HISTORY DEPARTMENT

 

What is a Monograph?

by
Todd F. Carney
Southern Oregon University

(Copyright 1996, 2005 Todd F. Carney. This material may be used for instructional purposes without permission, but all commercial rights are reserved.)

1. Webster's Definition.

A highly detailed and thoroughly documented study or paper written about a limited area of a subject or field of inquiry.

2. Features of a Historical Monograph.

• Usually one author, usually a professional historian.
• A tightly focused subject.
• Based mostly on primary sources.
• Thoroughly documented with footnotes or endnotes.
• Usually published by a university press, or by a commercial press which specializes in scholarly works.

3. The following are not monographs.

• Memoirs of historical figures.
• Collections of essays, each written by a different author.
• Collections of documents on a given topic.
• Surveys of broad fields such as the Civil War, the history of African-Americans, or Industrial Revolution in the United States.
• Journalistic accounts of historical events written for a "popular" readership.
• Textbooks that cover an entire field of college history study.

4. Examples of Monographic Books.

• Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (N.Y.: New York University Press, 1984).
• Hal S. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth Century New England (N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
• Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750 (N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 1984).
• Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1986).

5. The Following Are Not Monographic Books.

• Ray Allen Billington, The Far Western Frontier, 1830-1860 (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1956).
• Albert. P. Blaustein, ed., Civil Rights and the American Negro: A Documentary History N.Y.: Washington Square Press, 1968).
• John Mayfield, The New Nation, 1800-1845. Revised Edition (N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 1981).

6. Selection Hints.

• Ask Prof. Carney (or another historian) about books published before 1950.
• Avoid books written by historical figures on subjects in which that figure played a role.

 

Updated