“How successful was the US civil rights movement of 1960s in ensuring the human rights of African Americans?”

Essays should include reference to at least four primary sources and ten secondary sources. The point of this task is to hone your research skills; hone your ability to make a sustained argument with evidence; and hone your ability to write persuasively.

On developing a question.

Steps:

1Identify your primary sources, relevant to your area of interest. You must use at least four. Make sure you can explain why your primary sources are significant. In order to make a historical argument about your sources, to make them evidence for something, you have to be able to justify what they are representative of, and what they help us to know and understand. You can use primary sources that have been set in the unit, as long as they are salient to your question.

2When constructing your question, relate it to the primary sources that you wish to explore. Your question needs to match the scale and evidentiary power of your sources. So, if you wanted to explore the idea of collective rights in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, you could ask something like ‘As noted by scholars, activism by Indigenous activists across the globe has resulted in new notions of collective rights within human rights discourse. Discuss, in relation to your reading of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.’ This is a good question, because it helps you structure your essay, and make a clear argument. It asks you to explain the scholarship that discusses the emergence of collective or group rights. In so doing, you then have a framework to explain the Statement within that background. But you asked something like this, ‘Does the Uluru Statement from the Heart represent the history of global Indigenous calls for the recognition of collective rights’, then you would be setting yourself a much harder, and perhaps impossible task. You would have to perform a type of global history to see whether it is true that the call for collective rights has been widespread, and you would have to offer a close history of the Statement in order to gauge whether it is in fact representative of a global movement. This would be a fascinating question, but it would be too big for 3000 words.