Skip to Main Content

African History

A brief overview of African history and politics.

Introduction

African history is vast, spanning thousands of years and many regions.  To effectively research, let's identify what aspect(s) of African history you are interested in learning more about. For example, decide if you’re interested in ancient kingdoms, Egypt, Mali, Great Zimbabwe, colonial history, independence movements, or contemporary history.

By identifying the scope of your topic, you will have an easier task to find the right resources. Below are some tips for narrowing your topic to an appropriate scope.

Finding the Right Scope for Your Topic

Narrow Your Topic

It's very common to select a topic that's too broad.  When the scope of your topic is too big, it's hard to dig through the huge volume of  information available to find something relevant.  It's also hard to write a paper or give a presentation of with any depth.  Most scholarly research examines fairly narrow topics and looks at relationships between concepts.  For example, affirmative action is a huge topic, but looking at the relationship between affirmative action and self esteem might be a more manageable topic.

There are many ways to narrow a topic that is too broad.  Let's use affirmative action as an example:

  • affirmative action and the law (what)
  • affirmative action and self esteem (what)
  • affirmative action and the military (what)
  • affirmative action and medical education (what)
  • affirmative action in California (where)
  • affirmative action and women (who)
  • affirmative action and latinos (who)
  • affirmative action and blacks (who)
  • affirmative action in the 1970s (when)

Use these concepts develop a research question on the topic of affirmative action

  • Has affirmative action changed medical education for women?

  • Have latinos in California benefitted from affirmative action?
  • Are there more high ranking black officers in the military because of affirmative action?

Broaden Your Topic

It is possible to generate a topic that's too narrow.  When the scope of your topic is too small, there may not be enough information available for your paper or presentation.  For example, this affirmative action-related topic is probably too narrow:

Did affirmative action policies benefit medical education opportunities for women from Atwater, California in the 1970's.

To find enough information, you might need to broaden the who (change women to minorities) and the where (change Atwater to California) concepts in this question.  You might also need to omit the limited time frame.

Examples

Here are a few more examples of narrowing a broad topic down to a manageable topic one step at a time.

  • political correctness > political correctness and universities > Are universities equally tolerant to politically correct and politically incorrect viewpoints?

  • social media > social media and bullying > The effect of social media on bullying behaviors among U.S. teenagers
  • academic freedom > academic freedom and politic* > Does academic freedom exist on both sides of the political aisle? 

This guide has a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC) License. This license enables reusers to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Users can remix, transform and build upon the material. Under this license, attribution must given with the appropriate credits, provide a link to the license, and indicate what changes were made. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. If you would like to reuse any part of this LibGuide for noncommercial educational or instructional purposes, please contact (library@ucmerced.edu) and credit the guide's creator, or the original content creator as noted, and include a link to the source.