how to write a research proposal in history

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Preparing a History PhD proposal

The carefully thought-out and detailed research proposal to be submitted with the formal application is the product of a sometimes prolonged negotiation with your potential supervisor. The supervisor may be enthusiastic about your project or might advise you to consider a different subject or change your angle on it; they may query aspects of your plan such as its breadth, the availability of primary sources or the extent to which you are familiar with the secondary literature. You may be asked to demonstrate the originality of your research question or be advised to consider applying to another institution which may have more appropriate expertise. During this process you will likely be asked to submit a specimen of written-up historical research, such as your Masters or BA dissertation. The sooner you start developing the structure that is expected in a research proposal, the more productive your exchanges with your potential supervisor will be.

You may find different advice for writing a research proposal across different OU webpages. Given that a research proposal can vary significantly across different disciplines, when applying to the History Department you should follow the guidance provided here.

The research proposal you submit in January should be approximately 1000 words, plus a bibliography, and should contain the following:

A title, possibly with a subtitle

The title should not take the form of a question and it may run to a dozen words or more. Like the title of a book, it should clearly convey the topic you propose to work on. A subtitle may explain the chronological or geographical focus of your work, or the methodological approach you will take. Choosing a title is a good way for focusing on the topic you want to investigate and the approach you want to take.

These are examples of poor titles and topics to research:

• Captain Cook’s Third Voyage
• Women in eighteenth-century England

These would be poor topics to research because they lack a strong question and it is not clear which approach they take to their already well-researched subjects. They are generic or merely descriptive. 

Examples of good research topics

• Constructing the Eternal City: visual representations of Rome, 1500-1700
• Rearing citizens for the state: manuals for parents in France, 1900-1950

These projects combine a sharp chronological and geographical focus with a clear indication of how the sources will be analysed to respond to a precise question. In the first case, for example, the premise is that visual representations are critical in the making of a city’s eminence. This indicates the type of sources that will be analysed (paintings, engravings and other visual sources). The chronology is particularly well chosen because in these two centuries Rome turned from being the capital of the Catholic world to becoming the much sought-after destination of the Grand Tour; interesting questions of change and continuity come into focus.

Brief summary of your argument

An acceptable PhD thesis must have a central argument, a 'thesis'.  You need to have something to argue for or against, a point to prove or disprove, a question to answer. What goes into this section of the proposal is a statement of your question and the answer you plan to give, even if, for now, it remains a hypothesis.

Why this subject is important

We expect originality in a thesis and so under this rubric we expect you to explain why the knowledge you seek on the subject you propose to work on is important for its period and place, or for historians’ views on its period and place. Finding some early-modern English laundry lists would not suffice  on its own  to justify writing a PhD thesis about them. But those laundry lists could be important evidence for a thesis about the spread of the Great Plague in London, for example.

Framing your research

Your proposal has to show awareness of other scholarly writing on the subject. This section positions your approach to the subject in relation to approaches in some of those works, summarising how far you think it differs. For instance, you could challenge existing interpretations of the end the Cold War, or you might want to support one historian or another; you could open up a neglected aspect of the debate - say by considering the role of an overlooked group or national government - and perhaps kick-start a debate of your own. All this is to show that you have read  into  your subject and familiarised yourself with its contours. We don’t expect you to have done all your research at the start, but it is essential for you to show familiarity with the key texts and main authors in your chosen field.

What sources might you need to consult in libraries and archives?

Here you should describe or at least list the primary materials you are likely to use in researching your thesis. This demonstrates your confidence that enough relevant sources exist to support a sustained scholarly argument. Many archival catalogues are available online and can be searched remotely, including The National Archives, the National Archives of Scotland, the National Archives (Ireland), the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and Archives Wales. You can search the London-based Historical Manuscripts Commission and the National Register of Archives, both of which provide access to local county record offices. Databases such as ‘Eighteenth Century Collections Online’ and the British Library’s ‘British Newspapers Online 1600-1900’ will help you identify and locate relevant sources.

What skills are required to work on the sources you plan to use?

You need to show that you have the linguistic competence to pursue your research. With few exceptions, original sources must be read in the original languages; if the principal historical literature is not in English, you must be able to read it too. Palaeographic problems aren’t confined to ancient writing. You might have to tackle early modern or other scripts that are hard to decipher. Even with fluent German, an applicant baffled by the Gothic script and typeface would flounder without undertaking ancillary study. Training is available at The Open University, or in some circumstances you can be funded to undertake training elsewhere, and you should demonstrate awareness of the skills that you need to acquire.

Do you have the technical competence to handle any data-analysis your thesis may require?

Databases, statistical evidence and spreadsheets are used increasingly by historians in certain fields. If your research involves, say, demographic or economic data, you will need to consider whether you have the necessary IT and statistical skills and, if not, how you will acquire them.

How will you arrange access to the libraries and archives where you need to work?

Although primary sources are increasingly available in digitised form, you should consider that important sources may be closed or in private hands. To consult them may require some travelling and so you should be realistic as to what you will be able to do, particularly if you are applying to study part-time as not all archives are open out of regular office hours.

A bibliography

This should come at the end and include a list of the primary sources you plan to use and the relevant secondary literature on the subject. While you should show that you are on top of recent work (and of important older studies) on the topic, there is no point in having a long list of works only marginally related to your subject. As always, specificity is the best policy.

Please follow this link to see an  example of a successful research proposal [PDF].

All this may seem daunting, as if the department is asking you to write a thesis before you apply. But that is not our intention; the advice is to help you perform the necessary spadework before entering the formal application process. Working up a proposal under the headings suggested above will, if your application is successful, save you and your supervisor(s) much time if and when the real work begins.

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A proposal is a chance to explain your topic, discuss the resources critical to your research, and justify the need for your proposed paper.

Proposal Guidelines

Goals of a proposal.

1) Precisely defines your topic and the need for studying it (i.e., it briefly takes apart the topic and tells what one will learn from reading your proposed paper).

2) Explains the sources critical to your proposed research, demonstrating that they are adequate for your project.

1) Narrow and break down your topic and your approach to it as much as possible. (ONE SENTENCE ON THE PROPOSED TOPIC IS NOT ENOUGH.)

2) Discuss the issues and questions which you foresee your paper addressing.

3)  To demonstrate your competence, you must exhibit a level of research and thinking suitable for this stage of your work.  Remember, you are expected to have done a fair amount of research already.  It should indicate that you have done extensive research in library catalogs, databases and the internet.

4) Explain why you are using your secondary and primary sources, to explain which will be especially valuable, and, perhaps, to explain what important sources are not available and are likely to be missing from your paper–and why your topic is manageable nonetheless.

Do not try to cover every source. Provide a useful view of the critical sources that anyone doing your topic must look at. Whether or not you have yet finished your study of them, or you have yet to acquire them, you should have determined which are the critical ones.

In referring to sources, always provide author (full name on first reference) and date of work; generally the full title is also necessary or useful.

5) Exclude irrelevant information. Since the proposal is a discussion of sources and not a research trail, do not include comments about where, in what order, or how you found sources (e.g., in the UMW library or through ILL) or that you are “still waiting” for ILL to provide you with a book.

6) Include a bibliography of relevant sources cited using the Turabian/Chicago Manual of Style  citation guidelines . That list of sources should not include finding aids, bibliographies, encyclopedias, or children’s books.

7) Although footnotes/endnotes are not usefully employed in a proposal, you must make clear where your information came from.

8) Use of first-person perspective can be appropriate, but do so only in consultation with your professor.

For general writing guidelines, see here .

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• How to Write a Research Proposal | Examples & Templates

How to Write a Research Proposal | Examples & Templates

Published on October 12, 2022 by Shona McCombes and Tegan George. Revised on November 21, 2023.

A research proposal describes what you will investigate, why it’s important, and how you will conduct your research.

The format of a research proposal varies between fields, but most proposals will contain at least these elements:

Introduction

Literature review.

• Research design

Reference list

While the sections may vary, the overall objective is always the same. A research proposal serves as a blueprint and guide for your research plan, helping you get organized and feel confident in the path forward you choose to take.

Table of contents

Research proposal purpose, research proposal examples, research design and methods, contribution to knowledge, research schedule, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about research proposals.

Academics often have to write research proposals to get funding for their projects. As a student, you might have to write a research proposal as part of a grad school application , or prior to starting your thesis or dissertation .

In addition to helping you figure out what your research can look like, a proposal can also serve to demonstrate why your project is worth pursuing to a funder, educational institution, or supervisor.

Research proposal length

The length of a research proposal can vary quite a bit. A bachelor’s or master’s thesis proposal can be just a few pages, while proposals for PhD dissertations or research funding are usually much longer and more detailed. Your supervisor can help you determine the best length for your work.

One trick to get started is to think of your proposal’s structure as a shorter version of your thesis or dissertation , only without the results , conclusion and discussion sections.

Download our research proposal template

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Writing a research proposal can be quite challenging, but a good starting point could be to look at some examples. We’ve included a few for you below.

• Example research proposal #1: “A Conceptual Framework for Scheduling Constraint Management”
• Example research proposal #2: “Medical Students as Mediators of Change in Tobacco Use”

Like your dissertation or thesis, the proposal will usually have a title page that includes:

• The proposed title of your project
• Your supervisor’s name
• Your institution and department

The first part of your proposal is the initial pitch for your project. Make sure it succinctly explains what you want to do and why.

Your introduction should:

• Introduce your topic
• Give necessary background and context
• Outline your  problem statement  and research questions

To guide your introduction , include information about:

• Who could have an interest in the topic (e.g., scientists, policymakers)
• How much is already known about the topic
• What is missing from this current knowledge
• What new insights your research will contribute
• Why you believe this research is worth doing

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As you get started, it’s important to demonstrate that you’re familiar with the most important research on your topic. A strong literature review  shows your reader that your project has a solid foundation in existing knowledge or theory. It also shows that you’re not simply repeating what other people have already done or said, but rather using existing research as a jumping-off point for your own.

In this section, share exactly how your project will contribute to ongoing conversations in the field by:

• Comparing and contrasting the main theories, methods, and debates
• Examining the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches
• Explaining how will you build on, challenge, or synthesize prior scholarship

Following the literature review, restate your main  objectives . This brings the focus back to your own project. Next, your research design or methodology section will describe your overall approach, and the practical steps you will take to answer your research questions.

To finish your proposal on a strong note, explore the potential implications of your research for your field. Emphasize again what you aim to contribute and why it matters.

For example, your results might have implications for:

• Improving best practices
• Informing policymaking decisions
• Strengthening a theory or model
• Challenging popular or scientific beliefs
• Creating a basis for future research

Last but not least, your research proposal must include correct citations for every source you have used, compiled in a reference list . To create citations quickly and easily, you can use our free APA citation generator .

Some institutions or funders require a detailed timeline of the project, asking you to forecast what you will do at each stage and how long it may take. While not always required, be sure to check the requirements of your project.

Here’s an example schedule to help you get started. You can also download a template at the button below.

Download our research schedule template

If you are applying for research funding, chances are you will have to include a detailed budget. This shows your estimates of how much each part of your project will cost.

Make sure to check what type of costs the funding body will agree to cover. For each item, include:

• Cost : exactly how much money do you need?
• Justification : why is this cost necessary to complete the research?
• Source : how did you calculate the amount?

To determine your budget, think about:

• Travel costs : do you need to go somewhere to collect your data? How will you get there, and how much time will you need? What will you do there (e.g., interviews, archival research)?
• Materials : do you need access to any tools or technologies?
• Help : do you need to hire any research assistants for the project? What will they do, and how much will you pay them?

If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Methodology

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

Once you’ve decided on your research objectives , you need to explain them in your paper, at the end of your problem statement .

Keep your research objectives clear and concise, and use appropriate verbs to accurately convey the work that you will carry out for each one.

I will compare …

A research aim is a broad statement indicating the general purpose of your research project. It should appear in your introduction at the end of your problem statement , before your research objectives.

Research objectives are more specific than your research aim. They indicate the specific ways you’ll address the overarching aim.

A PhD, which is short for philosophiae doctor (doctor of philosophy in Latin), is the highest university degree that can be obtained. In a PhD, students spend 3–5 years writing a dissertation , which aims to make a significant, original contribution to current knowledge.

A PhD is intended to prepare students for a career as a researcher, whether that be in academia, the public sector, or the private sector.

A master’s is a 1- or 2-year graduate degree that can prepare you for a variety of careers.

All master’s involve graduate-level coursework. Some are research-intensive and intend to prepare students for further study in a PhD; these usually require their students to write a master’s thesis . Others focus on professional training for a specific career.

Critical thinking refers to the ability to evaluate information and to be aware of biases or assumptions, including your own.

Like information literacy , it involves evaluating arguments, identifying and solving problems in an objective and systematic way, and clearly communicating your ideas.

The best way to remember the difference between a research plan and a research proposal is that they have fundamentally different audiences. A research plan helps you, the researcher, organize your thoughts. On the other hand, a dissertation proposal or research proposal aims to convince others (e.g., a supervisor, a funding body, or a dissertation committee) that your research topic is relevant and worthy of being conducted.

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McCombes, S. & George, T. (2023, November 21). How to Write a Research Proposal | Examples & Templates. Scribbr. Retrieved July 27, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/research-process/research-proposal/

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The goal of a research proposal is twofold: to present and justify the need to study a research problem and to present the practical ways in which the proposed study should be conducted. The design elements and procedures for conducting research are governed by standards of the predominant discipline in which the problem resides, therefore, the guidelines for research proposals are more exacting and less formal than a general project proposal. Research proposals contain extensive literature reviews. They must provide persuasive evidence that a need exists for the proposed study. In addition to providing a rationale, a proposal describes detailed methodology for conducting the research consistent with requirements of the professional or academic field and a statement on anticipated outcomes and benefits derived from the study's completion.

Krathwohl, David R. How to Prepare a Dissertation Proposal: Suggestions for Students in Education and the Social and Behavioral Sciences . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005.

How to Approach Writing a Research Proposal

Your professor may assign the task of writing a research proposal for the following reasons:

• Develop your skills in thinking about and designing a comprehensive research study;
• Learn how to conduct a comprehensive review of the literature to determine that the research problem has not been adequately addressed or has been answered ineffectively and, in so doing, become better at locating pertinent scholarship related to your topic;
• Improve your general research and writing skills;
• Practice identifying the logical steps that must be taken to accomplish one's research goals;
• Critically review, examine, and consider the use of different methods for gathering and analyzing data related to the research problem; and,
• Nurture a sense of inquisitiveness within yourself and to help see yourself as an active participant in the process of conducting scholarly research.

A proposal should contain all the key elements involved in designing a completed research study, with sufficient information that allows readers to assess the validity and usefulness of your proposed study. The only elements missing from a research proposal are the findings of the study and your analysis of those findings. Finally, an effective proposal is judged on the quality of your writing and, therefore, it is important that your proposal is coherent, clear, and compelling.

Regardless of the research problem you are investigating and the methodology you choose, all research proposals must address the following questions:

• What do you plan to accomplish? Be clear and succinct in defining the research problem and what it is you are proposing to investigate.
• Why do you want to do the research? In addition to detailing your research design, you also must conduct a thorough review of the literature and provide convincing evidence that it is a topic worthy of in-depth study. A successful research proposal must answer the "So What?" question.
• How are you going to conduct the research? Be sure that what you propose is doable. If you're having difficulty formulating a research problem to propose investigating, go here for strategies in developing a problem to study.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Failure to be concise . A research proposal must be focused and not be "all over the map" or diverge into unrelated tangents without a clear sense of purpose.
• Failure to cite landmark works in your literature review . Proposals should be grounded in foundational research that lays a foundation for understanding the development and scope of the the topic and its relevance.
• Failure to delimit the contextual scope of your research [e.g., time, place, people, etc.]. As with any research paper, your proposed study must inform the reader how and in what ways the study will frame the problem.
• Failure to develop a coherent and persuasive argument for the proposed research . This is critical. In many workplace settings, the research proposal is a formal document intended to argue for why a study should be funded.
• Sloppy or imprecise writing, or poor grammar . Although a research proposal does not represent a completed research study, there is still an expectation that it is well-written and follows the style and rules of good academic writing.
• Too much detail on minor issues, but not enough detail on major issues . Your proposal should focus on only a few key research questions in order to support the argument that the research needs to be conducted. Minor issues, even if valid, can be mentioned but they should not dominate the overall narrative.

Procter, Margaret. The Academic Proposal.  The Lab Report. University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto; Sanford, Keith. Information for Students: Writing a Research Proposal. Baylor University; Wong, Paul T. P. How to Write a Research Proposal. International Network on Personal Meaning. Trinity Western University; Writing Academic Proposals: Conferences, Articles, and Books. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Writing a Research Proposal. University Library. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Structure and Writing Style

Beginning the Proposal Process

As with writing most college-level academic papers, research proposals are generally organized the same way throughout most social science disciplines. The text of proposals generally vary in length between ten and thirty-five pages, followed by the list of references. However, before you begin, read the assignment carefully and, if anything seems unclear, ask your professor whether there are any specific requirements for organizing and writing the proposal.

A good place to begin is to ask yourself a series of questions:

• What do I want to study?
• Why is the topic important?
• How is it significant within the subject areas covered in my class?
• What problems will it help solve?
• How does it build upon [and hopefully go beyond] research already conducted on the topic?
• What exactly should I plan to do, and can I get it done in the time available?

In general, a compelling research proposal should document your knowledge of the topic and demonstrate your enthusiasm for conducting the study. Approach it with the intention of leaving your readers feeling like, "Wow, that's an exciting idea and I can’t wait to see how it turns out!"

Most proposals should include the following sections:

I.  Introduction

In the real world of higher education, a research proposal is most often written by scholars seeking grant funding for a research project or it's the first step in getting approval to write a doctoral dissertation. Even if this is just a course assignment, treat your introduction as the initial pitch of an idea based on a thorough examination of the significance of a research problem. After reading the introduction, your readers should not only have an understanding of what you want to do, but they should also be able to gain a sense of your passion for the topic and to be excited about the study's possible outcomes. Note that most proposals do not include an abstract [summary] before the introduction.

Think about your introduction as a narrative written in two to four paragraphs that succinctly answers the following four questions :

• What is the central research problem?
• What is the topic of study related to that research problem?
• What methods should be used to analyze the research problem?
• Answer the "So What?" question by explaining why this is important research, what is its significance, and why should someone reading the proposal care about the outcomes of the proposed study?

II.  Background and Significance

This is where you explain the scope and context of your proposal and describe in detail why it's important. It can be melded into your introduction or you can create a separate section to help with the organization and narrative flow of your proposal. Approach writing this section with the thought that you can’t assume your readers will know as much about the research problem as you do. Note that this section is not an essay going over everything you have learned about the topic; instead, you must choose what is most relevant in explaining the aims of your research.

To that end, while there are no prescribed rules for establishing the significance of your proposed study, you should attempt to address some or all of the following:

• State the research problem and give a more detailed explanation about the purpose of the study than what you stated in the introduction. This is particularly important if the problem is complex or multifaceted .
• Present the rationale of your proposed study and clearly indicate why it is worth doing; be sure to answer the "So What? question [i.e., why should anyone care?].
• Describe the major issues or problems examined by your research. This can be in the form of questions to be addressed. Be sure to note how your proposed study builds on previous assumptions about the research problem.
• Explain the methods you plan to use for conducting your research. Clearly identify the key sources you intend to use and explain how they will contribute to your analysis of the topic.
• Describe the boundaries of your proposed research in order to provide a clear focus. Where appropriate, state not only what you plan to study, but what aspects of the research problem will be excluded from the study.
• If necessary, provide definitions of key concepts, theories, or terms.

III.  Literature Review

Connected to the background and significance of your study is a section of your proposal devoted to a more deliberate review and synthesis of prior studies related to the research problem under investigation . The purpose here is to place your project within the larger whole of what is currently being explored, while at the same time, demonstrating to your readers that your work is original and innovative. Think about what questions other researchers have asked, what methodological approaches they have used, and what is your understanding of their findings and, when stated, their recommendations. Also pay attention to any suggestions for further research.

Since a literature review is information dense, it is crucial that this section is intelligently structured to enable a reader to grasp the key arguments underpinning your proposed study in relation to the arguments put forth by other researchers. A good strategy is to break the literature into "conceptual categories" [themes] rather than systematically or chronologically describing groups of materials one at a time. Note that conceptual categories generally reveal themselves after you have read most of the pertinent literature on your topic so adding new categories is an on-going process of discovery as you review more studies. How do you know you've covered the key conceptual categories underlying the research literature? Generally, you can have confidence that all of the significant conceptual categories have been identified if you start to see repetition in the conclusions or recommendations that are being made.

NOTE: Do not shy away from challenging the conclusions made in prior research as a basis for supporting the need for your proposal. Assess what you believe is missing and state how previous research has failed to adequately examine the issue that your study addresses. Highlighting the problematic conclusions strengthens your proposal. For more information on writing literature reviews, GO HERE .

To help frame your proposal's review of prior research, consider the "five C’s" of writing a literature review:

• Cite , so as to keep the primary focus on the literature pertinent to your research problem.
• Compare the various arguments, theories, methodologies, and findings expressed in the literature: what do the authors agree on? Who applies similar approaches to analyzing the research problem?
• Contrast the various arguments, themes, methodologies, approaches, and controversies expressed in the literature: describe what are the major areas of disagreement, controversy, or debate among scholars?
• Critique the literature: Which arguments are more persuasive, and why? Which approaches, findings, and methodologies seem most reliable, valid, or appropriate, and why? Pay attention to the verbs you use to describe what an author says/does [e.g., asserts, demonstrates, argues, etc.].
• Connect the literature to your own area of research and investigation: how does your own work draw upon, depart from, synthesize, or add a new perspective to what has been said in the literature?

IV.  Research Design and Methods

This section must be well-written and logically organized because you are not actually doing the research, yet, your reader must have confidence that you have a plan worth pursuing . The reader will never have a study outcome from which to evaluate whether your methodological choices were the correct ones. Thus, the objective here is to convince the reader that your overall research design and proposed methods of analysis will correctly address the problem and that the methods will provide the means to effectively interpret the potential results. Your design and methods should be unmistakably tied to the specific aims of your study.

Describe the overall research design by building upon and drawing examples from your review of the literature. Consider not only methods that other researchers have used, but methods of data gathering that have not been used but perhaps could be. Be specific about the methodological approaches you plan to undertake to obtain information, the techniques you would use to analyze the data, and the tests of external validity to which you commit yourself [i.e., the trustworthiness by which you can generalize from your study to other people, places, events, and/or periods of time].

When describing the methods you will use, be sure to cover the following:

• Specify the research process you will undertake and the way you will interpret the results obtained in relation to the research problem. Don't just describe what you intend to achieve from applying the methods you choose, but state how you will spend your time while applying these methods [e.g., coding text from interviews to find statements about the need to change school curriculum; running a regression to determine if there is a relationship between campaign advertising on social media sites and election outcomes in Europe ].
• Keep in mind that the methodology is not just a list of tasks; it is a deliberate argument as to why techniques for gathering information add up to the best way to investigate the research problem. This is an important point because the mere listing of tasks to be performed does not demonstrate that, collectively, they effectively address the research problem. Be sure you clearly explain this.
• Anticipate and acknowledge any potential barriers and pitfalls in carrying out your research design and explain how you plan to address them. No method applied to research in the social and behavioral sciences is perfect, so you need to describe where you believe challenges may exist in obtaining data or accessing information. It's always better to acknowledge this than to have it brought up by your professor!

V.  Preliminary Suppositions and Implications

Just because you don't have to actually conduct the study and analyze the results, doesn't mean you can skip talking about the analytical process and potential implications . The purpose of this section is to argue how and in what ways you believe your research will refine, revise, or extend existing knowledge in the subject area under investigation. Depending on the aims and objectives of your study, describe how the anticipated results will impact future scholarly research, theory, practice, forms of interventions, or policy making. Note that such discussions may have either substantive [a potential new policy], theoretical [a potential new understanding], or methodological [a potential new way of analyzing] significance.   When thinking about the potential implications of your study, ask the following questions:

• What might the results mean in regards to challenging the theoretical framework and underlying assumptions that support the study?
• What suggestions for subsequent research could arise from the potential outcomes of the study?
• What will the results mean to practitioners in the natural settings of their workplace, organization, or community?
• Will the results influence programs, methods, and/or forms of intervention?
• How might the results contribute to the solution of social, economic, or other types of problems?
• Will the results influence policy decisions?
• In what way do individuals or groups benefit should your study be pursued?
• What will be improved or changed as a result of the proposed research?
• How will the results of the study be implemented and what innovations or transformative insights could emerge from the process of implementation?

NOTE:   This section should not delve into idle speculation, opinion, or be formulated on the basis of unclear evidence . The purpose is to reflect upon gaps or understudied areas of the current literature and describe how your proposed research contributes to a new understanding of the research problem should the study be implemented as designed.

ANOTHER NOTE : This section is also where you describe any potential limitations to your proposed study. While it is impossible to highlight all potential limitations because the study has yet to be conducted, you still must tell the reader where and in what form impediments may arise and how you plan to address them.

VI.  Conclusion

The conclusion reiterates the importance or significance of your proposal and provides a brief summary of the entire study . This section should be only one or two paragraphs long, emphasizing why the research problem is worth investigating, why your research study is unique, and how it should advance existing knowledge.

Someone reading this section should come away with an understanding of:

• Why the study should be done;
• The specific purpose of the study and the research questions it attempts to answer;
• The decision for why the research design and methods used where chosen over other options;
• The potential implications emerging from your proposed study of the research problem; and
• A sense of how your study fits within the broader scholarship about the research problem.

VII.  Citations

As with any scholarly research paper, you must cite the sources you used . In a standard research proposal, this section can take two forms, so consult with your professor about which one is preferred.

• References -- a list of only the sources you actually used in creating your proposal.
• Bibliography -- a list of everything you used in creating your proposal, along with additional citations to any key sources relevant to understanding the research problem.

In either case, this section should testify to the fact that you did enough preparatory work to ensure the project will complement and not just duplicate the efforts of other researchers. It demonstrates to the reader that you have a thorough understanding of prior research on the topic.

Most proposal formats have you start a new page and use the heading "References" or "Bibliography" centered at the top of the page. Cited works should always use a standard format that follows the writing style advised by the discipline of your course [e.g., education=APA; history=Chicago] or that is preferred by your professor. This section normally does not count towards the total page length of your research proposal.

Develop a Research Proposal: Writing the Proposal. Office of Library Information Services. Baltimore County Public Schools; Heath, M. Teresa Pereira and Caroline Tynan. “Crafting a Research Proposal.” The Marketing Review 10 (Summer 2010): 147-168; Jones, Mark. “Writing a Research Proposal.” In MasterClass in Geography Education: Transforming Teaching and Learning . Graham Butt, editor. (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), pp. 113-127; Juni, Muhamad Hanafiah. “Writing a Research Proposal.” International Journal of Public Health and Clinical Sciences 1 (September/October 2014): 229-240; Krathwohl, David R. How to Prepare a Dissertation Proposal: Suggestions for Students in Education and the Social and Behavioral Sciences . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005; Procter, Margaret. The Academic Proposal. The Lab Report. University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto; Punch, Keith and Wayne McGowan. "Developing and Writing a Research Proposal." In From Postgraduate to Social Scientist: A Guide to Key Skills . Nigel Gilbert, ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 59-81; Wong, Paul T. P. How to Write a Research Proposal. International Network on Personal Meaning. Trinity Western University; Writing Academic Proposals: Conferences , Articles, and Books. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Writing a Research Proposal. University Library. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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How to Write a History Research Paper

• How do I pick a topic?
• But I can’t find any material…

Research Guide

Writing guide.

See also: How to Write a Good History Essay

1. How do I pick a topic?

Picking a topic is perhaps the most important step in writing a research paper. To do it well requires several steps of refinement. First you have to determine a general area in which you have an interest (if you aren’t interested, your readers won’t be either). You do not write a paper “about the Civil War,” however, for that is such a large and vague concept that the paper will be too shallow or you will be swamped with information. The next step is to narrow your topic. Are you interested in comparison? battles? social change? politics? causes? biography? Once you reach this stage try to formulate your research topic as a question. For example, suppose that you decide to write a paper on the use of the films of the 1930’s and what they can tell historians about the Great Depression. You might turn that into the following question: “What are the primary values expressed in films of the 1930’s?” Or you might ask a quite different question, “What is the standard of living portrayed in films of the 1930’s?” There are other questions, of course, which you could have asked, but these two clearly illustrate how different two papers on the same general subject might be. By asking yourself a question as a means of starting research on a topic you will help yourself find the answers. You also open the door to loading the evidence one way or another. It will help you decide what kinds of evidence might be pertinent to your question, and it can also twist perceptions of a topic. For example, if you ask a question about economics as motivation, you are not likely to learn much about ideals, and vice versa.

2. But I can’t find any material…

No one should pick a topic without trying to figure out how one could discover pertinent information, nor should anyone settle on a topic before getting some background information about the general area. These two checks should make sure your paper is in the realm of the possible. The trick of good research is detective work and imaginative thinking on how one can find information. First try to figure out what kinds of things you should know about a topic to answer your research question. Are there statistics? Do you need personal letters? What background information should be included? Then if you do not know how to find that particular kind of information, ASK . A reference librarian or professor is much more likely to be able to steer you to the right sources if you can ask a specific question such as “Where can I find statistics on the number of interracial marriages?” than if you say “What can you find on racial attitudes?”

Use the footnotes and bibliographies of general background books as well as reference aids to lead you to special studies. If Carleton does not have the books or sources you need, try ordering through the library minitex. Many sources are also available on-line.

As your research paper takes shape you will find that you need background on people, places, events, etc. Do not just rely on some general survey for all of your background. Check the several good dictionaries of biography for background on people, or see if there is a standard book-length biography. If you are dealing with a legal matter check into the background of the judges who make the court decision and the circumstances surrounding the original incident or law. Try looking for public opinions in newspapers of the time. In other words, each bit of information you find should open the possibility of other research paths.

Learn to use several research techniques. You cannot count on a good research paper coming from browsing on one shelf at the library. A really pertinent book may be hidden in another section of the library due to classification quirks. The Readers’ Guide (Ref. A13 .R4) is not the only source for magazine articles, nor the card catalog for books. There are whole books which are listings of other books on particular topics. There are specialized indexes of magazine articles. Modern History Journals are indexed in the Social Studies and Humanities Index (Ref. A13 .R282) before 1976 After 1976 use the Social Sciences Index (REF A13 .S62) and the Humanities Index (Ref. A13 .H85). See also Historical Abstracts (Ref. D1 .H5). Reference Librarians would love to help you learn to use these research tools. It pays to browse in the reference room at the library and poke into the guides which are on the shelves. It also pays to browse the Internet.

3. Help! How do I put this together?

A. preliminary research:.

If you do not already have a general background on your topic, get the most recent good general source on the topic and read it for general orientation. On the basis of that reading formulate as clearly focused question as you can. You should generally discuss with your professor at that point whether your question is a feasible one.

B. Building a Basic Bibliography:

Use the bibliography/notes in your first general source, MUSE, and especially Historical Abstracts on cd-rom in the Library Reading Room (the computer farthest to the left in the front row as you walk past the Reference Desk — or ask there). If there is a specialized bibliography on your topic, you will certainly want to consult that as well, but these are often a bit dated.

C. Building a Full Bibliography:

Read the recent articles or chapters that seem to focus on your topic best. This will allow you to focus your research question quite a bit. Use the sources cited and/or discussed in this reading to build a full bibliography. Use such tools as Historical Abstracts (or, depending on your topic, the abstracts from a different field) and a large, convenient computer-based national library catalog (e.g. the University of California system from the “Libs” command in your VAX account or the smaller University of Minnesota library through MUSE) to check out your sources fully. For specific article searches “Uncover” (press returns for the “open access”) or possibly (less likely for history) “First Search” through “Connect to Other Resources” in MUSE can also be useful.

D. Major Research:

Now do the bulk of your research. But do not overdo it. Do not fall into the trap of reading and reading to avoid getting started on the writing. After you have the bulk of information you might need, start writing. You can fill in the smaller gaps of your research more effectively later.

A. Outline:

Write a preliminary thesis statement, expressing what you believe your major argument(s) will be. Sketch out a broad outline that indicates the structure — main points and subpoints or your argument as it seems at this time. Do not get too detailed at this point.

B. The First Draft:

On the basis of this thesis statement and outline, start writing, even pieces, as soon as you have enough information to start. Do not wait until you have filled all the research gaps. Keep on writing. If you run into smaller research questions just mark the text with a searchable symbol. It is important that you try to get to the end point of this writing as soon as possible, even if you leave pieces still in outline form at first and then fill the gaps after you get to the end.

Critical advice for larger papers: It is often more effective not to start at the point where the beginning of your paper will be. Especially the introductory paragraph is often best left until later, when you feel ready and inspired.

C. The Second Draft:

The “second draft” is a fully re-thought and rewritten version of your paper. It is at the heart of the writing process.

First, lay your first draft aside for a day or so to gain distance from it. After that break, read it over with a critical eye as you would somebody else’s paper (well, almost!). You will probably find that your first draft is still quite descriptive, rather than argumentative. It is likely to wander; your perspective and usually even the thesis seemed to change/develop as you wrote. Don’t despair. That is perfectly normal even for experienced writers (even after 40 years and a good deal of published work!). You will be frustrated. But keep questioning your paper along the following lines: What precisely are my key questions? What parts of my evidence here are really pertinent to those questions (that is, does it help me answer them)? How or in what order can I structure my paper most effectively to answer those questions most clearly and efficiently for my reader?

At this point you must outline your paper freshly. Mark up your first draft, ask tough questions whether your argument is clear and whether the order in which you present your points is effective! You must write conceptually a new paper at this point, even if you can use paragraphs and especially quotes, factual data in the new draft.

It is critical that in your new draft your paragraphs start with topic sentences that identify the argument you will be making in the particular paragraph (sometimes this can be strings of two or three paragraphs). The individual steps in your argument must be clearly reflected in the topic sentences of your paragraphs (or a couple of them linked).

D. The Third or Final Draft:

You are now ready to check for basic rules of good writing. This is when you need to check the diction, that is, the accuracy and suitability of words. Eliminate unnecessary passive or awkward noun constructions (active-voice, verbal constructions are usually more effective); improve the flow of your transitions; avoid repetitions or split infinitives; correct apostrophes in possessives and such. Make the style clear and smooth. Check that the start of your paper is interesting for the reader. Last but not least, cut out unnecessary verbiage and wordiness. Spell-check and proof-read.

– Diethelm Prowe, 1998

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Home » How To Write A Research Proposal – Step-by-Step [Template]

How To Write A Research Proposal – Step-by-Step [Template]

Table of Contents

How To Write a Research Proposal

Writing a Research proposal involves several steps to ensure a well-structured and comprehensive document. Here is an explanation of each step:

1. Title and Abstract

• Choose a concise and descriptive title that reflects the essence of your research.
• Write an abstract summarizing your research question, objectives, methodology, and expected outcomes. It should provide a brief overview of your proposal.

2. Introduction:

• Provide an introduction to your research topic, highlighting its significance and relevance.
• Clearly state the research problem or question you aim to address.
• Discuss the background and context of the study, including previous research in the field.

3. Research Objectives

• Outline the specific objectives or aims of your research. These objectives should be clear, achievable, and aligned with the research problem.

4. Literature Review:

• Conduct a comprehensive review of relevant literature and studies related to your research topic.
• Summarize key findings, identify gaps, and highlight how your research will contribute to the existing knowledge.

5. Methodology:

• Describe the research design and methodology you plan to employ to address your research objectives.
• Explain the data collection methods, instruments, and analysis techniques you will use.
• Justify why the chosen methods are appropriate and suitable for your research.

6. Timeline:

• Create a timeline or schedule that outlines the major milestones and activities of your research project.
• Break down the research process into smaller tasks and estimate the time required for each task.

7. Resources:

• Identify the resources needed for your research, such as access to specific databases, equipment, or funding.
• Explain how you will acquire or utilize these resources to carry out your research effectively.

8. Ethical Considerations:

• Discuss any ethical issues that may arise during your research and explain how you plan to address them.
• If your research involves human subjects, explain how you will ensure their informed consent and privacy.

9. Expected Outcomes and Significance:

• Clearly state the expected outcomes or results of your research.
• Highlight the potential impact and significance of your research in advancing knowledge or addressing practical issues.

10. References:

• Provide a list of all the references cited in your proposal, following a consistent citation style (e.g., APA, MLA).

11. Appendices:

• Include any additional supporting materials, such as survey questionnaires, interview guides, or data analysis plans.

Research Proposal Format

The format of a research proposal may vary depending on the specific requirements of the institution or funding agency. However, the following is a commonly used format for a research proposal:

1. Title Page:

• Include the title of your research proposal, your name, your affiliation or institution, and the date.

2. Abstract:

• Provide a brief summary of your research proposal, highlighting the research problem, objectives, methodology, and expected outcomes.

3. Introduction:

• Introduce the research topic and provide background information.
• State the research problem or question you aim to address.
• Explain the significance and relevance of the research.
• Review relevant literature and studies related to your research topic.
• Summarize key findings and identify gaps in the existing knowledge.
• Explain how your research will contribute to filling those gaps.

5. Research Objectives:

• Clearly state the specific objectives or aims of your research.
• Ensure that the objectives are clear, focused, and aligned with the research problem.

6. Methodology:

• Describe the research design and methodology you plan to use.
• Explain the data collection methods, instruments, and analysis techniques.
• Justify why the chosen methods are appropriate for your research.

7. Timeline:

8. Resources:

• Explain how you will acquire or utilize these resources effectively.

9. Ethical Considerations:

• If applicable, explain how you will ensure informed consent and protect the privacy of research participants.

10. Expected Outcomes and Significance:

11. References:

12. Appendices:

Research Proposal Template

Here’s a template for a research proposal:

1. Introduction:

2. Literature Review:

3. Research Objectives:

4. Methodology:

5. Timeline:

6. Resources:

7. Ethical Considerations:

8. Expected Outcomes and Significance:

9. References:

10. Appendices:

Research Proposal Sample

Title: The Impact of Online Education on Student Learning Outcomes: A Comparative Study

1. Introduction

Online education has gained significant prominence in recent years, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This research proposal aims to investigate the impact of online education on student learning outcomes by comparing them with traditional face-to-face instruction. The study will explore various aspects of online education, such as instructional methods, student engagement, and academic performance, to provide insights into the effectiveness of online learning.

2. Objectives

The main objectives of this research are as follows:

• To compare student learning outcomes between online and traditional face-to-face education.
• To examine the factors influencing student engagement in online learning environments.
• To assess the effectiveness of different instructional methods employed in online education.
• To identify challenges and opportunities associated with online education and suggest recommendations for improvement.

3. Methodology

3.1 Study Design

This research will utilize a mixed-methods approach to gather both quantitative and qualitative data. The study will include the following components:

3.2 Participants

The research will involve undergraduate students from two universities, one offering online education and the other providing face-to-face instruction. A total of 500 students (250 from each university) will be selected randomly to participate in the study.

3.3 Data Collection

The research will employ the following data collection methods:

• Quantitative: Pre- and post-assessments will be conducted to measure students’ learning outcomes. Data on student demographics and academic performance will also be collected from university records.
• Qualitative: Focus group discussions and individual interviews will be conducted with students to gather their perceptions and experiences regarding online education.

3.4 Data Analysis

Quantitative data will be analyzed using statistical software, employing descriptive statistics, t-tests, and regression analysis. Qualitative data will be transcribed, coded, and analyzed thematically to identify recurring patterns and themes.

4. Ethical Considerations

The study will adhere to ethical guidelines, ensuring the privacy and confidentiality of participants. Informed consent will be obtained, and participants will have the right to withdraw from the study at any time.

5. Significance and Expected Outcomes

This research will contribute to the existing literature by providing empirical evidence on the impact of online education on student learning outcomes. The findings will help educational institutions and policymakers make informed decisions about incorporating online learning methods and improving the quality of online education. Moreover, the study will identify potential challenges and opportunities related to online education and offer recommendations for enhancing student engagement and overall learning outcomes.

6. Timeline

The proposed research will be conducted over a period of 12 months, including data collection, analysis, and report writing.

The estimated budget for this research includes expenses related to data collection, software licenses, participant compensation, and research assistance. A detailed budget breakdown will be provided in the final research plan.

8. Conclusion

This research proposal aims to investigate the impact of online education on student learning outcomes through a comparative study with traditional face-to-face instruction. By exploring various dimensions of online education, this research will provide valuable insights into the effectiveness and challenges associated with online learning. The findings will contribute to the ongoing discourse on educational practices and help shape future strategies for maximizing student learning outcomes in online education settings.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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Advanced Research Methods

• Writing a Research Proposal
• What Is Research?
• Library Research

What Is a Research Proposal?

Reference books.

• Writing the Research Paper
• Presenting the Research Paper

When applying for a research grant or scholarship, or, just before you start a major research project, you may be asked to write a preliminary document that includes basic information about your future research. This is the information that is usually needed in your proposal:

• The topic and goal of the research project.
• The kind of result expected from the research.
• The theory or framework in which the research will be done and presented.
• What kind of methods will be used (statistical, empirical, etc.).
• Short reference on the preliminary scholarship and why your research project is needed; how will it continue/justify/disprove the previous scholarship.
• How much will the research project cost; how will it be budgeted (what for the money will be spent).
• Why is it you who can do this research and not somebody else.

Most agencies that offer scholarships or grants provide information about the required format of the proposal. It may include filling out templates, types of information they need, suggested/maximum length of the proposal, etc.

Research proposal formats vary depending on the size of the planned research, the number of participants, the discipline, the characteristics of the research, etc. The following outline assumes an individual researcher. This is just a SAMPLE; several other ways are equally good and can be successful. If possible, discuss your research proposal with an expert in writing, a professor, your colleague, another student who already wrote successful proposals, etc.

• Author, author's affiliation
• Explain the topic and why you chose it. If possible explain your goal/outcome of the research . How much time you need to complete the research?
• Give a brief summary of previous scholarship and explain why your topic and goals are important.
• Relate your planned research to previous scholarship. What will your research add to our knowledge of the topic.
• Break down the main topic into smaller research questions. List them one by one and explain why these questions need to be investigated. Relate them to previous scholarship.
• Include your hypothesis into the descriptions of the detailed research issues if you have one. Explain why it is important to justify your hypothesis.
• This part depends of the methods conducted in the research process. List the methods; explain how the results will be presented; how they will be assessed.
• Explain what kind of results will justify or  disprove your hypothesis. 
• Explain how much money you need.
• Explain the details of the budget (how much you want to spend for what).
• Describe why your research is important.
• List the sources you have used for writing the research proposal, including a few main citations of the preliminary scholarship.

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How to Write a PhD Research Proposal

Starting on PhD research is a big step in a researcher’s academic journey, and submitting a research proposal is a significant part of it. Indeed, many PhD scholars seek guidance on how to write a PhD research proposal , which is the foundational document that outlines the scope, objectives, and methodology of their prospective doctoral study. This article takes a look at the essential elements of a PhD research proposal and discuss practical steps to help develop an effective and strong document.  

What is a PhD Research Proposal ?  

Think of a PhD research proposal as a blueprint for your research. It lays out the main questions you want to seek answers to in your study, and presents an overview of the field you are planning to dive into. The PhD research proposal is not just about summarizing what is already available in the public domain. It is a critical document that demonstrates the feasibility, significance, and originality of the proposed research, and therefore, plays a crucial role in influencing admission decisions and securing funding opportunities. It also explains how your research is different and new and underscores the unique angles, perspectives and originality of your area of study.[ 1]    

Why is a PhD Research Proposal Needed?  

Even though your research proposal focuses on what you plan to do in the future, supervisors and funders also want to see what you have already achieved academically. Their interest lies in how well you understand the existing research, including recent studies and discussions in your academic field.   

Therefore, it is essential to showcase your awareness about gaps in current knowledge and how your research will develop new knowledge and perspectives. Presenting a clear and detailed picture of this background is critical.[ 2]  

How to Structure Your PhD Research Proposal ?  

Research proposals can vary based on the institution you wish to send the proposal to or your subject of study, but there is a broad structure that needs to be followed.[ 3][4][5]  A good PhD research proposal structure should highlight what makes your idea unique, feasible, and significant.   

Follow these proven tips to structure a PhD research proposal and make it stand out:  

• Provisional Title: The title should not only describe the subject matter but also hint at your approach or main question.   
• Key Question: The key question is crucial for defining the scope and purpose of the research, making sure everything stays clear and organized.  
• Topic Description: This section serves to introduce readers to the topic being studied, outlines its key focus areas, and helps establish a clear context for the study.   
• Existing Knowledge: Here, researchers are required to provide a brief outline of existing knowledge drawn from seminal works, recent research findings, and ongoing debates and highlight gaps in the literature, demonstrating their awareness of existing scholarship.  
• Detailed Bibliography: A detailed bibliography not only reflects the thoroughness of the literature review but also provides credibility to the proposed study. It allows reviewers to assess the quality and relevance of sources and enables them to gauge the scholarly merit of the PhD proposal.  
• Research Methodology: Details of a comprehensive plan outlining the methodology, procedures, and techniques that will be employed to address the research objectives are included here. Methodology includes information on any special facilities, resources, or equipment required for data collection, analysis, or experimentation.   
• Research Plan: This section provides a structured outline of the tasks and activities to be undertaken, along with their respective deadlines or milestones. It includes key phases such as literature review, data collection, analysis, and writing up the findings.   

How Long Should a PhD Research Proposal be?  

A research proposal typically spans approximately 2,500 words, although there is flexibility in the length as there is no strict upper or lower limit. However, the length may vary depending on the requirements of the institution or funding agency.   

Tips for Writing Your PhD Research Proposal  

Now that you understand the structure of a PhD research proposal , here are some tips to help you craft a compelling document: [7]    

• Start early: Begin drafting your research proposal well in advance to allow yourself ample time for revisions and refinement.   
• Be specific: Provide clear and detailed explanations of your objectives, methodology, and expected outcomes.   
• Seek feedback: Share your proposal with peers or advisors to receive constructive feedback and suggestions for improvement.   
• Write clearly and concisely: Use clear and concise language to convey your ideas effectively, avoiding unnecessary jargon or technical terms.   
• Be ethical: Address any ethical considerations related to your research, such as participant consent or data privacy.  
• Revise and proofread: Take time to revise, proofread and proofread again. Best to weed out any inconsistencies and errors for a favourable impression and to clearly communicate your ideas.  
• Be passionate: Clearly convey your enthusiasm for the research topic and potential impact of your proposed study. Let your passion for your research topic shine through your proposal.  

References:  

• How to write a PhD research proposal – University of Liverpool  
• How to write a successful research proposal – Prospects  
• How to write a good PhD proposal – The University of Queensland  
• Writing a research proposal – Sociological Studies – The University of Sheffield  
• Writing a Good PhD Research Proposal – Researchgate  
• Guidelines to Writing a Research Proposal – University of Oxford  
• Top tips for writing your research proposal – University of Birmingham  

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History Essays Help

How to write a history research proposal like a pro.

• November 15, 2023

A history research proposal serves as a plan for any academic exploration. Learning how to write a history research proposal is essential as it helps in showcasing your skills in the historical landscape. Crafting a compelling research proposal requires an effective plan and a proper understanding of the information in the historical field.

To help you begin this complex action with ease, There is an overall date that can guide you to craft a history research proposal like a pro. In this blog post, we will explore the history research proposal and provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to write one like a professional.

What is a historical research proposal?

A historical research proposal is a written plan that summarizes a proposed research project in the history field. It explains the details of the methodology, objectives, and scope of a historical research proposal. A historical research proposal simply involves a literature review of research questions, proposed methodology, theoretical framework and potential results.

Here are some key elements of a history research paper proposal:

Start with an interesting, relevant, and significant title that expresses the nature of your research.

• Introduction

Write an introduction that explains the background of the selected topic, why you chose it and present the research question.

• Research question and objectives

Create a clear research question that will guide you or will form the core of your paper. Elaborate the scope of your study and state the particular historical events, themes, or facts that will be the centre of your research.

• Literature review

Conduct a review of the existing literature and debates relating to your chosen topic. Consider what other scholars have discussed about the topic you have chosen for your history paper, state the limitations in the current literature, and explain how your research will solve the issues or enhance existing knowledge.

• Methods and materials

Determine the appropriate research methodology for your study. Give details of all the materials you will use when researching for your history paper project. Specify your data collection methods, whether it involves qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, oral history reviews, or archival research. State the ethical considerations involved in your research and include a summary of the chosen studies.

• Historical context and significance

Provide a deeper explanation of the historical context that surrounds your research. Highlight the significance of your research and explain how your study will enhance your understanding of the historical topic or period you have chosen.

• Historical interpretation (if applicable)

If your study is based on a theoretical framework, highlight it and explain how it enlightens your knowledge of the research.

• Structure and timeline

Highlight the proposed structure of your history research paper. Ensure you include the chapters and give the exact timeline for finishing each level of the research procedure. The timeline should involve writing, analysis, data correction, and revision.

Provide a reference list or an introductory bibliography highlighting the sources you intend to use for your research.

• Ethical considerations

State the possible ethical considerations related to your research. Explain your plans on doing these ethical issues and guarantee the protection of the rights and privacy of participants.

Write a summary of the main points of your proposal explaining the benefits of your research in enhancing historical understanding and knowledge. Support the significance of your research topic and its future contributions to the field of History.

What is the format of writing a research proposal?

A research proposal format can change depending on the particular specifications of the academic institution or the intended audience.

Here are some key sections of a representative research proposal format:

This section includes the title of your research proposal, the name of the researcher, the name of the academic institution, and the date of submission.

Includes a summary of the research project emphasizing the objectives, methodology and potential outcomes of the research.

Involves an outline of the research topic, its importance, and its objectives.

Includes an overall review of existing literature related to your research topic, emphasizing the importance of your proposed research in filling gaps that have not been addressed in the existing scholarly work.

Includes the particular methods, techniques, and approaches that will be used in the research.

• Plan and timeline

This section involves the structure and timeline for each level of your research process.

• Outcomes and significance

Includes an explanation of the expected outcomes, the importance of the proposed research, and its possible impacts.

Provides a list of the sources cited in the research proposal. They should be formatted according to the specified citation styles, such as Apa MLA, and meet the recommendations of the institution.

Includes any extra materials that enhance the research proposal, for example, data collection tools, supplementary information and research instruments.

What are the 5 steps of writing a research proposal?

The following and some general steps in writing a research proposal:

• Choosing the research topic and objectives

Start identifying a research topic that fits your interests and skills. Highlight the objectives of your research and create a particular question you plan to address throughout your research.

• Carry out an overall literature review

Conduct a thorough review of the existing literature related to your topic. Emphasize the areas that have not been appropriately researched in previous studies and state how the proposed research will help fill these gaps.

• Creating the methodology and research techniques

State the methodology you plan to use in your research and develop a research plan that highlights the steps, timeline, and activities of each level of the research process.

• Structure the proposal and write the narrative

Arrange your research proposal into clear sections for example, introduction, methodology, literature review, plan and timeline, expected outcomes, and references. Write a captivating narrative that will communicate the significance of your research topic, objectives, and methodologies to the intended audience.

• Revise and edit the proposal

Conduct a proper review of your research proposal and ensure that it is according to the guidelines and recommendations of the academic institution. Revise and edit the proposal to check for coherence, clarity and conciseness.

Sample history research proposals

The following is a sample research proposal to help you have a better understanding of how to write your research proposal.

Sample history research proposal 1: Women’s activism and suffrage movement in the 20th century United States: a comparative analysis.

1.      Research question

How did the strategies and achievements of women’s suffrage movements in the 20th-century United States vary based on factors such as regional differences, racial diversity, and socio-economic backgrounds

2.      Historical context

This research aims to explore various women’s activism and suffrage movements that emerged in the 20th century, stating their career techniques, achievements and the wider sociopolitical context that formed their paths. By exploring this narrative of women’s activism around various regions and communities, this research aims to investigate the multifaceted dimensions of the suffrage movements, uncovering the intersectionality of class, race, and gender that led to the development of the struggle for women’s rights.

3.      Scope and objectives

The study will focus on analyzing the differences and similarities of the techniques used by different women’s suffrage movements in the 20th century, the intersectionality of race, class, and gender within the background of women’s activism and suffrage, and the impacts of women’s activism on broader social and political reforms during the 20th century in the United States.

4.      Methodology

This research will involve a comprehensive evaluation of primary sources, a combination of archival analysis and qualitative comparative analysis research methods, including the assessment of historical documents and statistical data. Oral interviews and personal narratives will also be conducted to provide an overall understanding of the lived experiences of women involved in the suffrage movements.

5.      Timeline and budget

The research is approximated to be finished within two years, with particular milestones set for data collection analysis and the writing process. The budget will account for travel expenses related to relevant archives, data transcription services, and the acquisition of primary and secondary sources, ensuring overall and thorough research.

6.      Ethical considerations

This study will adhere to ethical regulations and protect the privacy and confidentiality of the participants. It will apply informed consent principles and the experiences of individuals who will contribute to oral histories will be represented accurately and respectively.

7.      Conclusion

Through a comprehensive evaluation of women’s activism and suffrage movement in the 20th century United States, this study focuses on offering a detailed and overall knowledge of the various achievements and strategies of women in their struggle for political privilege. By discussing the intersectionality of class, gender, and race within the suffrage movement, this research aims to provide a more significant and comprehensive historical narrative, revealing the indispensable participation of women in advancing the social-political field of 20th-century America.

History Ph.D. research proposal topics

Here are some history PhD research proposal topics you can use for your research:

•  A comparative Study of the American and French Revolutions and its impact
•  The impact of urbanization and modernity in 19th-century Europe and its contribution to the transformations in cityscapes and societal structures
• Analyzing crusades and their impacts on cross-cultural exchanges and religious conflict in the Medieval Mediterranean
• A military History Perspective on the evolution of warfare tactics and technologies in ancient China
•  A study of the colonial encounters in Africa and their perspectives on resistance, collaboration, and cultural hybridity
• A comparative Analysis of cultural and artistic exchange in the Byzantine and Islamic world
•  A Study of Indigenous Spiritual Practices and Colonial Influences in Columbian Mesoamerica
• Historical analysis of ethnic conflicts and state-building that contributed to nationalism and identity formation in the Balkans
• The impact of the Mongol Empire on Eurasian societies, including the economic, political, and cultural consequences
• A study of Cold War diplomacy and global alliances drawing perspectives from the non-aligned movement

Writing a history research proposal needs thorough research, proper planning, and knowledge of the subject matter. By following the structure we have provided, you can be able to create a captivating proposal that will showcase your skills and knowledge in historical research and experience in the historical landscape.

If you need help crafting your historical research proposal, essay, or history assignments, visit us at historyessayshelp.com and enjoy the excellent work of professionals.

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Applicants must submit a detailed research proposal. The full proposal, preferably between 1,000 and 1,500 words, should include at least the following elements:

• a clear description of the proposed thesis topic, indicating the research problem and expected scope of the investigation;
• a description of how the proposed topic fits into the existing field;
• an indication of how the research is to be carried out (e.g. study of written sources, social surveys, fieldwork);
• an indication of why the University of Aberdeen is suited to the proposed research (e.g. staff expertise, library or archival resources).

Candidates admitted to PhD study will not be bound by the proposal that accompanies the application. Its purpose is to reveal something of the applicant’s preparation and insight. During their first months of work doctoral students often adjust their proposals in consultation with their advisors, who may also request a fuller proposal (e.g. with chapter outlines and provisional bibliography) as the project takes shape.

In Aberdeen as elsewhere in the UK, the dissertation is examined by internal and external examiners other than the candidate’s supervisor. They will expect a dissertation that makes an original and significant contribution to knowledge.

Research proposals should be uploaded online with your application.

Megamenu Global

Megamenu featured, megamenu social, sample thesis proposals.

Lanfranc of Bec: Confrontation and Compromise Imperial Expansion and the Evolution of the South and Southeast Asian economies Nantucket’s Role in the War of 1812 Letters Home: Records of the Experiences of Common Soldiers in the American Civil War Writing for Stalin: American Journalists in the USSR, 1928-1941 Dismal Scientists, Diplomats, and Spooks: Bissell, Milliken, and Rostow and Their Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy Media Reflections of Western Public Opinion in the Suez Crisis The Implications, Effects, and Uses of Media in the Emmett Till Lynching Cromwell Lives while Mason Stalks: Irish Nationalism and Historical Memory during the Troubles ‘My broken dreams of peace and socialism’: Youth propaganda, personality, and selfhood in the GDR, 1979-1989.

Lanfranc of Bec: Confrontation and Compromise

The ecclesiastical history of Europe in the 11th century revolves around the investiture conflict and the Gregorian reform effort. These two issues forced their way into religious lives around the continent. Even in England, on the edge of the world, Anglo-Saxon and Norman reformers grappled with these challenges to the construction of a “universal church.” I would like to enter into this world through the case study of Lanfranc of Bec. Lanfranc is an apt choice for this intensive focus because of the apparent philosophical paradoxes that dominated his life.

Early in his career, Lanfranc was a staunch supporter of Pope Leo IX in the Eucharistic controversy with Berengar of Tours. The doctrine of transubstantiation was, however, less important to Lanfranc than the idea of “the universal church.” Significantly, this new church was to be united under the stronger and more demanding popes in Rome who were early supporters of the young Italian monk. Lanfranc’s transformation began when was appointed abbot of St. Etienne, Caen in 1063 under the direct patronage of William the Conqueror. This relationship continued with Lanfranc’s promotion to Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070. In this role, Lanfranc severed all most traditional ties with Rome. He did command the right to supervise and veto any papal synods planned for England. In addition, Lanfranc even skipped the mandatory pilgrimage to Rome to receive the pallium, a tradition for English bishops that dated back to Gregory the Great and the 6th century.

Traditional scholarship has tended to portray this break as pragmatic. Lanfranc’s new master, William, demanded a more present loyalty than the faraway Church of St. Peter’s. Loyalty in turn led to advancement and a place in religious governance of countless souls in England. To justify these mercenary considerations scholars described the admittedly conservative Lanfranc as a Carolingian bishop, a relic of an empire then dead for two centuries. The Carolingian era was a time of dramatic expansion for the church, largely under the protections of its secular Christian protector, Charlemagne. It is easy to see parallels, at least from the Norman point of view, between the conquest of England in 1066 and the forceful conversion of the Saxons in 8th century. Both these invasions brought subject peoples in line with a new, larger Christendom. Historians have written about Lanfranc as a player within this system of sacred reform spearheaded by the secular.

In my study I plan to reexamine this view. Although the Archbishop did abandon Gregory VII at the time of his greatest need, the investiture conflict, Lanfranc’s role in the English reform need not be seen as driven by Normandy rather than Rome. For example, William’s concern for the piety of his new subjects was at best secondary to an interest in appointing bishops who would maintain order on the tumultuous island in place of the absentee king. Thus it was with a relatively free hand that Lanfranc directly reformed both Canterbury and England as a whole. Some of these changes, like his emphasis on clerical celibacy, were directly in line with the Gregorian reforms that he had supposedly renounced upon his arrival. In other instances, Lanfranc was more open minded to the religious practices that preceded him. Unlike other Norman bishops that arrived after the conquest, the Archbishop was far more accommodating to both local English saints and the institution of monastic cathedrals. These examples create a far more complex picture of Lanfranc. It is clear that he was more loyal to the Gregorian reform movement than to any particular pontiff occupying the See of St. Peter. At the same time, his syncretistic approach would have been at odds with any of the uncompromising popes that he had dealings with. These incongruous details suggest the need to revise traditional interpretations of Lanfranc’s life. Within a wider scope, I hope to demonstrate how the clergy positioned themselves in the larger conflict between the church and state at this time.

In pursuing this topic I want to integrate traditional and less traditional sources in an attempt to create a fresh portrayal. Any study of medieval political and ecclesiastical history will rely heavily on the chroniclers. Specifically I will use the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Eadmer’s Vita Anselmi for the Anglo-Saxon perspective. For the Norman point of view I will use chronicles by William of Jumièges and Gilbert Crispin. To supplement these more formally produced histories, I will read Lanfranc’s own works including his major treatise on the Eucharist, the Liber Corpore et Sanguine Domini, which I fail to believe he so easily abandoned on his arrival to England. In addition, his personal correspondence and monastic constitutions, both of which have been recently republished, will be usefully in understanding his own views, whether they be practical or theological. Lastly, I want to use architectural analyses of the church that Lanfranc built at Canterbury and studies of relic worship surrounding the remains of local saints like Dunstan and Theodore. These less traditional sources, while harder to obtain, will, I hope, provide new insight into Lanfranc’s life and, at the very least, provide social and cultural context for this specific period. The result will be a study that uses the analysis of Lanfranc to address larger question concerning the orientation of individuals within 11th century conflicts.

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Imperial Expansion and the Evolution of the South and Southeast Asian economies

The arrival of Vasco De Gama in 1498 on the beaches of modern-day Calicut marked the beginning of the intensification of economic relations between East and West, and the first encounter of Europeans with an ancient and complex commercial network reaching by land and sea from Europe to China, handling trade and traffic of far greater value than anything known in the West. Luxury products from China, silk and precious metals from Iran, the cotton textiles of India, the gold and ivory of East Africa, and the spices of Indonesia were all connected through highly advanced and dense trading networks. While the Indian economy is often represented as having stagnated under the weight of European intrusions, it is clear that particularly in coastal areas, a brisk and dynamic coastal trade flourished under the aegis of European rule. The creation of a world market in commodities such as rice gold, silver, spices, textiles and other raw materials occurred simultaneous with displacement of local markets as European imperial reach was extended over an increasingly wide part of the globe.

By the mid 18th century, the two great chartered companies, the British East India Company and the VOC (Dutch East India Company) had transformed from mere commercial trading ventures to entities that dominated economic relationships with Asian economies and began to acquire auxiliary governmental and military functions. By 1765 the British East India Company was effectively the de facto sovereign in Bengal by virtue of its overwhelming military power in the region, and its acquisition of the diwani, or the right to collect territorial revenues. For both the Dutch and British East India Companies, it is clear that the acquisition of territorial empires and quasi-governmental functions had profound effects upon the nature, scope, and distribution of investment within the Companies from Europe, but also upon the character of the relationship between indigenous traders, merchants, and financiers, and Europeans. Lakshmi Subramanian, a historian who has published some of the most important works dealing with the relationship of the Marathas and the British in Bombay, mentions how Law de Lauriston, the ex-Governor General of French India, “recognized the local banking community in 1777 as the decisive factor in any future alliance of the French and Indian States against their inveterate antagonist the English East India Company.” In a recent paper Chaudhury asserts how the local credit markets of eastern India, particularly Bengal, were seminal in rescuing financially several of the European Companies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries from chronic shortages of working capital, yet with victory at Plessy and the transformation of the British role in Bengal, the nature of the relationship between local creditors and European merchants changed dramatically.

This project will comparatively look at the Dutch and British East India Companies and their relationships with groups such as the Marathas, the Chettiars, and the Chinese banking and mercantile families, and will draw upon resources that deal with the relationships of other European powers with indigenous merchants and financiers. By examining the interaction of indigenous financial institutions and capital with Europeans in Asia, particularly South and Southeast Asia, I am hoping to explore many aspects of the Asian economies of the 17th-19th century under the aegis of this broader topic, such as the different development paths between European and Asian societies, the dynamics of the extension of European power in south and southeast Asia, and the radically different financial and economic structures that characterized Asian societies prior to the expansion of Europe, and how the imposition of colonial rule altered (or didn’t) the dynamics of indigenous capital. This project will look at the relationship from the European perspective by utilizing Dutch and British East India Company records. Particularly in recent years, several historians have sought to expand our understanding of the relationship between European traders and Indian merchants and financiers, and this project will attempt to both build upon their work and form a more global and far-reaching conclusion about the role of indigenous capital in imperial expansion by looking at the phenomenon from a comparative perspective.

The chief question I am seeking out to answer is to define and delineate the nature of the relationship between indigenous credit institutions and imperial expansion; effectively, examine the relationship between native bankers, financiers, and traders, and the Europeans who came to trade and later colonize. Above all, I hope to posit a link between these economic relationships, and changes to the political and economic map of Asia.

Nantucket’s Role in the War of 1812

I am a junior history major currently studying abroad at the Williams-Exeter in Oxford Programme. Since August, I have been casually researching the whaling industry on Nantucket during the late 18th to mid-19th century. I am committed to Nantucket as a general topic not only because its history is exceedingly interesting to me but also because there is a wealth of primary data. For example, the Nantucket Historical Association boasts 5000 volumes (ship logs, diaries, legal documents, etc.) that are accessible to scholars.

Although I have explored a number of topics within Nantucket history, I find myself returning again and again to the whaling industry. In particular, I am intrigued by Nantucket’s role in the 1812 war. Nantucket was the only US territory to seek and receive a truce with Great Britain, formally withdrawing from the war in 1814. The islanders were motivated to pursue neutrality because of the importance of the whaling industry as the island’s livelihood and the British fleet’s threat to Nantucket ships. Furthermore, the US government not only offered little to no protection for the islanders but also alienated them by taxing them heavily. In order to understand the1814 treaty, I anticipate needing to research two other areas that I believe are connected: first, how did Nantucket’s experiences in the American Revolution inform and shape its course of action in 1812? During the Revolution, the island declared neutrality, probably because Nantucket whalers did not care which side was victorious, so long as the whaling industry survived the war. The whalers had appealed to other Quakers in England and won an amendment to the parliamentary motion to restrict whaling in New England. However, because the law was not enforced properly, the island fell into economic depression. British naval ships not only prevented Nantucket whalers from selling spermaceti oil to London, its biggest market, but also captured many of their ships. Any threat to the whaling industry would be a true moment of crisis because most of the island was directly or indirectly involved in whaling, and many of the islanders were not rich enough to relocate their families to the mainland. Certainly, there were members of the community in 1812 who would have remembered this treatment by the British and the economic depression.

The second issue that I anticipate addressing pertains to Nantucket’s sense of identity: how “American” did they feel? The circumstances under which the island declared neutrality makes the issue of patriotism more oblique because the “betrayal” of the US can be explained by the need for economic stability without addressing the issue of identity. In these early stages of nationhood, the island seems to have acted very differently from other whaling communities in the US. Socially and politically, Nantucket seemed to be more liberal than the mainland, especially in terms of the role of women and the political (but not always social) equality of African Americans. For example, racial segregation in schools was banned in the 1850s in a legal case that resembles Brown vs. Board of Education. As I have mentioned above, American policies also sometimes alienated the islanders. In the first two years of the 1812 war, Nantucket whaling was almost exclusively threatened not by the British fleet but by American policy, as Congress placed an embargo on trade with Britain; unfortunately, only days after Congress lifted the embargo, Britain enforced is own against New England. During the American Revolution, Nantucket toyed with the idea of becoming either an independent or a British territory. Did it face the same choices in 1812?

Primary Sources :

A Selection from the Nantucket Historical Society Manuscripts Collection:

Allen Family Papers, 1790-1930. Banks on Nantucket, 1804-1985. Barker Family Papers, 1720-1853. Benevolent Society’s Papers, 1814-1976. Carey Family Papers, 1809-1894. Citizens News Room Record. Charles Congdon Collection, 1671-1844. Clapp Family Papers, 1804-1896. Margaret Coffin Papers/Small Collection, 1761-1913. Mary M Coffin Collection, 1806-1865. William Coffin Letter Book, 1811-1833. Coleman Family Papers, 1729-1873. Crosby Family Papers. 1812-1893. Ewer Family Papers, 1813-1875. Fish Family Papers, 1708-1916. Paddock Family Papers, 1755-1853, Phebe Coffin Hanaford Papers, 1848-1929. Jones Family Papers, 1817-1868. Joy Family Papers, 1806-1880. Keziah Coffin Fanning Papers, 1775-1812. Macy Family Papers/ Cloyes Collection, 1812-1869. Myrick Family Papers, 1796-1863. Nantucket Censuses Collection, 1796-1900. Nantucket Monthly Meeting of Friends’ Papers, 1664-1889. Nantucket Monthly Meeting of Friends’ Records, 1672-1944. Ray Family Papers, 1776-1844. Starbuck Family Papers, 1662-1973. Worth Family Papers, 1743-1912. Henry Barnard Worth Collection, 1641-1905.

(I’ve only gone through half of the list of available manuscripts, so I expect that there should be a lot more sources of interest from the Nantucket Historical Society collection. Information about Nantucket Historical Society archives found on www.nha.org)

Annals of Congress, 13th Congress, 2d session. Hutchinson, Thomas. History of Massachusetts, Vol. II, Boston: Thomas & Andrews, 1767. Journal of Samuel Swain, 1813-1837. “Keziah Coffin Fanning’s Diary,” Historical Nantucket 6 (July 1958). Macy, Obed. The History of Nantucket (New York: Research Reprints, 1970 [1835]). Napier, Henry Edward. New England Blockaded in 1814: The Journal of Henry Edward Napier, Lieutenant in H.M.S ‘Nymphe,’ ed. Walter Muir Whitehill. Salem, MA: Peabody Museum, 1939. “Notes on Nantucket. August 1st 1807,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 3 (1815). Scoresby, William. History and Description of the Northern Whale Fisheries, Vol. II. Edinburgh, 1820.

Secondary :

Anderson, Florence Bennet. Through the Hawse-Hole: The True Story of a Nantucket Whaling Captain. New York: Macmillan Co., 1932. Byers, Edward. The Nation of Nantucket: Society and Politics in an Early American Commercial Center, 1660-1820. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987. Graham, Gerald S. “The Migrations of the Nantucket Whale Fishery: An Episode in British Colonial Policy.” The New England Quarterly 8, no. 2 (Jun. 1935):179-202. Davis, Ralph. The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London: David & Charles, 1972. Hegarty, Reginald B. Returns of Whaling Vessels Sailing from American Ports: A Continuation of Alexander Starbuck’s “History of the American Whale Fishery” 1876-1928. New Bedford, MA: Old Dartmouth Historical Society and Whaling Museum, 1959. Hickey, Donald R. “American Trade Restrictions during the War of 1812.” Journal of American History 68, no. 3 (Dec. 1981): 517-538. Hohman, Elmo Paul. The American Whaleman: A Study of the Life and Labor in the American Whaling Industry. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1928. Horsman, Reginald. “Nantucket’s Peace Treaty with England in 1814.” New England Quarterly 54, no. 2 (Jun. 1981): 180-198. Horsman, Reginald. The War of 1812. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. Johnson, Robert. “Black-White Relations on Nantucket.” Historical Nantucket (Spring 2002). Taken from www.nha.org. Kugler, Richard C. “The Whale Oil Trade, 1750-1775,” Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1980. Main, Jackson Turner. The Social Structure of Revolutionary America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. McDevitt, Joseph L. The House of Rotch: Whaling Merchants of Massachusetts, 1734-1828. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1986. Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1979. Tower, Walter. A History of an American Whalefishery, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1907. Starbuck, Alexander. History of Nantucket, Boston: C. E. Goodspeed Co.,1924. ______. History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876. Repr., 2 vols., with preface by Stuart C. Sherman. New York: Argosy Antiquarian, 1964. Vickers, Daniel Frederick. “Maritime Labor in Colonial Massachusetts: A Case Study of the Essex County Cod Fishery and the Whaling Industry of Nantucket, 1630-1775.” Ph.D. Thesis, Princeton University, 1981.

Letters Home: Records of the Experiences of Common Soldiers in the American Civil War

The idea for my honors thesis project is inspired by my work last summer in the Chapin Library of Rare Books at Williams. I spent the summer reading and organizing the library’s collection of Civil War soldiers’ letters—a group of about one thousand letters written by men in army camps to the loved ones they left behind at home. Besides a cursory chronological arrangement, no one before me had touched these letters since the library acquired them. For me they represented a vast untapped historical resource—they were sitting in a closet waiting to be discovered, and I was the first to explore their possibilities. I found myself completely absorbed, squinting at line after line of cramped, faded script and imagining the words flowing haltingly from the authors’ pens as they crouched by the light of a sputtering campfire, the booming of cannon fire echoing in the distance. It fascinated me how these young men portrayed their experiences to family members back home—reassuring them of their safety and expressing enthusiasm for their causes while also betraying paralyzing fear and devastating homesickness. In one particularly memorable series of letters a Union soldier continued to write home to his wife from the battlefield during a siege of a Confederate fort, knowing that no mail was running and suspecting that the days he spent crouching under fire in the brush of a Louisiana forest would be his last. But somehow his letters did get through, and the final letter in the sequence told of his harrowing escape to a field hospital, giving me the hope that he and his wife were reunited soon afterwards.

The words of letters like these haunted me after I left work everyday, and stayed with me even after I left Williams for the year. As I started thinking about my plans for my honors thesis, I knew that I wanted to work closely with the letters in the Chapin collection. In my thesis, I plan to explore the average soldier’s experience of the war, using Union and Confederate sources in the form of the letters soldiers sent home to their families and friends. The Chapin Library’s collection is mainly made up of Union letters, so the Union side will be heavily based upon that resource. For the upcoming summer, I have been granted a summer research fellowship from Williams. My plan for this project is to gather resources from the Confederate side, visiting facilities in Virginia that hold extensive collections of Confederate letters. I am deeply interested in letting the authors of the letters speak for themselves so I will be comparing and contrasting specific experiences related by specific soldiers in relation to broader questions such as what reasons Union and Confederate soldiers gave for fighting, whether the views they express in their letters aligned with the professed views of their respective causes, what they knew—if anything—about these causes, and what they thought of one another. Perhaps most of all I would like to use these primary documents to emphasize how the soldiers on opposing sides were alike—how they commonly identified with certain ‘American’ values and ambitions, and how their views on the War were shaped significantly by the coincidence of which side of the divided country they happened to be born on.

I believe letters like these offer historians an invaluable means for stepping inside the minds of the actors who participated in historical events. And the particular set of letters I will examine in my project is important because it does not tell the ‘great man’ version of the Civil War, governed by figures like Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. Instead, it gives us a broader sense of the common man’s—in this case the common soldier’s—experiences of events that fundamentally shaped the American past. This is a version of the past that is often inaccessible to us, so it is important for historians to take advantage of resources like those housed in the Chapin Library. It is impossible for me to encompass all the perspectives and experiences offered by surviving Civil War letters, which is why I have chosen to focus my research closely on the Chapin collection, which is manageably sized and within convenient proximity to me for research during the academic year. After working with those letters for several months, I feel that I have a general sense of what they have to offer—a representative sample of the experiences of the common soldier in the war. In my research in the South this summer, I plan to supplement the Chapin collection with more Confederate examples. I also plan to draw inspiration from secondary sources, a small collection of which I have listed below. Many scholars have worked from Civil War soldier’s letters in the past, and they have even infiltrated popular culture to a considerable extent—most famously through Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. These authors will help me to get a sense of wider patterns in the experiences of soldiers, but I will rely upon my reading of primary sources to draw out specific examples.

The most exciting thing about my proposed thesis for me is that I really do not know what I will find or where my research will take me. I suspect that there are an inexhaustible number of topics that may be drawn out from Civil War soldiers’ letters, and I am confident I will find many things in my research that will inspire me. I am deeply committed to approaching history through contact with authentic documents and artifacts, and I look forward to the opportunity to do this over the course my project next year.

Preliminary Bibliography :

Primary sources: I will rely heavily upon the collection of approximately one thousand Civil War letters in the collection of the Chapin Library of Rare Books at Williams for the Union perspective. For the Confederate point of view, I will use collections of letters held by the Virginia Historical Society, the Museum of the Confederacy, and the Library of Virginia, all in Richmond, as well as the library of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. There are also collections of letters accessible online, in particular The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries at http://solomon.cwld.alexanderstreet.com/.

Secondary sources :

Barton, Michael, and Larry M. Logue, eds. The Civil War Soldier: A Historical Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. McPherson, James M. The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. ______. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. ______. What they Fought For, 1861-1865, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. ______, ed. The Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. ______ and William J. Cooper, Jr., eds. Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Mitchell, Reid. Civil War Soldiers, New York: Viking, 1988. ______. The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Rosenblatt, Emil & Ruth, eds. Hard Marching Every Day: The Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk, 1861-1865, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. Sheehan-Dean, Aaron. The View From the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers, Wiley, Bell I. The Life of Billy Yank. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. ______. The Life of Johnny Reb, the Common Soldier of the Confederacy. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943. ______. The Plain People of the Confederacy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.

Writing for Stalin: American Journalists in the USSR, 1928-1941

“There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be.” So wrote the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times, Walter Duranty, on November 15, 1931. By the end of 1933, between six and eight million Soviet citizens, at least half of them Ukrainians, had perished in the wake of consecutive failed harvests and official repression, in one of the worst man-made famines in history. Duranty won his Pulitzer Prize a year before the end of the famine. Duranty was not alone in his whitewashing of the Soviet Union in general and Stalinist policy in particular. Journalists from all over the world writing from the USSR depicted a land of noble struggle, where the working class, guided by leader and Party, were forging a utopia free from the injustice and squalor of capitalism. Why did so many Western visitors to the USSR allow themselves to become mouthpieces for the Soviet regime, with evidence of political repression and hideous suffering all around them, while only a few observers spoke out against the communist regime? What was the appeal of Stalinism in this age of the great crisis of capitalism? The 1930s were a time of uncertainty for liberal democracy, with the Great Depression causing misery across the world and calling into question the old liberal creeds of free market capitalism, while democracy itself was under siege from totalitarianisms of the left and right. To attempt to encompass this immense crisis in an entire book, let alone a thesis, would be a daunting task. Instead, I propose to probe this crisis through the microcosm of the men and women who visited the Soviet Union hoping to find a workers’ utopia. Many Westerners came to the USSR at the invitation of the regime, as journalists, technical experts, and travel writers who left behind an impressive body of news reports, diaries, letters, and memoirs. My thesis project will examine a particular subset of these visitors—the American journalists writing for US papers like The Nation, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times, or English-language publications in the USSR like The Moscow News. The time frame discussed will open with the launch of the first Five Year Plan in 1928, and conclude with the entry of both the Soviet Union and the United States into the Second World War in 1941. I will further focus my project on the coverage of two particular events: the much-denied famine taking place in the Ukraine, and Stalin’s Purge-era show trials, where many observers wrote either that those on trial really were saboteurs and agents of foreign powers, or that their guilt or innocence was of little consequence in the grand historical drama that was unfolding. I choose these two events because they represent indictments of the Soviet system’s claim to legitimacy—its ability to feed all its people, and its claim to be a truly fair society. The gymnastics of fact and logic undertaken by the regime’s apologists on these points are thus of particular significance.

So far, the question of what it was about most journalists visiting the USSR in this period, and what it was about Soviet communism, that made most reporters toe the Party line has not been addressed in particularly great depth. Today, those who favored the regime, like Walter Duranty, Maurice Hindus, and Anna Louise Strong, tend to be dismissed as ideological hacks, either willfully ignorant or purposely lying in the service of socialism. Those who see through the regime’s cloud of deception are by contrast heroic truth-tellers. A certain amount of work has been done on official Soviet efforts to win over liberal-minded Westerners in this period, and the Duranty Pulitzer Prize controversy has generated a number of articles and books in recent years, most notably S.J. Taylor’s Stalin’s Apologist. However, the historiography leaves open a number of questions. Were the journalists reluctant to speak against the regime because they could lose their access to the leadership, because their families might be targeted (many married in Russia), or similar, practical causes? To what extent did the practical intersect with the ideological as reporters sympathized with the official ideology and goals of the regime, and were prepared to forgive a little gangsterism on the part of the leadership if it would bring about a genuinely fair and equal society? As Duranty put it in his article of May 14th, 1933, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Was there something about the generally well-meaning liberalism of the American journalists that led them in droves to whitewash the crimes of Stalinism in service of some genuinely laudable social projects like universal literacy and the welfare state, as well as a powerful vision of a society that could come to be? Moreover, how were these journalists’ points of view informed by the society that produced them? What, if any, were the differences in the attitudes of those who were foreign-born, like Duranty and Hindus, and those like Strong who were natural-born citizens? To what extent did the reporters’ experience of Depression-era America, with all its hunger and inequality, influence their perception of the Soviet Union, which claimed to eliminate all such evils of capitalism?

In seeking an explanation of why so many American reporters upheld the Stalinist line in this period, I plan to explore three distinct sets of sources. First, I will examine the actual newspaper reports produced by these journalists. Americans reporting from Moscow were well aware that they were virtually the only source of information about events inside the USSR available to Americans, and their articles naturally give a great deal of insight into how they hoped to explain the Soviet system to the American public. Next I will consider more private sources like the reporters’ diaries and letters, which may shed light on the internal thoughts, goals, motivations, and reservations of the journalists, and include thoughts that were left out of their news articles or later memoirs. Finally, I will consider the memoirs that many journalists wrote during or directly after this period about their experiences in the USSR. The memoirs that I have read so far are extremely rich sources, raising a number of important questions of methodology. How far can we trust these reporters, who often wrote several years after the events they witnessed? Were the memoirs published before or after the Soviet Union had become engaged in the battle against fascism, either indirectly in Spain, or directly after 1941? Are these memoirs little more than cases of special pleading by journalists hoping to prop up both the great idea of communism and their own reputations? The memoirs by those reporters like Eugene Lyons who defied the safe consensus of their colleagues and wrote against Stalinism (often at the price of their careers) present a fascinating set of outliers. Can we trust such former sympathizers to report the truth as they saw it, or do conversions from fellow traveler to anticommunist attack dog represent swings between extremes of endorsement and repulsion, implying unreliability? These sources, both the ones I encountered and wrote about in my tutorial last term with Robert Service, as well as those I have come across since, will constitute a very rich base for my research.

Using this source material, I am seeking to tie together the grand political and ideological debates of the 1930s and the personal lives of the journalists in question to explain why so many of these men and women embraced Stalinism, while a few wrote furious condemnations of the Soviet system. This project will in many ways be an exploration of the crisis of capitalism and seeming rise of socialism in microcosm, driven by the particular nuances and intricacies of my particular material. In 2010, it seems all too obvious to us that Stalinism was a nightmare for millions of Soviet citizens, but eighty years ago, it was still very much an open question whether the future belonged to capitalism or communism. Those who made excuses for Stalinism sometimes did so for the best of reasons. However, that so many people could be so wrong about Stalinism demands an explanation.

Dismal Scientists, Diplomats, and Spooks: Bissell, Milliken, and Rostow and Their Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy

As the current global economic crisis shakes countries around the world, its effects resonate beyond the realms of financial regulators, central banks, and finance ministries. This crisis has created a number of foreign policy challenges for the United States government, and Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair recently declared to the Senate intelligence committee, “The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications.” Blair, however, is not the first representative of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, or even the foreign policy-making establishment of the country as a whole, to advocate for incorporating economics into the conduct of U.S. foreign relations.

Richard Bissell, Max Milliken, and Walt Rostow share a number of similarities; all three, born in the beginning of the twentieth century, graduated from Yale University, became economics professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later worked as researchers at a number of the same think tanks. More remarkably, all three of these men wandered from academia and into influential roles in the foreign policy-making establishment of the U.S. government during the early Cold War. Between them, these former economists developed strong ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the White House during the formative years of the United States’ as a global hegemon.

This commonality opens a number of interesting questions. What motivated their decisions to become economists and then to transition from academics to Cold Warriors? Was their overlap coincidental or does some common thread or societal trend connect their journeys? And, most important and relevant to questions at hand today, what role did these social scientists see for economic theory and analysis in the planning and practice of foreign policy? I plan to explore how world events shaped the career decisions and ideologies of these men, and, in turn, what effect their ideas and contributions had on the development of U.S. foreign policy.

I expect to mainly explore their ideas on economic intelligence, especially with regard to Milliken and Bissell, who both spent significant periods in the CIA, and modernization theory, for which both Rostow and Milliken served as strong advocates to the White House and State Department. With current debates in the U.S. on rebuilding our economic intelligence capacities, correctly using foreign aid, and coping with the current financial crises, the insights gleaned from these former scholars and Cold Warriors could shed light on contemporary issues.

As sources for my investigation, I plan on utilizing the papers of Max Milliken and Walt Rostow, which are both available at the John F. Kennedy Library. Bissell’s memoir and several oral interviews in which he participated are also publicly available. Furthermore, several working papers, which these men produced as officials of the U.S. government and as researchers at numerous think tanks, are known to exist. And, finally, I plan to utilize the rich existing scholarship on modernization theory and its role in U.S. foreign policy.

Bibliography

Central Intelligence Agency On-line Library. Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room. Personal Papers of Max Millikan (1913-1969), John F. Kennedy Library. Walt W. Rostow (#8.24), John F. Kennedy Library. Wilson, Theodore A. and Richard D. McKinzie. “Oral History Interview with Richard M. Bissell, Jr.” Harry S. Truman Library. Works by all three at various think tanks, including one collaboration between Bissell and Milliken at the Center for International Studies (CENIS). Bissell, Jr., Richard M. Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Fialka, John J. War by Other Means: Economic Espionage in America. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999. Latham, Michael. Modernization as Ideology. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Light, Jennifer S. From Warfare to Welfare. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pearce, Kimber Charles. Rostow, Kennedy, and the Rhetoric of Foreign Aid. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001.

Media Reflections of Western Public Opinion in the Suez Crisis

In the years following the Second World War, the global balance of power shifted significantly; following conflict amongst the traditional Great Powers, a bipolar power struggle emerged between the United States and the Soviet Union. The military and financial costs of the Second World War made it extremely difficult for European powers to hold their colonial empires, the loss of which compounded their economic downfall and ensured their decline as world powers. These material conditions were certainly a major factor in determining the new balance of power, as was the relative strength of the U.S.’s economic position, but less quantifiable factors were also importantly at play, namely the ability of each of the new and old powers to reconceptualize its role in the world and adapt its attitudes toward other nations accordingly. As decolonization occurred and Cold War conflicts began to arise across the globe, the Cold War powers and the traditional Great Powers were facing novel foreign policy challenges, mostly in the vein of trying to establish influence overseas when using force to do so was no longer feasible or morally acceptable. Thus each nation contending for global influence was forced to reassess its identity as a player on the world stage. Government officials developing policy carried out this reassessment as a conscious process, but it also occurred spontaneously within national populations responding to the obvious shifts in global power dynamics, begging the question: how well did government reconceptions of identity reflect public attitudes in the early Cold War era? The emergence of many new nations and nationalisms in the postwar world created ample cases which exemplify how modern national self-perceptions developed on different levels and how that led to the consolidation of a new world order. My thesis will focus on the 1956 Suez Crisis, due to its location in the strategically important and materially rich Middle East, which resulted in the involvement of many countries, and within that conflict, on the Western powers involved, for whom government was supposedly representative- England, France, and the United States.

Despite historiographical debates about precipitating and intermediate causes, the Suez Crisis of 1956 can be traced at least in part to the joint U.S.-British decision to discontinue their planned funding for the Egyptian government’s Aswan High Dam project, leaving the Egyptians in need of ready money, which served to justify Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. The proposed Aswan High Dam project was exemplary of the new state of relations between Egypt and the western powers following the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. The new Egyptian leadership was anti-colonial, but not opposed to productive relations with the Western world. Thus, it hoped cooperative projects like the construction of the Aswan High Dam could usher in a new type of relationship between Egypt and the West. For Britain, this would mean relations based on voluntary economic cooperation rather than exploitation by force, while for the U.S. the change of policy consisted not in promoting an anti-colonial position but in doing so quite actively, as opposed to its former stance of relative isolationism. Britain and the U.S. tried to advance anti-colonial economic relations as per Egyptian requirements in order to maintain and create, respectively, a presence in the region, which was important in order to protect financial interests in the Middle East that were highly dependent on access to the Suez Canal, and to keep the Soviets from establishing rival influence there.

However, when the U.S. and Britain ultimately deemed the Aswan High Dam project inopportune and Nasser nationalized the canal in the summer of 1956, the ensuing Suez Crisis featured the British, influenced by the French, playing a traditional colonial imperialist role, while the U.S. took on a novel modern role, acting as an international arbitrator in pursuit of its own Cold War related interests. That Britain aligned with France rather than U.S. during the Suez Crisis is not entirely surprising given each nation’s recent history in international relations; careful study has reflected the extent to which French and British politicians were misguided in their political calculations by thought processes that were still largely driven by outmoded colonial considerations. There is also debate about the extent to which they based their policies on false assumptions about the U.S. position. The leaders involved in the Suez Crisis based their decisions about how best to serve their material interests without losing political capital not only on analysis of other nations’ official positions but also on their reading of public opinion at the time. No Western government wanted to act against national will and lose popularity with its constituents over Suez. It is therefore natural to wonder to what degree the western leadership’s gauge of popular thought was skewed by historicism, or conversely, how closely public attitudes in Britain, France, and the U.S. towards the developing crisis in the Middle East actually tended to match official ones in judging what action each nation should take.

For my thesis, I would like to examine this question: to what extent were policy-influencing perceptions of public opinion about the Suez Crisis in Britain, France, and the U.S. accurate? To fill out the high command side of the picture I would use mostly secondary sources, and when necessary the primary documents they are based upon (such as sources available in the U.S. National Archives, British Public Records Office, and French Foreign Ministry Archives), focusing my original research on French, British, and U.S. newspaper and perhaps radio coverage as indicative of trends within the field of public opinion in each country. To manage the scope of this study, I intend to concentrate on the two most publicly controversial time periods within the months of the Suez Crisis, the week after the canal was nationalized on July 26, 1956 (up to and including August 2) and the week after Israel invaded Egypt on October 29, 1956 (up to and including November 6). By analyzing the straight news coverage of, and the range of editorial responses to, the decision taken by Nasser to nationalize the canal, the decision of Israel to invade Sinai, and the subsequent statements and actions taken by France, Britain, and the U.S., I hope to determine the tenor of each national discourse about the crisis, and to place all three within a comparative framework in order to determine the relative degree to which elite and mass perceptions corresponded over the appropriate role for each Western power to play in Suez. The degree to which the press (on a national and local level, across the full spectrum of political stances), condoned and encouraged official decisions taken during the Suez Crisis will hopefully illuminate how well the political development of the crisis matched mainstream contemporary attitudes not merely about the situation, but about where the world powers now stood as arbiters of international relations and, thereby, how far long-serving leaders with deeply rooted beliefs about the role of their nations in the world were able to conform to the demands of a world in which the ideological as well as material environment had recently undergone major changes.

Preliminary Reading List :

Relevant Primary Sources to be located through:

The Times online archives, at http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/tol/archive/ British Library Integrated Catalogue: Newspapers, at http://catalogue.bl.uk ProQuest Historical Newspapers (US) including The New York Times, at http://proquest.umi.com French sources through Gallica, the French National Library’s Digital Browser, at http://gallica.bnf.fr/?&lang=FR

Azar, Edward E. “Conflict Escalation and Conflict Reduction in an International Crisis: Suez, 1956.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 16 (1972): 183-201. Cockett, R. “The Observer and the Suez Crisis.” Contemporary British History 5, no.1 (Summer 1991): 9-31. Gorst, Anthony, and Lewis Johnman. The Suez Crisis. London: Routledge, 1997. Louis, Wm. Roger, and Roger Owen. Suez 1956: The Crisis and its Consequences. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Lucas, W. Scott. Divided We Stand: Britain, the United States and the Suez Crisis. Sevenoaks: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991. Negrine, Ralph. “The Press and the Suez Crisis: A Myth Re-Examined.” Historical Journal 25, no. 4 (1982): 975-983. Oneal, John R., Brad Lian, and James H. Joyner, Jr. “Are the American People ‘Pretty Prudent’? Public Responses to U.S. Uses of Force, 1950-1988.” International Studies Quarterly 40, no. 2 (Jun., 1996): 261-279. Owen, Jean. “The Polls and Newspaper Appraisal of the Suez Crisis.” Public Opinion Quarterly 21 (1957): 350-354. Parmentier, Guillaume. “The British Press in the Suez Crisis.” Historical Journal 23, no. 2 (1980): 435-448. Rawnsley, G. D. “Cold War Radio in Crisis: the BBC Overseas Services, the Suez Crisis and the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.” Historical Journal of Radio and Television 16, no.2 (Jun., 1996): 197-219. ______. “Overt and Covert: The Voice of Britain and Black Radio Broadcasting in the Suez crisis, 1956.” Intelligence and National Security 11, no. 3 (July, 1996): 497-522. Shaw, Tony. Eden, Suez and the Mass Media: Propaganda and Persuasion During the Suez Crisis. London: Tauris, 1996.

The Implications, Effects, and Uses of Media in the Emmett Till Lynching

I propose to write an Honors Thesis in History during the xxxx academic year. After researching topics that interest me and consulting with Professor xxxx, I have developed a project that analyzes the uses and effects of media during the Civil Rights Movement. More specifically, my project will investigate how children, and the American media’s depiction of them, greatly impacted the American consciousness of the Civil Rights Movement. Children were a part of some of the most widely televised and reported Civil Rights events such as the lynching of Emmett Till, the use of water cannons and police dogs on children, the deaths of four black girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, the desegregation of Central High School, and the Selma marches where children were trampled by police horses.

Taking on a project with all these events would be beyond the scope of a senior thesis, so Professor Long and I have narrowed our focus to the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955. To briefly summarize this event, after allegedly whistling at a white woman, fourteen year old Emmett Till was shot and his body thrown in the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi by a group of white men. Emmett’s great-uncle identified two of these men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, as those who had forced Emmett into their car the night he was killed. The trial lasted a mere five days, and the all-white jury acquitted both men of Emmett’s death in about an hour.

Media coverage served very important roles in Emmett Till’s death. In The Chicago Defender, Emmett’s hometown newspaper, the first articles on Emmett Till include pictures of his inconsolable mother being held upright by family members in front of Emmett’s casket. The newspaper articles focusing on Emmett also refer to the recent lynchings of black voting rights activists and the recent Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. In effect, these articles attached a name, face, and picture to individuals affected by racist violence in the South while incorporating and increasing the visibility of large-scale race issues. Television crews broadcast Emmett’s mutilated face at his open-casket funeral, sparking outrage and horror throughout the country. Viewing these images in white America’s living room made the Jim Crow South more visible across white America. Media coverage of Emmett’s death further motivated black America to take a stand against white supremacy, all the more so after both white men confessed to Emmett’s murder in Look Magazine. This event raises myriad questions regarding race relations in the South, but I want to focus my efforts on a few that interest me most. I want to explore the reasons, implications, and effects of Emmett’s mother’s decision to display Emmett’s mutilated and decomposed face at his open-casket funeral. This investigation leads to the history, reasons, and importance of open-casket funerals in the African-American community. My project will also analyze the response of the white community in the immediate area where Emmett was murdered. His murder has been well documented in television coverage, newspaper articles, and magazine interviews; however, very little research has examined the media’s impact on the regional, national, and international levels. I want to examine how these communities responded to Emmett’s death and how the white South was viewed as a result of different reactions according to race and location.

Furthermore, Emmett Till’s murder raises questions regarding white masculinity and femininity and their relationship to black masculinity. Another aspect to this project may include how the image of Emmett Till has been remembered and reconstructed by the media more recently in the form of television series and movies. I seek to investigate these issues primarily through primary sources such as photographs, television coverage, newspaper articles, and interviews of individuals. Secondary resources, particularly in the field of media studies will be helpful to my project. Overall, my project will become part of a greater dialogue that explores the media’s perception of the white response to black life and culture in the Jim Crow South.

Since the summer after my sophomore year at Williams, I have laid the foundation for this project. My independent research through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship has allowed me to develop my research skills, work closely with a professor, and read over a dozen seminal primary and secondary sources in the field of race relations in the United States. I have already written two research papers, (with a third on the way) about these books.

I am interested in writing an Honors Thesis in History for many reasons. Most importantly, I want the opportunity to immerse myself in a subject that greatly interests me while contributing to a larger body of academic work in the field. Writing a thesis is also important because it will allow me to dedicate an extended period of time to a very specific subject. I enjoy historical research and want the satisfaction of knowing that I thoroughly understand the intricacies and nuances of a particular topic, even though it may be a small fraction of a larger whole. Additionally, I want to complete a large historical project to show history graduate schools of my seriousness in pursuing a Ph.D. in American History.

Cromwell Lives while Mason Stalks: Irish Nationalism and Historical Memory during the Troubles

In my proposed thesis I want to ask how significant perceptions of Irish history were in perpetuating the Troubles. Often, the pieces of history that get retold vindicate the present. I believe that perceptions of Irish history are significant in perpetuating the conflict in Northern Ireland because both Unionists and Nationalists created their own versions of history which they use to give legitimacy to their political visions for the future. Within the communities, different interest groups manipulate and re-manipulate history and each separate reading of the past justifies the present actions of its perpetuators. In this sense, the issue of history is an issue of legitimacy, and legitimacy is directly linked to political power. In their book The Northern Ireland Conflict: Consociational Engagements, John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary write that Northern Ireland is “a site of competing analogies and norms. Neither of its communities… have been able to achieve hegemonic legitimacy. This is one reason why the conflict continues.” It’s a trope that history is written by the winners, and in Northern Ireland, both sides are trying to write themselves as winners. Far from just an intellectual debate, the separate readings of history are crafted to justify political action, perpetuating the conflict.

Partition is a classic example of how Unionists and Nationalists use history to justify their current political positions. The Unionists perception of history accentuates the continuity of partition as a social force. Historian A.T.Q. Stewart uses the election of 1886 to emphasize the innate nature of partition. In it, seventeen out of thirty-three Ulster members of parliament elected were for Home Rule. That emphasized to Protestants that they were characteristically different from the rest of the inhabitants of Ireland. Stewart writes, “from 1886 to 1920, Ulster Protestants were a minority under threat.” By stressing the deep, cultural roots of partition, Stewart justifies it as a logical action and just solution that was a long time coming.

In contrast, the general Nationalist reading of the same period of history frames partition as “the arbitrary division of the country”, to quote the New Ireland Forum Report. “In the period immediately after 1920,” the Report continues, “many saw partition as transitory.” Nationalists tend to blame British imperialism or other exogenous factors as the cause of the conflict. In this way, they are able to represent partition an illegitimate action imposed on Ireland. The emphasis on exogenous factors allows Nationalists to imply that partition is the problem. Generally, they argue that by removing it and restoring the territorial integrity of Ireland, the conflict would be solved.

Both Unionists and Nationalists construct elaborate historical myths that legitimate their claim to the territory of Northern Ireland. Andy Tyrie, the supreme commander of the Ulster Defense Association in the early 1980s, broke from the traditional Unionist position of supporting union with Great Britain and advocated for an independent Ulster in the early 1980s. He created historical justification for his position by arguing that the areas of Scotland where Ulster Protestants came from were originally colonized by tribesmen from Ulster in the early middle ages—so in a sense Ulster Protestants were just returning to their ancestral homeland when they re-colonized in the seventeenth century. “Many people are convinced that the Protestants arrived here in 1607,” he said. “But their ancestors arrived here long before that. The Ulster people have always been here.”

Tyrie’s myth about Ulster was designed to compete with the traditionally Republican version of history of centuries of Irish resistance to British imperial rule. The Nationalist myth, as summarized by Padraig O’Malley, begins with the invasion of Ireland by England 800 years ago. In it, O’Malley writes, “history is linear. Thus, Ireland was subdued by superior arms and resources, but not beaten; the struggle to re-establish a free and united Ireland was carried forward from generation to generation.” The H-Block Song, written for the Republican prisoners in the maze perpetuates this view of events. The song ends with the question, “Does Britain need a thousand years of protest, riot, death, and tears?” emphasizing the long history of Irish oppression at the hands of British invaders. Lines like “Black Cromwell lives while Mason stalks” create a sense of the historical continuity of the fight against British imperialism, linking Oliver Cromwell with Roy Mason, the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland when the H-Block song was written in 1976.

Both of these “ancestral tribe” myths are designed to support current claims to the island. Neither one is particularly valid historically, but the point is not historical accuracy. These myths are designed to create legitimacy for current political claims. Thus, history has become a tool allowing each side to perpetuate and justify their view of the conflict.

In my proposed thesis I’d ask the significance of perceptions of Irish history in perpetuating the Troubles. Much of the scholarship that I’ve read concentrates on specific historical occurrences and doesn’t directly investigate Irish historiography, or the link between historical memory and political action. I’d begin with a definition and explanation of the Nationalist myth of unbroken struggle. I’d draw on the writings of Irish Nationalists such as Padraig Pearse, as well as later scholarship by historians such as Padraig O’Malley. I’d also study how this historical myth has been created and perpetuated both inside Ireland and also abroad. On the international front, I’d specifically focus on how Irish Nationalists draw historical analogies to oppressed-native minority/settler-oppressor conflicts such as comparing their situation to the struggle over apartheid in South Africa. I’d study memoirs and interviews, like Adrian Kerr’s book Perceptions: Cultures in Conflict, and scholarship, such as Adrian Guelke’s book on comparative politics, Northern Ireland: An International Perspective. I’d also draw on art and propaganda: music, street murals, accounts of parades, 1916 commemoration posters issued by Sinn Fein and other Republican groups, and films, such as the 1980 documentary The Patriot Game, which gives a Nationalist account of the Troubles.

The well-established historical myth of Nationalist struggle presupposes an almost inevitable pattern to history: “Ireland unfree will never be at peace.” Therefore, I’d next investigate how the Nationalist reading of Irish history has affected political events during the Troubles. I’d focus on two important historical occurrences, the 1974 Ulster Worker’s Council strike that brought down the Sunningdale power-sharing agreement and the 1981 Republican hunger strikes. According to the strike bulletins, the main reason the UWC wanted to stop Sunningdale was because of the provisions it made to involve the Irish Free State in Northern Ireland’s affairs, which it characterizes as “the main danger.” I’d investigate if this anti-Irish attitude was affected by the striker’s perceptions of Ulster history and the North’s relationship to the South.

With the hunger strikes, I’d research the connection between the strikers’ experiences and Irish history. I’d specifically ask if the hunger strikers appealed to historically Irish motifs of martyrdom in an attempt to gain political legitimacy for the Provisional IRA. My hunch is that the Nationalist movement consciously used history as a practical tool in order to get political status for their prisoners, but it would take further research to figure this out. Not Meekly Serve My Time, the remembrances of Republican H-Block prisoners and hunger strikers would be invaluable, as would the diaries of Bobby Sands and the writings of Gerry Adams, as well as the memoirs of SDLP party leader John Hume.

Through these two specific incidents, I’d study how perceptions of Irish history affected the politics of Northern Ireland during the 1970s and early 1980s and also investigate how Nationalists and Unionists used interpretations of history to generate political legitimacy.

Adams, Gerry. Selected Writings. Kerry: Brandon, 1994. Bew, Paul and Patterson, Henry. The British State and the Ulster Crisis. New York: Verso, 185. Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie. The Provisional IRA. Aylesbury: Corgi Books, 1989. Campbell, Brian, Laurence McKeown, and Felim O’Hagan, ed. Not Meekly Serve My Time: The H Block Struggle 1976-1981. Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 1998. Farrell, Michael. Northern Ireland: The Orange State. London: Pluto Press Limited, 1976. Gallagher, AM. “Majority Minority Review 2: Employment, Unemployment and Religion in Northern Ireland.” CAIN Web Service, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/csc/reports/mm210.htm. Guelke, Adrian. Northern Ireland: An International Perspective. New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Hepburn, A.C., ed. The Conflict of Nationality in Modern Ireland. London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1980. Hume, John. Personal views, Politics, Peace and Reconciliation in Ireland. Dublin: Town House, 1996 Kerr, Adrian, ed. Perceptions: Cultures in Conflict. Derry: Guildhall Press, 1996. McAllister, Ian. The Northern Ireland Social Democratic and Labor Party. London: Unwin Brothers Ltd., 1977. MacDonagh, Oliver. States of Mind. London: Pimlico, 1992. McGarry, John and Brendan O’Leary. Explaining Northern Ireland. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. ______. The Northern Ireland Conflict: Consociational Engagements. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Mulchaly, Aogan. “Claims-Making and the Construction of Legitimacy: Press Coverage of the 1981 Hunger Strikes.” Social Problems 42, No. 4 (Nov. 1995): 467-499. “The New Ireland Forum Report,” CAIN Web Service, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ issues/politics/nifr.htm. O’Malley, Padriag. Biting at the Grave. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1990. ______. The Uncivil Wars. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1983. O’Neill, Terence. Ulster at the Crossroads. Faber and Faber: London, 1969. Rose, Richard. Governing without Consensus. London: Faber and Faber, 1971. Sands, Bobby. Writings from Prison. Cork: Mercier Press, 1998. Stewart, A.T.Q. The Narrow Ground: The Roots of the Conflict in Ulster. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. “Strike Bulletins of the Ulster Worker’s Council Strike, No 1.” CAIN Web Service. http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/uwc/uwc-pdfs/one.pdf. Sweeney, George. “Irish Hunger Strikes and the Cult of Self-Sacrifice.” Journal of Contemporary History 28, No. 3 (Jul. 1993): 421-437. Wichert, Sabine. Northern Ireland Since 1945. London: Longman, 1999.

‘My broken dreams of peace and socialism’: Youth propaganda, personality, and selfhood in the GDR, 1979-1989.

“I was a young citizen in a young nation, and it was my duty to advance the cause of socialism,” writes Jana Hensel in her memoir of childhood during East Germany’s final decade of socialism. The molding of youth and children like Hensel into healthy “socialist personalities” desirous of political stability and unity had been the object of the Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) most ardent ideological efforts ever since the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949. By the 1980’s, however, when the GDR could no longer rely on brute force to secure the loyalty of its subjects, the very survival of the Communist East German regime had come to depend on the success of the socialist mentality building project. To urge the new generations of East Germans to develop personal qualities essential for the advancement of socialism, the SED mobilized all of its resources: the school system, youth organizations, mass events, and leisure time activities. Unlike the youth of the 1960’s, however, “Honecker’s children” turned out to be much more concerned with personal matters than with the fulfillment of their social and political obligations. Moreover, with the assimilation of new psychological models and concepts of individuality throughout the 1980’s, the anachronism and absurdity of SED’s personality building project became increasingly apparent.

In my Honors thesis, I plan to examine the manifold ways in which the ideological prescriptions disseminated by the SED during the 1980’s actually shaped the lived experience and affected the sense of selfhood of young members of East German society. I also wish to reflect on the lasting effects of GDR’s preoccupation with character building on the sense of identity of “Honecker’s children” twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. My work thus aims to complement current historical literature on the politics of the GDR’s youth project with a thorough investigation of the cultural, psychological, and sociological aspects of socialist character building in the GDR. To this end, I plan to relate my investigation of the ways in which the youth responded to new ideas about the socialist East German self to sociological and anthropological works on identity and selfhood, as well as to psychological theory on childhood and memory. By examining the ideas about selfhood lying at the very heart of East German youth policies and focusing on the ways in which the youth understood them and responded to them, I hope to challenge current understandings of the overarching roles of culture and ideology in postwar German history.

I will begin my research by examining official documents printed by the GDR Ministry of Education, to reveal how state-sanctioned ideas about selfhood were engendered and promoted by the East German school system throughout the 1980’s. I will then explore the inner workings of mass youth organizations such as the Free German Youth (FDJ) to trace the manifestation of these ideas in party-monitored extracurricular and leisure time activities. By investigating children’s letters to relatives, diaries, and anthologies of poems, I plan to shed light on the kinds of interpretive categories that children and youth were using in turn to make sense of their own experiences and evolving personalities. I will then examine memories of GDR’s personality building project in their natural context by conducting interviews with the protagonists of my research during my stay in Berlin and Jena this summer.

Among the secondary sources central to my research are the works of social historians such as Anna Saunders, Alan McDougall, John Rodden, and Alan Nothnagle, who have previously explored the dynamics of youth policy in the GDR and delineated the evolution of propaganda techniques employed by communist youth organizations and schools to communicate Marxist-Leninist values and ideology. Equally significant are the works of Alon Confino and Daphne Berdahl, which examine the consequences of the rigorous program of socialist patriotic education in the GDR on the sense of national and personal identity of the youth before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. My research aims to respond to debates that have concerned not only German historians, but also scholars of international youth politics. Some of the questions I will be asking are: how much autonomy did the East German youth of the 1980’s have in shaping their sense of self, in what ways were they influenced by the personality models put forward by the SED, how did they conceive of themselves as historical subjects before and after the collapse of the East German regime, and what may explain their reactions to the personality building project?

Agee, Joel. 1981. Twelve years: an American boyhood in East Germany. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Andresen, Sabine. 2006. Sozialistische Kindheitskonzepte: politische Einflüsse auf die Erziehung. München: Ernst Reinhardt. Annen, Niels, Björn Böhning, Kai Burmeister, and Sven Frye. 2007. 100 years of International Socialist Youth: struggle for peace and equality in the world. Internationale Politik (Vorwarts Buch (Berlin, Germany)). Berlin: Vorwärts Buch. Baehr, Vera-Maria. 1990. Wir denken erst seit Gorbatschow: Protokolle von Jugendlichen aus der DDR. Recklinghausen: G. Bitter. Berdahl, Daphne. 1999. Where the world ended: re-unification and identity in the German borderland. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press. Berdahl, Daphne. 2000. Altering states: ethnographies of transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. Confino, Alon, and Peter Fritzsche. 2002. The work of memory: new directions in the study of German society and culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Confino, Alon. 2006. Germany as a culture of remembrance: promises and limits of writing history. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Franke, Klaus, and Gerhard Krause. 1976. Kommunisten und Jugend in der DDR. ABC des Marxismus-Leninismus. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Freie Deutsche Jugend. 1987. Fragen und Antworten zum Programm der SED. Berlin: Dietz. Friedrich, Walter. 1975. Jugend, FDJ [i.e. Freie Deutsche Jugend], Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur sozialistischen Persönlichkeitsentwicklung junger Arbeiter und Studenten in der DDR. Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben. Fulbrook, Mary. 2005. The people’s state: East German society from Hitler to Honecker. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hellbeck, Jochen. 2006. Revolution on my mind: writing a diary under Stalin. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Hensel, Jana. 2004. After the Wall: confessions from an East German childhood and the life that came next. New York: Public Affairs. Intertext, Fremdsprachendienst der DDR. 1985. Free German youth, the GDR’s all-embracing youth organization. Berlin: Panorama DDR. Jahnke, Karl Heinz. 1986. Partei und Jugend: Dokumente marxistisch-leninistischer Jugendpolitik. Berlin: Dietz. Jarausch, Konrad Hugo. 1994. The rush to German unity. New York: Oxford University Press. Jarausch, Konrad Hugo. 1999. Dictatorship as experience: towards a socio-cultural history of the GDR. New York: Berghahn Books. Leiby, Richard A. 1999. The unification of Germany, 1989-1990. Greenwood Press “Guides to historic events of the twentieth century”. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. Leidecker, Gudrun, Dieter Kirchhöfer, and Peter Güttler. 1991. Ich weiss nicht, ob ich froh sein soll: Kinder erleben die Wende. Stuttgart: Metzler. Macleod, David I. 1983. Building character in the American boy: the Boy Scouts, YMCA, and their forerunners, 1870-1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Maier, Charles S. 1997. Dissolution: The crisis of Communism and the end of East Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. McAdams, A. James. 1993. Germany divided: from the wall to reunification. Princeton studies in international history and politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. McDougall, Alan. 2004. Youth politics in East Germany: the Free German Youth Movement, 1946-1968. Oxford historical monographs. Oxford: Clarendon. Meier, Andreas. 1998. Jugendweihe–JugendFEIER: ein deutsches nostalgisches Fest vor und nach 1990. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Michalzik, Martin. 1994. An der Seite der Genossen–: offizielles Jugendbild und politische Sozialisation im SED-Staat : zum Scheitern der sozialistischen Erziehung in der DDR. Melle: Knoth. Mothes, Jörn. 1996. Beschädigte Seelen: DDR-Jugend und Staatssicherheit : mit 136 Dokumenten und einer Audi-CD mit Original-Tonunterlagen. Bremen: Edition Temmen. Nothnagle, Alan L. 1999. Building the East German myth: historical mythology and youth propaganda in the German Democratic Republic, 1945-1989. Social history, popular culture, and politics in Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Pelka, Anna. 2008. Jugendmode und Politik in der DDR und in Polen: eine vergleichende Analyse 1968-1989. Osnabrück: Fibre. Pence, Katherine, and Paul Betts. 2008. Socialist modern: East German everyday culture and politics. Social history, popular culture, and politics in Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rodden, John. 2002. Repainting the little red schoolhouse: a history of Eastern German education, 1945-1995. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press. Rodden, John. 2006. Textbook reds: schoolbooks, ideology, and Eastern German identity. University Park, Pa: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Rodden, John. 2008. The walls that remain: Eastern and Western Germans since reunification. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Saunders, Anna. 2007. Honecker’s children: youth and patriotism in East(ern) Germany, 1979-2002. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schmemann, Serge. 2006. When the wall came down: the Berlin Wall and the fall of Soviet communism. Boston: Kingfisher. Schneider, Gisela. 1980. Jugendbrigaden, Bahnbrecher des Neuen. Berlin: Verlag Tribüne. Solms, Wilhelm. 1992. Begrenzt glücklich: Kindheit in der DDR. Marburg: Hitzeroth. Thomson-Wohlgemuth, Gaby. 2009. Translation under state control: books for young people in the German Democratic Republic. New York: Routledge. Turner, Henry Ashby. 1987. The two Germanies since 1945. New Haven: Yale University Press. Urban, Detlef, and Hans Willi Weinzen. 1984. Jugend ohne Bekenntnis?: 30 Jahre Konfirmation und Jugendweihe im anderen Deutschland 1954-1984. Berlin: Wichern-Verlag. Walter, Michael. 1997. Die Freie Deutsche Jugend: ihre Funktionen im politischen System der DDR. Freiburg im Breisgau: Arnold Bergstraesser Institut. Weyer, Jochen. 1974. Youth in the GDR: everyday life of young people under socialism. Berlin: Panorama DDR. Zahra, Tara. 2008. Kidnapped souls: national indifference and the battle for children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zilch, Dorle. 1994. Millionen unter der blauen Fahne: die FDJ : Zahlen, Fakten, Tendenzen : Mitgliederbewegung und Strukturen in der FDJ-Mitgliedschaft von 1946 bis 1989 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Funktionäre. Rostock: Norddeutscher Hochschulschriften Verlag.

38+ SAMPLE History Proposal in PDF | MS Word

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Step 1: introduction, step 2: research problem , step 3: review of related literature , step 4: research design and methods, share this post on your network, you may also like these articles, title project proposal.

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Budget 2024 highlights: New employment-linked incentives for employees; ₹1.48 lakh crore allocation for education, employment, skill

The budget for education scheme for madrasas and minorities has gone down from ₹10 crore to ₹2 crore; standard deduction for salaried taxpayers hiked to ₹75,000 from ₹50,000.

Updated - July 23, 2024 09:10 pm IST

Published - July 23, 2024 07:26 am IST

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman addressing the post-Budget press conference at National Media Center. | Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented her seventh straight Budget on July 23 for the fiscal 2024-25, surpassing the record of former Prime Minister Morarji Desai. This the first Budget by the BJP-led NDA government since it was re-elected in June. Read the Budget highlights here.

What are the most significant announcements?

Presenting the Budget, Ms. Sitharaman said the standard deduction for salaried employees will be hiked to ₹75,000, from ₹50,000 under the new income tax regime in FY25. The Union Budget 2024-25 identified nine priorities for generating ample opportunities — Productivity and Resilience in Agriculture, Employment and Skilling, Inclusive Human Resource Development and Social Justice, Manufacturing and Service, Urban Development, Energy Security, Infrastructure, Innovation, Research and Development and Next Generation Reforms.

Also read | Budget 2024: Mobile phones, gold and silver jewellery to get cheaper

India-funded projects in the neighbourhood received the bulk of the allocation for the Ministry of External Affairs under the Union Budget. Nepal secured an allocation of ₹700 crore, which is a jump of ₹150 crore from previous year’s allocation of ₹550 crore. Sri Lanka, which has a number of India-funded projects, has received ₹245 crore, an improvement of ₹95 crore over last year’s funding of ₹150 crore. 

Also read | Budget in Focus: The Hindu’s series on pre-Budget expectations

Benchmark Sensex and Nifty settled marginally lower in volatile trade on July 23 as the government proposed to hike securities transaction tax on futures & options in the Budget for 2024-25. Recovering most of its intra-day losses of over 1,200 points, the 30-share BSE Sensex settled lower by 73.04 points or 0.09% 80,429.04.

Key Updates

• Budget 2024: Understanding the allocation for Southern States
• Defence budget pegged at ₹6.21 lakh crore for 2024-25
• In charts: Key takeaways from Union Budget 2024-25
• Budget 2024 highlights
• Catch the latest political and industry reactions on Union Budget 2024-25
• Union Budget 2024-25: What is cheaper, what is costlier?
• Stock markets give a thumbs down to Budget
• Revisions in new tax regime
• What does the Union Budget say on personal Income Tax?

Allocation for Space projects - Union Budget 2024-25

A Flourish data visualization by Graphics Team 2

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman allocated about ₹ 1.50 lakh crore to the agriculture sector. Almost all major schemes for farmers see an increase in allocation compared to previous budgets.

However, the fertilisers subsidy is down by about ₹1 lakh crore when compared to the actual expenditure in 2022-23. To address the price rise, the Finance Ministry has also provided ₹10,000 crore to the price stabilisation fund. In the last budget, the allocation was just ₹10 lakh.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s Budget speech has for the first time signalled that polluting industries, such as iron, steel, and aluminium will have to conform to emission targets.

“A roadmap for moving the ‘hard to abate’ industries from ‘energy efficiency’ targets to ‘emission targets’ will be formulated. Appropriate regulations for transition of these industries from the current ‘Perform, Achieve, and Trade’ mode to ‘Indian Carbon Market’ mode will be put in place,” Ms. Sitharaman said in her address.

For deepening tax base the Finance Minister has proposed to increase Securities Transaction Tax on Futures and Options contracts to 0.2% and 0.1%, respectively. This was expected to curb volatility in the market for which everyone including SEBI was concerned. 

Also now income received on buyback of shares will be taxed in the hands of the recipient. As per the budget proposals now unlisted bonds and debentures, debt mutual funds and market-linked debentures will attract tax on capital gains irrespective of holding period.

Budget 2024: Allocation for MGNREGS scheme lower than last year’s actual expenditure, despite BJP’s poll losses in rural India

Union Budget 2024: Despite BJP’s significant losses in rural seats, Budget did not contain any shift for the rural jobs scheme - Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act scheme (MGNREGS).

Union Budget 2024 - Rupee goes to

To address the housing needs of urban poor and middle class families, the Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has announced an investment of ₹10 lakh crore under the PM Awas Yojana-Urban 2.0, including the Central assistance of ₹2.2 lakh crore in the next five years.

While tabling the Union Budget 2024-25, the Finance Minister said that under the PM Awas Yojana Urban 2.0, housing needs of 1 crore urban poor and middle-class families will be addressed with an investment of ₹10 lakh crore. This will include the Central assistance of ₹2.2 lakh crore in the next five years.

The Department of Space received an 18% hike over its expenses in 2023-2024 in the 2024-2025 Union Budget presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday. The bulk of the hike goes towards the development of space technologies. The allocation increased marginally for space applications, decreased for space sciences, and almost halved for INSAT satellite systems over the budgeted amount in 2023-2024. 

Since successfully concluding the Chandrayaan-3 mission in August 2023, the future road map of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has expanded to include a new ‘next generation’ launch vehicle, more ambitious missions to the moon, and an Indian space station. ISRO is also working on its ambitious human spaceflight programme, Gaganyaan. 

The Union government has continued its emphasis on tackling non-communicable diseases, and allocating funds for research in the healthcare sector, with Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on July 23 announcing customs duty exemptions on three cancer treatment drugs — Trastuzumab Deruxtecan, Osimertinib, and Durvalumab.

“To provide relief to cancer patients, I propose to fully exempt three more medicines from customs duties. I also propose changes in the BCD (basic customs duty) on X-ray tubes and flat panel detectors for use in medical X-ray machines under the phased manufacturing programme,” the Finance Minister said.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed legislative support to provide financing for leasing aircraft and ships in India in a bid to protect airlines from foreign exchange risks.

“We will seek the required legislative approval for providing an efficient and flexible mode for financing leasing of aircrafts and ships,” the Minister said in her Budget speech on July 23. She said legislative backing for “pooled funds of private equity through a variable company structure” would also be explored. 

Union Budget 2024-25: Major expenditures

Railways has been allocated ₹2.62 lakh crore in the Budget 2024-25, which Union Minister for Railways Ashwini Vaishnaw has termed as ‘historic’ and highest ever allocation.

Mr. Vaishnaw said that even as the Kavach roll out has been low (merely 2.14% of the entire railway network), after the approvals for Kavach 4.0 work on deployment of Kavach will be rapid. He also focused on creation of up to 40,000 new railway jobs.

“Recruitments are in progress, railways focus will be on new projects, connectivity with Kashmir and capitals of Northeastern States,” Mr. Vaishnaw said.

The Budget for Ministry of Minority Affairs saw a menial hike of 2.7% but the coaching and allied schemes for minorities was slashed from the allocated ₹30 crore to ₹10 crore this year.

The interest subsidy on educational loans for overseas education for minorities was also reduced. The budget for education scheme for Madrasas and Minorities has gone down from ₹10 crore to ₹2 crore in the budget of 2024-25.

The government has proposed the allocation of ₹1.28 lakh crore for telecom projects and public sector firms under the Telecom Ministry with a majority of funds earmarked for State-owned BSNL.

Of the total proposed allocation, over ₹1 lakh crore is meant for BSNL and MTNL-related expenses, including ₹82,916 crore infusion in BSNL for technology upgradation and restructuring at BSNL.

“The total net allocation for this demand in BE (Budget Estimate) 2024-25 is ₹1,28,915.43 crore (₹1,11,915.43 crore plus ₹17,000 crore). The additional provision of ₹17,000 crore is met from the balances available under Universal Service Obligation Fund and will be utilised for schemes viz., Compensation to Telecom Service Providers, Bharatnet and Research and Development,” the Budget document said.

Kerala’s much-anticipated and decades-long dream of having an All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS)-like institution on its soil was dashed yet again when the proposal found no mention in the Union Budget 2024-25 presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on July 23.

Unlike in the previous years, the anticipation this year that the project might finally come through was intense, particularly because of the presence of two Union Ministers of State from Kerala at the Centre, one of whom is the BJP’s first-ever elected MP from the State.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on July 23 dubbed the Union Budget 2024-25 as “politically biased and anti-poor” and slammed the Centre for “depriving” the State. The Chief Minister wondered what wrong West Bengal committed that it had been “deprived” by the Centre.

“Bengal has been completely deprived in this Union budget. This doesn’t look into the interest of the poor. The Budget is politically biased. This is directionless and has no vision. It is only to serve a political mission,” she told reporters on the State Assembly premises.

Khelo India, which is the government’s flagship project to promote sports at the grassroots level, was once again the biggest beneficiary in the union budget for the sports ministry as it was assigned ₹900 crore from the overall allocation of ₹3,442.32 crore on July 23.

Khelo India’s share, announced in the budget presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in New Delhi, is ₹20 crore more than the revised allocation of ₹880 crore during the previous financial year.

Read details here

The Budget 2024-24 on July 23 allocated ₹1,309.46 crore for census, a significant reduction from 2021-22 when ₹3,768 crore was allocated for the decadal exercise, an indication that it may not be carried out even after a significant delay.

A meeting of the Union cabinet on December 24, 2019 had approved the proposal for conducting census of India 2021 at a cost of ₹8,754.23 crore and updating the National Population Register (NPR) at a cost of ₹3,941.35 crore.

Read the full story here

Budget 2024-25: Taxes

Union Budget 2024-25: Here is a collection of all stories from The Hindu relating to the changes in direct taxes and custom duties.

On Rahul Gandhi’s allegation that that generosity shown towards States like Bihar and Andhra Pradesh is a way to save ‘ kursi ’, FM Nirmala Sitharaman said that the INDIA alliance members couldn’t cross 230 votes but BJP alone reached 240 votes, and with the pre-election alliance, could form the government for the third term. 

“PM Modi is leading free India for the third time. Something that has not happened in the last 60 years has happened now. Party’s that are talking about saving his ‘ kursi ’ should maybe think. Their alliance of almost 37 party’s could not make even 230 (seats) and they are saying that he is doing it to save his ‘ kursi ’. When Mr. Modi became PM for the third time and has been ‘announcing’ to the world about India, putting us at the forefront of the world, helping in development. This time in the Budget, we have allotted ₹1.50 lakh crore for States without any interest for the next 50 years for free. Finance commission did not mention this at all, but we are,” she said.

On TMC’s allegation that the Union Budget reflects the political bankruptcy of Modi Government, FM Sitharaman said if the name of the State is not mentioned in the Budget it doesn’t mean they don’t get anything at all. “As per the proposals, schemes, different projects in different States, every State will get what they have proposed for,” she said.

In a social media post, TMC dismissed the term ‘Union Budget 2024’, renaming it as the ‘Andhra-Bihar Budget’. TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee told reporters in New Delhi that “the net result is zero because Bengal has been constantly tortured and deprived.” “You have seen how Bengal has been consistently deprived by this BJP Government. Has there been a positive outcome of 12 BJP MPs elected from Bengal?,” Ms. Banerjee said outside the Parliament complex.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said the “special help” announced in the Union Budget addressed the State’s concerns, which had previously led to demands for special category status.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman skipped any mention of MNREGA, which is one of the biggest rural employment schemes. The allocated budget once again, falls short of the actual expenditure on the scheme in the last financial year. In 2024-25 FY, government has allocated ₹86,000 crore, while in 2023-24, the expenditure including the pending dues to the States, as per the Rural Development Ministry’s website was ₹1.2 lakh crore.

In a first, Home Ministry sets aside a budget of ₹56 crore to establish Bharatiya Bhasha Anubhag for development of a platform to facilitate the translation of various languages into Hindi and vice-versa. Around ₹88 crore allocated for holistic development of Islands in Union Territories. ₹700 crore has been set aside for the first time for Modernisation of Forensic Capacity, which is a crucial element of the newly implemented criminal laws. The budget for rehabilitation and Relief for migrants, which includes Sri Lankan refugees and Tibetans has been slashed. SPG which only protects the Prime Minister has seen an increase of ₹73 crore in budget allocation.

Over ₹200 crore have been earmarked for expenditure on “examination and selection” of the civil servants by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) in the 2024-25 Budget announced.

The Commission conducts the civil services examination annually in three stages -- preliminary, main and interview -- to select officers of Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Foreign Service (IFS) and Indian Police Service (IPS), among others.

The UPSC has been given ₹425.71 crore for the ongoing fiscal in the Budget presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

The 2024-25 Union Budget has allocated ₹1,248.91 for expenses incurred by the Council of Ministers, the Cabinet Secretariat and the Prime Minister’s Office, and for hospitality and entertainment of State guests.

The allocated amount is substantially lower than the ₹1,803.01 crore earmarked in 2023-24. A total of ₹828.36 crore has been given for the expenses of the Council of Ministers. It was ₹1,289.28 crore in 2023-24.

The allocation for defence in the Union Budget was ₹6.2 lakh crore for 2024-25, the same as the allocation in the interim budget presented in February and is just a marginal increase from last year. “The capital outlay of ₹1,72,000 crore will further strengthen the capabilities of armed forces. Earmarking of ₹1,05,518.43 crore for domestic capital procurement will provide further impetus to Atmanibharta ,” Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said on social media.

Benchmark Sensex and Nifty settled marginally lower in volatile trade as the government proposed to hike securities transaction tax on futures & options in the Budget for 2024-25.

Recovering most of its intra-day losses of over 1,200 points, the 30-share BSE Sensex settled lower by 73.04 points or 0.09% 80,429.04.

The index gyrated between highs and lows during the day as Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced Budget proposals for 2024-25.

The barometer tanked 1,277.76 points or 1.58% to hit a low of 79,224.32 as the Minister announced a hike in STT on F&O trade and an increase in long-term capital gains tax on equities. However, tax exemptions and customs duty cuts helped boost consumer durables and FMCG shares, aiding stocks to recover from the day’s lows.

When asked whether the Budget has specified anything about Railways, Dr. T.V. Somanathan said, “The expenditure budget for railways for the coming year is ₹2,55,393 crore, which is the highest ever and is a very substantial increase in recent years.”

After Union Finance Nirmala Sitharaman proposed new tax structures for charities, foreign shipping companies, rationalisation of capital gains, she said the tax has been brought down because the govt wants more investments. She also reduced corporate tax on foreign companies from 40 to 35%.

After FM Sitharaman announced the review of the Income Tax Act, she said the govt is working towards a simpler taxing regime and she can’t say right now if the old tax regime will be removed. “Working towards the goal of a simpler taxing regime, we came up with the new tax regime. We need to review about the sunset of the old tax regime and come to a decision,” she said.

FM Sitharaman clarified that ₹15,000 crore for Andhra Pradesh is coming through the multi-lateral development assistance which we borrow from the multi-lateral banks. She added that further assistance will also be extended, however, there is no definitive amount.

The angel tax was introduced under the UPA Government in 2012, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said. “Money laundering issue was being tackled through a tax measure... there is also PMLA act which will tackle the issue,” Revenue secretary Sanjay Malhotra said stressing that angel tax is not required to keep money laundering in check.

India’s tax net will have to be widened, whether it is direct taxation or indirect. There are also now PSU divisions which have been improving because the valuations have gone up and their performance has also substantially increased, the Finance Minister said addressing the press conference. 

She added that revenue mobilisation is not just tax-based, non-tax revenue mobilisations are also coming up. She stressed on asset monetisation -- optimum utilisation of those assets which are lying in the form of unutilised stadiums or lands with PSUs which can be used for better purposes. She added that govt is also looking at generating resources from newer areas and as a result, the revenue forgone will be made up for.

Budget 2024 key takeaways in charts

Union Budget 2024: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented her seventh consecutive Union Budget for FY 2024-25. Here are some key takeaways

In her seventh budget presentation , Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced allocating ₹11,11,111 crore towards capital expenditure. This would account for 3.4% of the GDP. Enumerating it as among the policy prerogatives towards investment in infrastructure by central government, she told the house that the significant investments made in previous years have triggered a multiplier effect. 

Read the article here

For every rupee in the government coffer, the biggest pie of 63 paise will come from direct and indirect taxes, according to the Union Budget 2024-25 documents. The remaining 27 paise will come from borrowings and other liabilities, 9 paise from non-tax revenue like disinvestment, and 1 paise from non-debt capital receipts, the Budget documents said. In all, 36 paise will come from direct taxes, including corporate and individual income tax. Income tax will yield 19 paise, while corporate tax will account for 17 paise, it said. 

Among indirect taxes, goods and services tax (GST) will contribute the maximum 18 paise in every rupee of revenue. Besides, the government is looking to earn 5 paise out of every rupee from excise duty and 4 paise from customs levy. The collection from “borrowings and other liabilities” will be 27 paise per rupee, as per the Union Budget 2024-25 presented in Parliament by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. The Budget documents provide a fractional break-up for ₹1 that comes in and gets spent. 

On the expenditure side, the outlay for interest payments and States’ share of taxes and duties, respectively, stood at 19 paise and 21 paise for every rupee. Allocation for defence stands at 8 paise per rupee. Expenditure on central sector schemes will be 16 paise out of every rupee, while the allocation for centrally-sponsored schemes is 8 paise. The expenditure on ‘Finance Commission and other transfers’ is pegged at 9 paise. Subsidies and pension will account for 6 paise and 4 paise, respectively. The government will spend 9 paise out of every rupee on ‘other expenditures’. 

Staffs carry the Budget copies after they arrive at the Parliament House for the Union Budget 2024-25 during the Monsoon Session, in New Delhi on July 23, 2024.

Shares of telecom infrastructure companies on July 23 declined more than 4% after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the government will increase the basic customs duty on specified telecom equipment from 10% to 15%.

On the BSE, shares of HFCL tumbled 4.60% to ₹112.10 apiece, Vodafone Idea plunged 4.15% to ₹15.23, Tejas Networks slumped 2.69% to ₹1,278.95, and ITI declined 2.58% to ₹295.10.

The scrip of Bharti Airtel fell 1.50% to trade at ₹1,442.70 per piece, ADC India Communications slipped 2.14% to ₹1,771.95, and Tata Communications dipped 0.97% to trade at ₹1,768.95 on the bourse.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi reacts during the presentation of Union Budget 2024-25 by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in Lok Sabha on July 23, 2024.

In the last 10 years, the NDA Government has ensured that the poor and the middle class continue to get tax relief. In this Budget also, a big decision has been taken to reduce income tax and increase standard deduction. TDS rules have also been simplified. These steps will result in additional savings for every taxpayer, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said.

This Budget will give a new scale to education and skill. This is a Budget that will give new strength to the middle class. It has come up with strong plans to empower the tribal society, Dalits and backward classes. It will help in ensuring the economic participation of women, Mr. Modi said.

This Budget will provide a new path of progress for small traders and MSMES. There is a lot of focus on manufacturing and infrastructure in the Budget. This will give new impetus to economic development, the Prime Minister said.

This Budget puts emphasis on manufacturing as well as infrastructure; will speed up growth, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Union Budget 2024-25 in the Lok Sabha on July 23. He cited Budget’s stress on youth and said its measures will open many new opportunities for youngsters.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on July 23 announced to fully exempt 25 critical minerals from custom duties, and reduce basic custom duties (BCD) on two of them. “This will provide a major fillip to the processing and refining of such minerals and help secure their availability for these strategic and important sectors,” Ms. Sitharaman said.

Union Budget 2024 highlights: From income tax changes to focus on employment, here are some key takeaways

Union Budget 2024 Highlights: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announces Budget 2024 focusing on employment, skilling, MSMEs, and women-led development with various initiatives.

Simplifying the tax regime for corporate industries, Union Finance Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday, proposed new tax structures for charities, foreign shipping companies, rationalisation of capital gains in her 2024 Budget speech . She also reduced corporate tax on foreign companies from 40 to 35%. Ms. Sitharaman’s speech lasted just shy of ninety minutes

“58% of corporate tax came from the simplified tax regime in 2022-23 and more than 2/3rd of taxpayers have used the new personal tax regime last year,” announced Ms. Sitharaman.

Budget 2024 | What measures were announced for women?

We summarise the various schemes announced for girls and women as part of the Union Budget 2024-25

Click here to read all the political and industry reactions

Budget 2024: What is cheaper, what is costlier in FY25

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposes customs duty cuts in 2024 Union Budget to boost domestic manufacturing and exports.

Seeking to attract more funds into the country, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on July 23 said rules for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) will be simplified. Presenting the Union Budget 2024-25 , the Minister said the government will bring out a five-year vision document for meeting financial needs of the economy.

2024 Union Budget: Nirmala Sitharaman says changes will be made to IBC to strengthen tribunals

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announces changes to IBC, strengthening tribunals, and proposing digital infrastructure for productivity and innovation.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed a reduction in basic customs duty on gold and silver to 6% and platinum to 6.4%. In her budget speech in Lok Sabha, she also proposed reduction of basic customs duty on mobile phones, mobile charger to 15%.

The Congress on said Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has taken a leaf out of its 2024 Lok Sabha polls manifesto by announcing an internship programme but “in their trademark style”, the scheme has been designed to “grab headlines with arbitrary targets” rather than a programmatic guarantee.

Read Congress’s reaction here

In an episode of Budget Focus series from The Hindu , we discussed the Budget projections for the Indian Railways. However, there is no mention of the Railways in the Union Budget 2024-25.

Tune in to the podcast here

Budget 2024 | Land reform measures to be undertaken consulting States, says Finance Minister in Budget speech

In the Union Budget 2024-25, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced certain measures calculated to improve land and other factors of production

The Finance Minister introduced the Finance Bill in the Lok Sabha. The Budget Session has been adjourned till July 24, 11 a.m.

Stock markets turned highly volatile amid the Union Budget presentation. Sensex tanked 1,266.17 points to 79,235.91 after FM hikes STT on F&O; Nifty tumbles 435.05 points to 24,074.20.

​​ Read the whole story here ​​

In the new tax regime, the tax rate structure is to be revised, the FM announced. For zero to ₹3 lakh - tax rate is zero. For ₹3 lakh to ₹7 lakh - 5%; For ₹7 lakh to ₹10 lakh - 10%; ₹10 lakh to ₹12 lakh - 15%; For ₹12 lakh to ₹15 lakh - 20%; For ₹15 lakh and higher - 30%. With this, a salaried employee stands to save upto ₹17,500 a year in income tax, the FM said.

The government announced the withdrawal of the 2% equalisation levy. Presenting the Budget for 2024-25 in the Lok Sabha, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the standard deduction for salaried employees will be hiked to ₹75,000, from ₹50,000 under new income tax regime in FY25. The government raised the deduction limit to 14% from 10% for employers’ contribution for the National Pension System (NPS). 

For those opting for the new tax regime, the standard deduction for salaried employees to be increased from ₹50,000 to ₹75,000. Similarly, deduction for family pension for pensioners to be enhanced from ₹15,000 to ₹25,000. This will provide relief to about 4 crore salaried and pensioner individuals, the FM said. 

Read in detail here

Other major proposals in the Finance Bill relate to withdrawal of an equalisation levy of 2%, expansion of tax benefits to certain funds and entities in the IFSC, and changes to the Benami Transaction Act enforcement.

Securities Transaction Tax on Futures and Options contracts is to be increased to 0.2% and 0.1%, respectively, the FM said. Income received on buyback of shares to be taxed in the hands of the recipient. Tax deduction on NPS contributions to be raised from 10% of salary to 14% of salary. This will cover government employees as well as private companies in the NPS.

The FM said that capital gains taxation is proposed to be hugely simplified. Short-term gains on some financial assets will now attract 20%, while those on all other assets will continue to attract the current rates. “For benefiting lower and middle income classes, I propose to increase the limit of exemption on some financial instruments for capital gains to ₹1.25 lakh a year. Unlisted bonds and debentures, debt mutual funds and market-linked debentures, will attract tax on capital gains irrespective of holding period,” she said.

The TDS rate on e-commerce operators is to be reduced from 1% to 0.1%. I propose to decriminalise delays in payments of TDS upto their filing due date. Simplification of reassessment and reopening of returns. From now, this can be done after three years only if the income involved is ₹50 lakh or more, with a time limit of six years, the FM said. 

The government announced that it will undertake a comprehensive review of the Income Tax Act to make it easy to read. Presenting the Union Budget for 2024-25, Ms. Sitharaman also said the government will come out with SoP (standard operating procedure) for TDS defaults and simplify and rationalise compounding of such offences.

She added that two tax exemption regimes for charitable trusts will be merged into one. Also, 58% of corporate tax have come from simplified tax regime in FY23. More than two-thirds of individuals availed of the new income tax regime, Ms. Sitharaman said in the Lok Sabha. The FM further announced that DPI apps will be developed for credit, e-commerce, education, health, law, MSME service delivery, and urban governance.

To bolster the Indian startup ecosystem, I propose to abolish the so-called Angel Tax for all classes of investors, the FM announced.

For customs, we reduced the number of customs duty rates in 2022-23. I propose to rationalise them after a review over next six months, the FM said. She announced that to provide relief to cancer patients, three more medicines will be fully exempted from customs duty. I propose changes in the basic customs duty on X-ray tubes and flat panel detectors for domestic X-ray machines’ production.

The net tax receipts are estimated at ₹25.83 lakh crore, and the fiscal deficit is estimated at 4.9% of GDP for this year. The gross and net market borrowings through dated securities are estimated at ₹14.01 lakh crore and the ₹11.63 lakh crore, respectively, lower than last year. The government is committed to stay the course on fiscal consolidation, with deficit at below 4.5% of GDP in 2025-26, and with sustained reductions thereafter, the FM said.

She added that GST has reduced compliance burden and logistics costs for trade and industry and enhanced revenues. To multiply its benefits, we will strive to simplify and rationalise the tax structure and expand it to cover more goods, she said.

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Budget speech proposed creation of employment of about 4.1 crore youth over the next five years. Towards it, the Finance Minister has made an allocation of ₹2 lakh crore.

Similarly, for skilling the citizens so as to generate job opportunities, she proposed ₹1.48 crore. 20 lakh youth will be skilled over a five-year period. A total of 1,000 industrial training institutes will be upgraded, she announced.

She proposed in her speech that a one-time wage would be provided to all first time employees in all sectors. The incentive for first-timers would be provided through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) 

The Finance Minister said that the government will launch internship opportunities in 500 companies to one crore youth in five years. 

Interns will get exposure to real-life environment and an allowance of ₹5000 per month, she said. The companies will bear training and 10% of training cost from CSR funds. Ms. Sitharaman said employment, skilling, MSME, and middle class are among key focus areas of this Budget. 

The Budget proposes to earmark a significant part of the 50-year interest-free loan, to work with the States on following reforms - Land related reforms in both urban and rural areas, that cover land administration, planning and urban planning and building bye-laws. “Rural land-related actions will include assignment of a unique Aadhaar for all lands, digitisation of terrestrial maps, survey of lands, and establishment of land registry. On labour related reforms, our govt. will facilitate a range of services for labour, including employment and skilling.”

She added that open architecture databases for the widely changing job market, and connecting potential employees with industry will be covered. Shram Suvidha and Samadhan portal will be revamped to enhance ease of compliance for industry and trade.

The FM announced that for space economy, with the govt’s continued emphasis on expanding it by 5 times in the next ten years, a venture capital fund of ₹1,000 crore will be set up. “We will formulate an economic policy framework to delineate the strategy for sustaining high growth with next generation reforms. These reforms will cover all factors of production, including land, labour and capital. This will require collaboration of the Centre and States,” she said.

“Tourism has always been a part of our civilisation. Our efforts to position India as a global destination will also create jobs and unlock opportunities in other sectors. I propose Vishnupath temple at Gaya, and Mahabodhi temple in Bodhgaya, are of immense spiritual importance. We will develop corridors there on the model of the successful Kashi Vishwanath corridor to make them a world-class tourist destination,” the FM said.

She added that a comprehensive development initiative for Rajgir and Nalanda (in Bihar) will be pursued. “We will support tourism in Odisha that has scenic beauty, temples, craftsmanship, natural landscapes, wildlife sanctuaries and pristine beaches,” she said.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that ₹2.66 lakh crore has been allocated for rural development, including rural infrastructure. She also said that three crore additional houses will be constructed under the PM Awas Yojana in rural and urban areas. Presenting the Budget for 2024-25 in the Lok Sabha, she said, “This year I have made a provision of ₹2.66 lakh crore for rural development, including rural infrastructure”.

The FM noted that Bihar has frequently suffered from floods, many of them originating outside the country. “Plans to solve these problems in Nepal have not progressed. We will provide support of ₹11,500 crore for flood mitigation projects. Assam grapples with floods every year from the Brahmaputra river and its tributaries that originate outside India. We will provide support to them. Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh, that suffered due to landslides and floods, will be provided assistance,” she said.

The Finance Minister announced that the Phase 4 of the PM Gram Sadak Yojana will be launched to provide all-weather roads to 25,000 rural habitats.

FM said the Centre has made significant infrastructure investments in years, triggering a multiplier effect. “This will continue over the next five years. This year, I provided ₹11,11,111 crore for capex, which is 3.4% of GDP. We will encourage States to provide support of similar scale for infrastructure development based on their priorities,” she said.

Private investment in infrastructure will be promoted through Viability Gap Funding and a market-based financing framework would be brought out, she added.

Electricity storage solutions will be worked out for renewable energy. Research and Development on smaller nuclear reactors. Our govt. will partner with the private sector for setting up Bharat Small Reactors, and research and development of new technologies for nuclear energy. Advanced Ultra-Super Critical Thermal Power Plants, with much higher efficiency, have been developed indigenously. An 800 MW commercial plant will be set up, with the government providing the required fiscal support, the FM said.

She added that a roadmap for hard-to-abate industries, from energy efficiency targets to emission targets, will be formulated.

We will bring out a document on appropriate energy transition pathways, that balances the needs of employment and development. In line with the Interim Budget announcement, the Rooftop Solar scheme has been launched to enable 1 crore households to get upto 300 units of free electricity every month. The scheme has seen 1.8 crore registrations and 14 lakh applicants.

Read the whole story here

“High Stamp Duty may be lowered, especially for women. This reform will be made essential condition for urban development schemes,” she said.

Building on the PM Swanidhi scheme for street vendors, we plan a scheme over the next 5 years to promote 100 weekly haats in select cities, the FM announced. 

In partnership with States, and MDBs, the Modi-led NDA Government will promote water supply, sewage treatment and solid waste management projects for 100 large cities, the FM announced.

Under the PM Awas Yojana-Urban, the housing needs of one crore poor and middle class families will be addressed with an investment of ₹10 lakh crore. This will include the central assistance of ₹2.2 lakh crore in the next five years.

“For facilitating term loans to MSMEs, a credit guarantee scheme will be introduced. The scheme will operate on the cooling of credit risks of such MSMEs. A self-financing guarantee fund will provide to each applicant cover of up to ₹100 crore while loan amount may be larger...” she said.

Backward region grant will be provided to 3 districts of Andhra Pradesh, the Finance Minister announced. In her Budget for 2024-25, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the Union Government will arrange financial assistance to Bihar through aid from multilateral development agencies.

The government will also set up airports, medical colleges and sports infrastructure in Bihar, she said. The Centre will also formulate plan ‘Purvodaya’ for all-round development of Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh .

Ms. Sitharaman further said the government will support industrial corridor for development in the eastern region. The Finance Minister also said the government will provide e-vouchers directly to 1 lakh students every year with interest subvention of 3% of loan amount.

The government said it will launch three employment-linked schemes. While presenting the Union Budget for 2024-25, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the government will provide incentives to 30 lakh youth entering the job market by providing one month’s PF (provident fund) contribution.

She announced that working women hostels will be set up in the country to promote women’s participation in the workforce. She added that the government will provide funds to the private sector, domain experts and others for developing climate-resilient seeds.

An already existing scheme -- MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee) -- aims to provide 100 days of wage employment in a particular fiscal year to at least one member of every household whose adult members seek manual work.

The government will bring a National Cooperation Policy for the overall development of the country, Finance Minister Nirmamala Sitharaman said. Presenting the Budget for 2024-25, she said the Centre will promote digital public infrastructure for agriculture in partnership with states, while Jan Samarth-based Kisan Credit Card will be introduced in five States. Also, the government will provide finance for shrimp farming and marketing, she added.

The FM said that large-scale vegetable production will be developed closer to major consumption centres. “We will promote farmer producer organisations, coops and startups for vegetable supply chains...,” she said.

For achieving self-sufficiency in pulses and oil seeds, the govt will strengthen their production, storage and marketing. A strategy is being put in place to achieve aatanibharta for oil seeds such as mustard, groundnut, sesame, soybean and sunflower, the Finance Minister said in the Lok Sabha, presenting the Union Budget 2024-2025.

Ms. Sitharaman said that in the next two years, one crore farmers across the country will be initiated into natural farming supported by certification and branding. Implementation will be through scientific institutions and willing Gram Panchayats. 10,000 need-based bio input resource centres will be established.

“Transforming agricultural research, our govt will undertake a comprehensive review of the agricultural research setup to bring the focus on raising productivity and developing climate-resilient varieties. Funding will be provided in challenge mode including to the pvt sector, domain experts both from the govt and outside and will oversee the conduct of such research,” Ms. Sitharaman said.

She added that 109 new high-yielding and climate-resilient varieties of 32 field and horticultural crops will be released for cultivation by farmers.

The Finance Minister said that the Budget will focus on employment, skilling, MSME and middle class. “Budget for FY25 to provide ₹1.48 lakh crore for education and employment and skill... Implementation of various schemes announced in Interim Budget in February are still underway,” the Finance Minister said. People of India have reinforced their faith in the government led by Mr. Modi and re-elected it for the third term, she said, while presenting the Budget in Lok Sabha.

India’s economic growth continues to shine while the global economy is still in the grip of policy uncertainty, Ms. Sitharaman added. The country’s inflation continues to be stable and is moving towards 4%, and core inflation stands at 3.1%.

On Budget priorities, the Finance Minister said that in the interim Budget the govt promised to present a detailed roadmap for the pursuit of Viksit Bharat. “In line with the strategy set in the interim Budget, this Budget envisages sustained efforts on the following nine priorities for generating ample opportunities for all -- productivity and resilience in agriculture, employment and skilling, inclusive human resource development and social justice, manufacturing and services, urban development, emergency security, infrastructure, innovation R&D, next-gen reforms. Subsequent Budgets will build on these and more priorities and actions,” she said.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is presenting the Union Budget 2024-2025 in Lok Sabha. India’s inflation continues to be low, stable and moving towards the 4% target, the Finance Minister said.

The Budget Session of the Parliament began at 11 a.m. on July 23. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present her seventh budget in the Lok Sabha today.

New Delhi: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman with a red pouch carrying the Budget documents arrives at the Parliament to present the Union Budget 2024-25, in New Delhi, Tuesday, July 23, 2024. (PTI Photo/Atul Yadav)(PTI07_23_2024_000064B)

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman opted for an off-white checkered handloom saree with a contrasting purple and pink-hued blouse for the presentation of the first Budget on July 23 of the third term of the NDA Government led by PM Narendra Modi.

Indian shares reversed early gains to drop marginally in morning trade on Tuesday, with volatility rising ahead of the union budget, due at 11 a.m. IST, which could have a huge bearing on the trajectory of markets.

The NSE Nifty 50 and S&P BSE Sensex opened about 0.3% higher but were trading about 0.2% lower as of 10:22 a.m. IST. Volatility rose to a six-week-high of 15.79.

“Volatility will remain elevated today as budget announcements will decide the direction of markets in intraday trade,” said ICICI Securities analysts led by Dharmesh Shah.

A market correction cannot be ruled out, given the high valuations, they added.

The Nifty has hit multiple all-time highs through its roughly 13% rally this year, despite a near 6% slide on June 4 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party returned to power but by unexpectedly having to rely on allies. Still, the index has risen in each of the seven weeks since.

The Union Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved the full Budget for 2024-25. Following this, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present her seventh budget in the Lok Sabha.

Ms. Sitharaman, the first full-time woman Finance Minister of the country, has presented five full Budgets since July 2019 and an interim budget on February 1, 2024. This is the first Budget of the BJP-led NDA Government in its third term in office.

“I think the problem is that the government is not recognising the real concerns. The real concerns are inflation, especially food inflation, and rampant unemployment and inadequate job creation,” says Economist Jayati Ghosh.

“If you look at the economic survey, the country has achieved, even post covid, a very stable growth pattern in GDP numbers. There is an uptick in manufacturing, agriculture, there is a bit of subsiding in the consumption patterns in country because of lower middle income people getting hurt due to inflation and having lost wealth during COVID,” ASSOCHAM President Sanjay Nayar said in an interview to PTI. 

“The govt has done a tremendous job, looking at the geopolitical, geographic scenario. India looks like a fantastic place to attract investments. The expectation would be to keep catalysing the infrastructure spending. I have told this to PTI that another couple of years of heightened spending on infrastructure is a good idea,” he added.

Emphasising the need for measures to address inflation, particularly the soaring prices of essential commodities and life-saving drugs, Uttar Pradesh Congress President Ajay Rai has voiced the expectations of the middle class for the Union Budget 2024-25.

Expressing his expectations from the budget, Congress leader Ajay Rai said on Tuesday, “In this budget, inflation should be controlled. The price of garlic is ₹500 per kg, and the prices of vegetables and medicines have gone up. The price of life-saving drugs has increased.

Employment opportunities also need to be generated. All these factors need to be worked upon.”

Shiv Sena Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray’s (UBT) faction leader, Priyanka Chaturvedi, echoed similar expectations, stating that the finance minister should concentrate on tackling unemployment and inflation.

More tax benefits for health insurance under the new tax regime, relaxation in payment norms for MSMEs and incentives for the agri-tech sector are among the expectations of stakeholders from the first budget of the Modi 3.0 government .

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is scheduled to present the full Budget for fiscal 2024-25 on July 23, which will be the first major policy document of the new government.

Anup Rau, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Future Generali India Insurance Company, said the deduction limit on health insurance premiums under Section 80D of the Income Tax Act has remained unchanged for the past nine years despite the fact that there has been a significant rise in healthcare costs across the country.

Watch what women can expect from Budget here

Union Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi met in Parliament on Tuesday to approve the Union Budget ahead of its presentation by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Parliament this morning to attend the cabinet meeting.On Monday, Prime Minister said the Economic Survey highlighted the prevailing strengths of the economy and identifies areas for further growth and progress as the government “moves towards building a Viksit Bharat”.

Union Ministers Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh and Pralhad Joshi were also seen arriving in the Parliament earlier for the Cabinet meeting today.

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman met President Droupadi Murmu ahead of presenting the Union Budget 2024 in Parliament, as per tradition.

The Finance Minister and her team briefed the President about the provisions of the Budget.

President Murmu then fed the Finance Minister ‘Curd and Sugar’ which is a symbol of wishes for good luck.

GTJVNmibQAE5JC1.jpg

All eyes will be on whether Sitharaman provides the much-expected tax relief for the middle class, leaving more money in their hands, as there is tax buoyancy. Besides, the market also expects staying on the fiscal glide path to lower the fiscal deficit to 4.5 per cent of GDP by 2025-26.

Fiscal Deficit: The budgeted fiscal deficit, which is the difference between the government expenditure and income, for the current fiscal is 5.1 per cent as projected in the Interim Budget in February, against 5.8 per cent in the last fiscal year. The full Budget is expected to provide better-than-earlier projections as there has been tax buoyancy.

Capital Expenditure: The government’s planned capital expenditure for this fiscal year is budgeted at ₹11.1 lakh crore, higher than ₹9.5 lakh crore in the last fiscal year. The government has been pushing infrastructure creation and also incentivising states to step up capex.

Tax Revenue: The Interim Budget had pegged gross tax revenue at ₹38.31 lakh crore for 2024-25, an 11.46 per cent growth over the last fiscal. This includes ₹21.99 lakh crore estimated to come from direct taxes (personal income tax + corporate tax), and ₹16.22 lakh crore from indirect taxes (customs + excise duty + GST).

GST: Goods and Services Tax (GST) collection in 2024-25 is estimated to rise to ₹10.68 lakh crore, an increase of 11.6 per cent. The tax revenue figures will have to be watched out for in the final Budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is set to create history when she presents her seventh straight budget on Tuesday for 2024-25, surpassing the record of former prime minister Morarji Desai.

Setting the tone for the third term of the Modi government, its focus areas may be boosting consumption by giving tax benefits to the middle class. Other priority areas may include agriculture, capex and infra spending and manufacturing push..

With India emerging as the biggest sweet spot in global growth, the budget is expected to address three major trends: global offshoring, digitalization, and energy transition.

Sitharaman, who will turn 65 next month, was in 2019 appointed as India’s first full-time woman finance minister when Prime Minister Narendra Modi won a decisive second term. Since then, she has presented six straight budgets, including an interim one in February this year.

A total of 39 shipyards have registered, and 18 shipyards utilised the benefits under the Centre’s scheme to provide financial support to Indian shipyards for shipbuilding contracts signed between April 1, 2016, and March 31, 2026, according to the Economic Survey. 

“India’s Maritime Vision 2030 outlines over 150 initiatives to improve ports, shipping, and inland waterways and envisions investments of ₹3-3.5 lakh crore. The Maritime Amrit Kaal Vision 2047 outlines over 300 initiatives across 11 key areas to drive growth and development in India’s coastal regions,” according to the Economic Survey 2023-24 tabled in the Parliament on Monday.

“Its vision aims to reduce the average vessel turnaround time (containers) from 25 hours in 2020 to less than 20 hours in 2030. Likewise, it also aims to increase the average ship daily output (gross tonnage) from 16,000 in 2020 to more than 30,000 in 2030.”

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present the estimated receipts and expenditure (2024-25) of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir (with legislature) in Parliament today.

“I hope that the Budget will face the country’s economic realities. The biggest economic reality is that unemployment rate in 9.2% in the country, inflation is at all time high. Food inflation is particularly very high. Private sector investment is falling. I hope that the government and the Budget will project ways to improve this situation,” TMC MP Saugata Roy.

Indian shares opened higher on July 23, led by financials and public sector companies, as investors brace for policy announcements in the Union Budget due at 11 a.m., which could have a huge bearing on the trajectory of markets.

The NSE Nifty 50 rose 0.24% to 24,568.9, while the S&P BSE Sensex added 0.28% to 80,724.3, as of 9:15 a.m. IST.

• July 23, 2024 09:26 Rupee rises 3 paise to 83.63 against U.S. dollar in early trade

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday again took a digital tablet wrapped in a traditional ‘bahi-khata’ style pouch as she headed for Parliament to present the full Budget 2024-25 in a paperless format just like the previous years.

Draped in a white silk saree with magenta border, she posed for the traditional ‘briefcase’ picture outside her office, along with her team of officials, before heading to meet the President.

With the tablet carefully kept inside a red cover with a golden-coloured national emblem embossed on it instead of the briefcase, Parliament will be her next destination after the call on President Droupadi Murmu at Rashtrapati Bhawan.

Sitharaman, India’s first full-time woman Finance Minister, had in July 2019 ditched the colonial legacy of a Budget briefcase for the traditional ‘bahi-khata’ to carry Union Budget papers. She used the same in the following year, and in a pandemic-hit 2021, she swapped traditional papers with a digital tablet for carrying her speech and other Budget documents.

“There is no direction in the Budgets presented in the last 10 years. Inflation is skyrocketing, unemployment is high, the growth rate is declining fundamentally. This indicates that the economy isn’t in a healthy situation,” says AAP MP Sandeep Pathak says. 

The government’s steps such as mandatory quality norms and increase in customs duties have significantly helped the domestic toy players to boost exports and reduce dependence on Chinese imports, Economic Survey said on July 22.

It said that India’s emergence as a toy exporting nation can also be attributed to its integration into the global value chain and zero-duty market access for domestically manufactured toys in critical countries such as the UAE and Australia.

The industry has long faced challenges in the global trade landscape, consistently being a net importer of toys for many years.

“Rising exports, coupled with declining imports, transformed India from a deficit to a surplus nation in the trade of toys,” it said.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman arrived at the Ministry of Finance ahead of the Union Budget presentation on Tuesday.

The Finance Minister was pictured wearing a white saree with a violet border as she arrived at the Ministry.

Nirmala Sitharaman is set to present the Union Budget 2024 in Parliament today, marking her seventh consecutive budget and eclipsing the late Moraji Desai’s record of six consecutive budgets, which is likely to focus on changes in the income tax structure and improving the ease of doing business in India.

Sitharaman tabled the Economic Survey 2023-24 along with the statistical appendix on Monday.

Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary said that the first Union Budget of the third Modi government will be based on his mantra of “Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas”.

“This budget is based on PM Modi’s mantra of Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas,” MoS Chaudhary said.

Chaudhary was among the first from FM Nirmala Sitharaman’s team to reach the North Block offices of the Finance Ministry ahead of the Budget Presentation. Vivek Joshi, Secretary, of the Department of Financial Services and Chief Economic Advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran have also reached the ministry ahead of FM Sitharaman.

Extreme weather, lower reservoir levels and crop damage have affected farm output and led to higher food prices over the past two years, the Economic Survey 2023-24 said on July 22.

Unfavourable weather conditions particularly impacted the production prospects of vegetables and pulses, it said.

“In FY23 and FY24, the agriculture sector was affected by extreme weather events, lower reservoir levels, and damaged crops that adversely affected farm output and food prices. So, food inflation based on the Consumer Food Price Index (CFPI) increased from 3.8% in FY22 to 6.6% in FY23 and further to 7.5% in FY24,” read the consolidated report on the state of the economy in the previous year.

The fiscal deficit for FY 2023-24 was 5.63% of GDP with a target of 5.1% for FY 2024-25. Given the significant share of personal tax in overall direct-tax collections, the government is unlikely to introduce measures that would greatly reduce tax revenue. Here are key expectations from individual taxpayers and potential government changes to minimise fiscal deficit impact:

Changes in simplified tax regime

• Standard deduction
• NPS employee contribution deduction
• Reintroduction of deduction for investment in infrastructure bonds

Changes in old tax regime

• Affordable housing deduction for interest paid on loan
• Metro cities for HRA

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman tabled the Economic Survey 2023-24 in both Houses of Parliament on July 22. The Economic Survey is a comprehensive review or annual report of Indian economy during the closed financial year, prepared by the Economics Division of the Department of Economic Affairs of the Finance Ministry under the guidance of the India’s Chief Economic Advisor (CEA).

Here are the charts that show key numbers from the Economic Survey 2023-24:

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is scheduled to present the Budget for 2024-25 in the Lok Sabha on July 23 . Parliament Session begins on July 22 and will conclude with the passage of the Finance Bill on August 12.

In this series, experts from various fields suggest what the focus of Narendra Modi-led NDA government’s third term should be. Read what the experts have told The Hindu .

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman tabled the Economic Survey of India 2023-24 , along with a statistical appendix, in both Houses of Parliament on July 22. 

The survey said that the outlook for India’s financial sector appears bright , but it needs to brace for likely vulnerabilities. The Indian financial sector is at a “turnpike moment”, it said, adding that the dominance of banking support to credit is being reduced, and the role of capital markets is rising. 

According to the report, India’s GDP is likely to grow at 6.5 to 7% in the current fiscal year amid global challenges which may impact exports. The growth projected for 2024-25 is lower than the economic growth rate of 8.2% estimated for the previous financial year.

India saw 92 lakh foreign tourist arrivals in 2023, signifying a positive post-pandemic revival, the Chief Economic Advisor has said in the Economic Survey released on July 22.

The survey, which was tabled in Parliament, said India’s tourism industry showed positive signs of revival post-pandemic with an year-on-year increase of 43.5%. The hospitality industry has also met the needs of the increasing numbers of tourists successfully. “In 2023, the highest amount of new supply was created with the addition of 14,000 rooms, bringing the total inventory of chain-affiliated rooms to 183,000 in India,” the survey said.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present the Union Budget 2024 on July 23 at 11 a.m. It will be a record seventh consecutive Budget presentation for Ms. Sitharaman.

The Budget 2024 presentation will be streamed on various platforms. Viewers can watch the Budget 2024 speech by Nirmala Sitharaman live at The Hindu . Follow our liveblog for all the latest news, reactions, and analysis of Budget 2024. The Finance Minister’s address will also be available to stream live via the Sansad TV .

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will be presenting the Union Budget 2024-25 on July 23, 2024.

It will be a record seventh consecutive Budget presentation for Ms. Sitharaman.

Previously, Morarji Desai presented the Union Budget for six times consecutively. Interestingly, Morarji Desai presented budgets for record 10 times followed by former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram 9 times.

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