223 Topic Selection

Topic Selection

I have recently been doing research and writing on a variety of topics. It occurred to me that very narrow subjects are my topics of choice.

I was an English major in college and went on to get a master's in English literature after I had my master's degree in library science. 

For the English degree, I was required to write a thesis. I loved Shakespeare. I have been obsessed with his work since junior high school when we studied MacBeth and Julius Caesar. In class, we read each play aloud--maybe not the entire play--but a substantial portion. 

So I thought, I'll write my thesis on Shakespeare! I had several ideas for a topic. But since I was a librarian, I soon discovered there was no way I could locate and read all the previous research on any Shakespearean topic. There is much written in English and as well as a huge amount in many other languages.

The World Shakespeare Bibliography, a searchable database from Texas A&M University, provides a comprehensive database of Shakespeare scholarship from 1960 to the present. It contains 146,000 entries! 

So I wrote my thesis on John Updike--much more manageable, but he is no Shakespeare!

I am working on a book about Judge Richard Parker, the judge who sentenced John Brown to death. That was his main claim to fame, and I now have hundreds of pages of information about his life. Much of it comes from avid manuscript collectors who tried to locate all the documents about and by him. However, only one person has written in any detail about his life so he meets my criteria!

In fact, I have an article coming out soon in the Journal of the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era, a Shenandoah University publication that is the brainchild of Jonathan Noyalas. The article concentrates on a week in Judge Parker's life. You can't get much more narrow than that!

These are the six; I found images of five.

I have spoken several times on another Civil War topic, one piece of graffiti in the Shenandoah Valley Civil War Museum in Winchester. It features the names of about twelve Union officers, but I talk about only six! I have found hundreds of pages of information about these men as well--perhaps a future blog!

And we can't forget one of my most infamous blogs--the one on dryer lint!

You Can't Get Too Narrow Trish