Due: Friday, March 20, 11:59 pm

Your final paper should be 2,000-2,500 words (8-10 pages, double-spaced) on some aspect of the history of databases.

There are many ways to approach this. You could write about:

• the development of a particular kind of database.
• the way that people used a particular kind of database in particular contexts.
• the way that the database industry dealt with a particular problem.
• the economic, social, political, or environmental effects of some aspect of the history of databases.
• etc.

You should take a historical approach to the question, meaning that you should discuss change over time. You should gain a full understanding of secondary literature and also conduct significant primary-source research in order to answer your question.

You should be sure to convey why your topic should matter even to people who don’t care about databases.

Your argument should be clear, easily identifiable, and stated in the first or second paragraph. Each subsequent paragraph should play a discernible role in advancing that argument. Please pay close attention to sentence clarity and concision; we’ll talk about how to do that in class.

Since this is a history paper, you should use Chicago/Turabian-style citations.