Writing Research Papers on the Present Day

Writing Research Papers on the Present DayIn researching our 2020 survey on research paper topics for undergraduate students, the winner was the 1980s war and its apparent progress, thirty years after the conclusion of the conflict. We were surprised to see that some people didn't even realize that a major part of the conflict was in fact still going on.Articles about the war are not surprising. War articles are all over the newspaper. It's only when the topic is a major international issue that people look at articles in scholarly journals to see what research papers are actually written. Now, there are several reasons why they may do this.For one thing, many Americans had very little idea of what the history of the US involvement in the war was. The one war that seems to get regular coverage is WWII, but we didn't enter WWII until just before World War II ended. Even that event was a major event - the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Few people had any idea of the period from Roose velt's New Deal to the end of the war, but if they did, they were almost certainly unaware of the main focus of the New Deal.Then there is the fact that we Americans were not fond of the word 'War' in the first place. Americans were actually quite traumatized by the early twentieth century experience of war. Things like the lynching of black people or the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor generated extreme feelings in the American public. Those who experienced the war first hand were apt to form a different point of view any mention of it in an entirely different light.Because we were traumatized by war, we tend to think of it as something that happened 'a long time ago'. Obviously, that's not true, but to people who were young and still had the first of their memories formed in the early nineteen seventies, what happened a long time ago could seem just that. They were more likely to see reference to the war in an article than in a scholarly journal article.We also have a different u nderstanding of how we should treat war than we had thirty years ago. For starters, there are now two opposing political parties in the United States, and one of them is in favor of bringing peace to the Middle East through some form of nation building. We have also become much more knowledgeable about the world as a whole and the global economy and trade that are happening in those regions. Therefore, it's not surprising that a few war related articles would still be published.But in spite of all this knowledge and understanding, the United States is still divided over national security, international relations, military force, and the like. Those in the executive branch of the US government are clearly in favor of national security, while those in the legislative branch want to bring the country back to the status quo ante. So, yes, a lot of the articles that we saw in scholarly journals this year about US involvement in the war in the late 1970s and 1980s are about the debate abo ut the future of the US in the world and its future role in the world. That's because there's plenty of room for a story like that.At the same time, writers like myself will be looking for a story that will provoke debate, not just because it's fun, but because it's good for the brain, and will help writers understand the various types of stories they need to be writing research papers on. I hope you'll consider all this in 2020. See you next time.