Week 7: Process and Product
Hello and welcome to Week 7 of History Honors.
As always, you will be asked to post twice, or once covering two topics.
The first relies on Formulating a Thesis. Take a look, and let us know the process you’re using to develop your working thesis, and how you will take that from here.
The second topic is to post one or two secondary sources, scholarly journal articles related to your topic. Consider this to be like annotated bibliography – tell us then thesis of the article, how the historian supports the thesis, and what use you’ll make of the article for your research.
Thanks!
As of now my working thesis is that the disconnect from the precepts created by the Nuremberg Trials and the lack of judicial action taken in prosecuting the My Lai Massacre show that there is a need for a standing international military tribunal. I will also argue, pending my research, that, despite some reform coming from the resulting trials of My Lai, our commitment to preeminent war is still ultimately more harmful than if we had remained uninvolved, as shown in the Gulf War and subsequent Iraq involvement.
I feel pretty confident regarding my first section of my thesis, but my second half I have stated after very brief surface research.
To develop my thesis I started on a surface level and dove deeper as i gained more knowledge. After meeting with my mentor, I had an idea of what I wanted to argue, but I wasn’t sure if it was feasible because of my lack of knowledge about the Vietnam War as a whole, let alone the My Lai incident. I began by reading a few wikipedias about the events that occurred and was truly taken aback by the tragedy. After reading that the legal trial, following the scandalous cover up, was highly controversial during the late 60s, I did a search for legal perspectives on Lieutenant Calley’s prosecution and found plenty of letters of dissent, personal memos stating the wrongness of the actions, and deeper legal analyses of the issues at hand. However, many of the articles I found, I did not have access to as they were solely for law students at an institution who had subscriptions to these journals. This brought me to USD’s law library online catalogue where I found an overwhelming amount of information on the extensive legal aspects regarding not just My Lai, but international law, war law, the constitutionality of our Vietnam occupation, etc. Many of these resources were published within a year or so after the trial, and in the early seventies at the latest. Knowing this, and after finding no contemporary analyses of the crime, sparked me to formulate my research questions and thus my working thesis.