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By admin

Unfortunately, in trying to decide on one of my previous 3 suggested topics to follow up with for my final project, I have encountered significant problems with all of them and seem no closer to reaching a final decision. Please forgive any grammatical or formatting errors in this post as I am rushing to get my thought process down in writing before midnight!

Firstly, my issue with my first topic is, with hindsight, quite easy to foresee; whilst the internet has all sorts of articles and diagrams to represent how membership of certain groups had fluctuated over time, my biggest issue with this project idea is how I could unify all my findings under one argument. Whilst it would be possible to posit causes for any and all microscopic fluctuations in membership rates for any number of political groups based on dates and known occurrences, it would be impossible to take all of those suggested causes and tie them together with some sort of unifying argument, unless I changed my perspective and approached it in terms of the varying consequences on political memberships of one certain event.

My second idea is, while ripe with potential, in jeopardy of forcing me to bend sources to one particular argument. I am worried that with a focus on education/literacy standards/rates I will be tempted to force every historical occurrence into the timeline of American literacy.

Thirdly, whilst there was plenty of resources to be found in terms of the development of the railway (particularly with useful maps), aside from analysing the return addresses of hundreds of letters around certain dates I am struggling to see how I could plot the location of certain influential individuals over time. If this is the only way, would it take that long? And how certain could I be?

So that is where I sit at the moment, if anyone has any solutions for me or suggested other topics, please don’t hesitate to let me know!