to the "Writing On History" website of the History Department at Queens College, New York.

This site is designed to answer your questions about various aspects of researching, writing, and editing papers on history.

The links on the left-hand menu will take you to pages that address specific aspects of the process of writing on history.

On each of these pages, you will find sample topics and assignments, all related to this website's umbrella theme: "Events leading up to World War II". We established this as our umbrella theme for several reasons:

• it allows us to follow up on each section of general advice with a concrete example, each relating back to the same larger theme;
• it thus lends thematic coherence to the website as a whole;
• and it allows us to weave a narrative of near-global scope, with topics and examples relating to Asia (Japan's conquest of Nanking and U.S.-Japanese relations prior to Pearl Harbor), Europe (the Rise of Hitler and the Nazi annexation of Austria), and the United States (the isolationist movement prior to the U.S. entry into the war).

For those writing on topics other than events leading up to World War II, fear not: although the specific examples, sample assignments and topics of this website relate to that theme, the general advice offered in each section is abstract and applicable to any subject in history.