IB History of the Americas: Internal Assessment (IA): Home

The History of the Americas Internal Assessment is an exercise in historiography, which the American Heritage dictionary (2020) defines as:

NOUN

1. The principles, theories, or methodology of scholarly historical research and presentation.
2. The writing of history based on a critical analysis, evaluation, and selection of authentic source materials and composition of these materials into a narrative subject to scholarly methods of criticism.
3. A body of historical literature.

Per the second definition (above), your goal is to critically analyze and evaluate various scholarly historical texts to determine the authors' points of view, backgrounds, arguments, and coverage of you selected research question.

Source:

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2020.

IB History Internal Assessment Overview

Created by Susannah Johnson

Internal Assessment Reminders

• All sources must relate to the research question
• Use textbooks and encyclopedias (i.e. tertiary sources) for context and background information only; do not cite
• Use primary sources from the time period
• Use secondary sources that are scholarly
• Use Books, eBooks (at least 2) written by historians
• Use Scholarly articles from history journal, written by historians
• Find several sources (minimum of 5, including at least 2 books) with varying perspectives 
• Do not rely heavily on one source
• Are there enough scholarly sources on the topic?