Picking a topic is research! Topics start very broad and then need to be narrowed down to a manageable size. For example, the broad topic for this assignment is the Civil Rights Movement; however, there are thousands of books, articles, and films made about this era. Choose an event that took place during that era to focus your research on. You can also choose to focus on gender or race, person or place, activity or movement. Try a variety of topics and see what kind of results you get. If you get very few results, change the topic and try again.
Check out this brief tutorial from North Carolina State University
The "Great Migration"
Slums & Poverty
Upper & Middle Class Differences
Professional Baseball
Higher Education for Women
Political Corruption
Reconstruction
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
Prohibition
Women's Suffrage
Rationing of Food & Fuel
Women & Minorities in the Workforce
Gangsters
Spanish Flu 1919
Race Riots
Communism & The Red Scare
Ku Klux Klan
The Automobile & Assembly Lines
Theories of Evolution & Anti-Evolution
Silent Movies
Aviation
Jazz Music & Women Flappers
Harlem Renaissance
The Great Depression
Racial Violence
The Dust Bowl
The 1st and/or 2nd New Deals
The Home Front
Women in the War
Zoot Suit Riots
Japanese Internment
D-Day
The Holocaust
The Atomic Bomb
The Fair Deal
Suburban Life
Rock and Roll
Civil Rights See HIST 2232-20 Civil Rights Movement
Vietnam War
Watergate
Roe v. Wade
Iranian Hostage Crisis
The Internet
The AIDS/HIV Crisis
Healthcare Reform
Domestic Terrorism
Primary sources provide first person experiences on your topic. Primary sources include letters, legal documents, interviews, live performances, images, and artifacts. Primary sources can be found in books, newspapers, and journals. They can also help you narrow your topic and discover keywords for further searching. To locate other primary sources use your topic keyword AND sources. For example: Civil Rights AND sources will retrieve all the primary sources about civil rights. Below are primary sources related to suggested topics: