Each student will write two (2-4 page) papers on a news article. Students should find a recent article and establish a question about information in the article that they want to learn more historical context about.  Based on the question, students should find two peer-reviewed academic sources (not Wikipedia) that discuss the history related to their question. Class sources may be used but the news article and at least one source must come from outside class.  Students must use at least three sources for their paper.

Good sources for news on Africa:

https://allafrica.com/ (Links to an external site.)

https://www.aljazeera.com/topics/regions/africa.html (Links to an external site.)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/africa (Links to an external site.)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world/africa (Links to an external site.)

Most U.S.-based sources of news are fine but tend to have limited stories and from a very U.S. perspective.  Your news article must have been published NO EARLIER THAN January 1, 2017.

Approaching the paper

    Find a news article on a topic about an issue in Africa (and about Africans not Americans in Africa) that interests you.
    Read the article and consider what questions arise for you when reading the article. What issues, ideas, etc in the article do you not understand or would like more information about? Consider why did the people/institutions/govts/etc in the article acted in particular ways?
    Pull out keywords that you can use to conduct searches for more information.
    Go to the LIBRARY website (library.tulane.edu) and use a combination of keywords in the SEARCHALL box, use the pulldown menu on the book to search in articles. Once you have search results, on the left side of the page choose peer-reviewed articles option. This will help narrow down your choices.
    Read two peer-reviewed articles that you find from the library website (in some cases reports from the United Nations and related organizations can count as a scholarly source. Please check with me if you want to use one of these kinds of reports as a source).
    Write an essay that introduces to the reader a topic/issue that is of interest in the present-day but has historical roots. Explain how the history in the region/time of Africa you are considering continues to shape aspects of life/policy/etc for people in that particular region of the continent.