Background:
One of our course objectives is to demonstrate the ability to produce an “original and clearly supported thesis.” The first step in doing so is to think about potential topics for your paper. A topic is the subject you’ll work in for your paper. Ultimately, your topic will need to allow you to make a substantial claim–the specific argument of your paper–which will have to meet several requirements:

-your claim should be something that would have reasonable counter-arguments

-claims that are too obvious (“technology is helping us to live longer”) or matters of faith or philosophy (“it is right and morally important that people behave in X way,” “the real definition of beauty is Z”) are not likely to sustain an academic debate that we, working as generalists rather than specialists, will enjoy or be successful with over the course of the quarter.

-your topic should be complex enough to sustain investigation over 12+ pages

-you will need to find and cite eight good sources in your paper

Closely related to the issues above, you’ll need to find something that you can write about within existing standards of academic conversation and without conducting new experiments or original research. Some topics are not very well provable or disprovable in academic terms. This doesn’t mean that they are less important topics, but it does mean that we can’t use them to practice the techniques we’re working on in this class. Matters of belief or arguments about things that are unobservable–no matter how true or important–are of things to avoid for this type of paper. (Conspiracies that have succeeded in suppressing evidence of themselves are a good example of this sort of thing.)

It will also be helpful if your topic is interesting to you.

Finally, I’m going to specifically disallow papers on:

gun control/the second amendment
abortion
minimum wage
drug policy
While these topics are interesting and might in some ways qualify under the rules above, I find that the breadth and intensity of feeling in popular sources on these topics make it very difficult for students to write successful papers.