History is a very popular subject in college, and so many students receive dreaded essays to complete on them. However, the one aspect of college that many students struggle with is choosing their own topic to write about. This usually leads to students choosing inadequate topics for their essays that lead to underperformance, and receiving marks well below their actual potential. In this article, we will discuss how to choose the right topic and the most popular topics that are well received by history professors.
Topics
When choosing your history topic, you obviously need to make sure that it is a topic that has been discussed during your class! You cannot just choose a topic that is not on your course syllabus and expect to receive a high mark, if any at all. This is why our topic list will cover a diverse range of topics so that we ensure that a lot of periods of history are covered for all the students that may be viewing this article.
Another aspect you need to take into consideration, when choosing your topic, is your own curiosity about it. In general, the more passionate and curious you are about your topic, the more galvanized you will be when writing about it. If you choose a topic because it is something that sounds ‘easy’ or ‘quick’ to write about, then it will only become harder as your motivation will be hard to keep up to write about it.
When writing about history, a large part of it, that many students overlook, are the sources that are relaying the information to us. You need to analyze these sources in depth to attain a high mark.
With these points in mind, the following are some of the best-received history topics by professors:
- What impact did the assassination of Julius Caesar have on the Roman Republic?
- How reliable are the ancient sources that tell us about ancient Greece and Rome?
- Is it accurate enough to describe the Middle Ages as being an age ‘feudalism’?
- How ‘dark’ were the dark ages?
- Examine the causes and effects of the Cold War
- What were the effects of China’s one-child policy?
- Examine the historical significance of the number 13
- How have drugs been perceived throughout history?
- How did small pox influence the colonization of the Americas?
- What impact did Buddhism have on the Chinese empire?
As you can see, these are all great topics to discuss in your history paper.