Examine the list of requirements for your paper as required by your professor. Some professors want students to pursue independent and original research, using primary and secondary history sources. Others may have other more specific requirements for the type of paper they want written. Know each of the major requirements of the paper before you delve too deeply into your research.
Brainstorm to create a list of possible broad topics that you may have an interest in pursuing. Compare some of these topics to the material found in your required textbooks for the class to see which areas are of most interest to you and which ones seem to have a substantial amount of information that you can use in a research paper.
Conduct preliminary research on your topic so that you have enough source material to put together a viable essay for a college course. Some professors may require an eight-page to 10-page paper, while others may require one that is 18 to 20 pages. Find as many sources as you can on the topic, but limit your use of sources to those that are written by scholars who have made significant contributions to the field of scholarship on your topic. Most scholarly books and articles will provide a biographical abstract of the author's work and contributions. General encyclopedic sources do not count as credible resources for a college history paper.
Read your sources to discover the questions that scholars are asking regarding the broader topic at hand. Each field of history can be divided and subdivided into more specific areas of study and research. Your initial readings in some of the sources you select should indicate to you some of the unanswered or more often argued questions in history. Make the ongoing debate in scholarly circles the focus of your paper. For instance, if you are writing a paper on the American Revolution, don't make your paper a descriptive paper of the military strategy of the revolution. Instead, examine the causes of the war and determine whether it was social forces or ideological concerns that led the revolutionaries to rebel.
Narrow down your topic as much as possible. A large topic, such as the American Revolution, is too broad for an American history paper. Instead, choose a topic within the topic. For instance, a paper on the role of women in influencing ideology and social norms during the revolutionary period would be much more effective than a general paper on women living during the time of the war. Your concern should be to look for narrower topics that answer larger questions such as these.