Outline and Bibliography

You need to define a place, and then narrow it to a specific area, so as not to get overwhelmed with information. Once you have a search term like "New York Chinatown" or "Boston North End" or "Chicago Stock Yard," try the following resources:

Web search: http://www.hotbot.com. Be sure to select "the page title" and ask for 25 full descriptions. Explore the links and whatever they lead to; then Bookmark them or Print them or Send them to yourself as a file. (See course Web site for more tips)

Library catalog: find subject boston north end--look especially for any books classified as Description and Travel. Skim them, copy useful pages and also title and copyright pages.

Site visit: Use your Web & Library finds to locate places or people you need to see. Any state, county, or town libraries will be valuable, as well as historical societies, if they have research files. Make copies, take pictures, ask questions, hold interviews, make notes of your sensory impressions--how the place looks, smells, tastes, feels--you'll begin to sense what you want to write about.

You should consider these questions (not necessarily in this order):

Where is this place, and why is it there?

What are its distinct features, and how do they fit in a larger regional context?

What do previous researchers, writers, thinkers say about it, and do they agree?

Who were prime movers in creating or shaping it, and why?

What sort of changes did it experience, and why?

When did it acquire its present character, and why?

How does it seem American, and what meaning does it give to that term?

Put those questions in an order that seems appropriate to your place. Using what you've found so far, sketch some possible lines of inquiry you will follow.

Comment on how this project will explain the place and your relation to it.

Using standard bibliographical form, list and briefly describe 10 sources you will use. Here are examples for a book and a web site:

Peters, Arthur King. Seven Trails West (New York: Abbeville Press, 1996). A lavishly-illustrated history of major Western trails, from the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803-06 to the transcontinental railway of 1863-69. I plan to make extensive use of a chapter on the Pony Express trail, pp. 147-72.

http://www.lyrics.ch/: The Lyrics Server, a massive database of song lyrics (over 107,000) dating from the latest back to the early 1800s. I will be using lyrics from songs written by Woodie Guthrie, during his hobo-minstrel days in the 1930s.