “Treaty of Detroit,” the five-year contract that Walter Reuther and the UAW negotiated with the Big Three automakers in 1950 so significant? What was the impact, both short- and long-term, of this contract? Was it something that either side came to regret?
• What is the current state of automation in the automobile industry? How extensively is automation, including robots, used? For what tasks? What effect has automation had on the number of jobs, production costs, productivity, etc.?
• Investigate the most recent contract between the UAW and the Big Three. What were the central issues? Did they include automation and any of the related issues (production standards, wage rates, job tasks, job classifications) in dispute at Brook Park in the 1950s? How were they resolved? Were the negotiations contentious or smooth?
• Automakers generally resisted government-imposed requirements to install as standard equipment two of best known safety features on cars today: seat belts and air bags. Select one of these and investigate its history. How, why, and when was the feature developed? How did it come to be standard equipment in cars? What role did the auto companies, governments, and advocacy and citizens’ groups play in that process?