The research project prospectus should consist of a 1-page topic description (approx. 2 paragraphs), a preliminary schedule for researching and writing your paper, and a basic annotated bibliography (two sentence annotations) of the secondary (at least three) and primary sources (at least one primary source collection) that you have identified. Choose a research topic of interest to you and of relevance to the themes of the course: a topic that allows you to investigate a particular issue in detail and then to provide your own analysis within a broader historical framework. You may choose to pursue in greater depth an event or theme discussed in the readings, or you may choose to investigate a specific area related to but not explicitly covered in the course.

Feel welcome to be creative in your approach, but you need to select a topic that is broad enough to be of general importance, and for which sufficient sources are available, but also narrow enough to allow you to research the issue in depth using a combination of primary and secondary sources. I suggest conceptualizing your project in terms of a theme, a time and a place. The theme, which needs to be related to environmental history, will allow you to explore scholarly approaches to the subject matter in your historiography that will often not be directly related to the particular time and place that you will explore in your case study. In turn, your case study should seek to build upon existing research in order to explain change over time (ie a story or narrative) in a way that adds something new and meaningful to the way other scholars have approached the topic.