Henry Laurens and the Atlantic Enlightenment Prospectus Proposal

Henry Laurens and the Atlantic Enlightenment Prospectus Proposal

I haven’t bothered correcting much of your grammar, but it will need a great deal of work. At this point, however, I think you need to give more thought to what you plan to do, what you want to learn, and how you are going to go about your research. You waste much effort in this version on simple description and recitation of facts that one can easily find in an encyclopedia, and don’t take on the crucial problem which is to define what original contribution you are going to make to academic research.

Let me begin by quoting the Graduate Bulletin about what is expected of a prospectus in the History Department: “The prospectus should contain: an explanation of the research problem under investigation; a summary of the relevant secondary literature; a statement of hypothesis; an outline of both research sources (especially primary materials); and methods the student expects to employ.”

I think you have done the first part of this in a very general way. You are going to investigate the influence of the Enlightenment on Henry Laurens. You have to indicate why it is important to do this. Your paper implies that Enlightenment thought was well known in South Carolina, so what makes Henry Lawrence a special case? What have people thought about this previously and what are the issues they argue about? I think, for one thing, you are going to have to be much more specific about which Enlightenment ideas are involved here. What is your hypothesis? Without a clearly defined problem and hypothesis, we can’t begin to work on the other parts of the prospectus, such as the sources and the research method.