Week 3 (16 September 2026) | Library Research Session, The First World War, and Children

This session, we will be meeting in Canaday Library, Room 315 with Jennifer Stoval for an introduction to library research. Please show up a few minutes early, so that we can start on time. 

As for the topics I’ve asked you to identify and bring to discuss and research this week: these need not become your final project topic. It would save time if one of them did, but I expect most of you will only settle on a final topic after spending much more time researching. I’ve asked you to choose topics for this week because practicing research skills is easiest with a concrete topic already in hand. And once you’ve learned the process for one topic, you can repeat it for any topic that interests you later. Topic development, in fact, tends to be circular and iterative: you research one topic, discover a second, more compelling one partway through, and abandon the first for the new one. So although you could, in principle, choose a topic and carry it through to the final paper, I’d rather you explore several and not hesitate to start over.

The point of the next several weeks is to explore different topics, with the understanding that you’ll eventually settle on one for the final project. You’re free to change direction at any point up until you submit your list of books and articles in week 6 (October 7). Ideally, you'll decide by the end of week 4, leaving a few weeks to research that specific topic—but you're also welcome to keep researching multiple topics right up to the week 6 deadline.