So you’d rather be thought incompetent when you hand in a bad paper?
I had this same problem when I was younger, and that’s the thinking that got me through it. Remember: “The person who asks a question is a fool for a moment; the person who doesn’t ask is a fool forever.”
All that said, you seem woefully ill-prepared for this work and your undergraduate professors are probably partly to blame. It blows my mind that you have managed to become a grad student without knowing how to write an acceptable research paper. For god’s sake, get some of your money’s worth out of grad school by pestering them until they teach you this stuff!
I’ve always liked the thought that the boom in women’s education is a result of the Civil War. I don’t think the argument is persuasive, but I like the argument. And that may be the mark of a good research paper.
Other ideas are fairly straight research - your argument is that so and so was instramental in founding the college (for instance) and you trace the actual history. i.e. examine the role of Mary Smith.
If this is a graduate level History course, and your undergrad degree was Education, you do need to get to your professor, advisor or someone and get some help. I wouldn’t want to undertake the rigor for a graduate research paper alone having avoided writing them for my entire undergrad career. You want help, and you want it right there - preferably from the professor or someone who has worked with this professor. For grad students who spent their undergrad degrees writing such things and needed an undergrad thesis to get out, knocking this off isn’t that difficult - and if this is a graduate level History class, that is the expectation. Grad school profs are pretty understanding that not everyone comes with the same background, and are willing to work to get you there - but they aren’t willing to have you not work, not show interest by getting help, and most importantly - they won’t give you full credit for substandard work simply because you haven’t written research papers.
Well, plagiarism is essentially taking someone else’s work and presenting it as your own. If she just wants the "facts,’ then take the “facts” from your sources and put them together in a simple narrative, making sure that you give citations for all of your sources of information.
Personally, i think that if all she wants you to do is give a chronological run-down of events, then it’s not really a history paper at all. It’s just a report.
What kind of essays or papers have you written before? You’re doing postgraduate work in an Arts type of course, presumably you did undergraduate work in something similar. Surely you have a grip on the difference between plagiarism and well-cited research? What am I missing here?
And you NEED an argument for any essay you write. It doesn’t have to be anything especially groundbreaking or controversial, just a short thesis or proposition that can be summed up in a sentence or two. “From 1920 to 1955, so-and-so College went through a dramatic set of changes. These changes were prompted by demographic change in the area, increased participation by women in higher education, and the concept of blah blah.” Then you go on and outline the facts supporting your argument. Without an argument, an essay is structureless and pointless, a mere list of factoids.
If you got that far in talking to your professor, couldn’t you have asked her this very question? Maybe not in those words, but something like, “I’m not sure I understand how to produce original work when all you want is previously acknowledged facts.”