Desperately need help one IA

[Andrew]

Hi! 
 

I'm currently on the second half of IB1 and just got to this new Mexican school a couple months ago. The rest of my IB education I took in Finland and Denmark, and my Group 4 subjects were Philosophy (1.5 years) and Anthropology ( a few months), but the only group 3 subject my school is offering at the moment is History, Route 2. 
I know nothing about History whatsoever; the methods, the schemes and stuff. All attempts to come up with a topic for my IA (which I'm expected to write a first draft for by the end of the month) end up sounding either like a philosophical or an anthropological or a social study. 
I really don't get how History works - How are you expected to produce new knowledge about facts you cannot explore or prove. What does History (IB) aim at finding?

All this, added to the unfortunate fact that my teacher is an awful lot less than ideal, have my crawling on the floor begging for help. So it's all on my own.
Is there a way I can take any of the topics I came up with and eventually got turned down by my teacher on the grounds of mistaken approach, without guidance to shape them into a more historical-looking work? 

 

They come in order of preference. Though I really feel no drop of passion for the subject. 

Idea 1: An causal-consequential analysis of the drop in religiosity-importance indices in nordic countries in relation to the welfare state. 
Idea 2: The impact of Darwin's On the origin of the species on the ideology of the third reich

Idea 3: The impact on the Sweden-USA relations after the assassination of president Olof Palme 

Idea 4: The impact on global markets of Monsanto unethical practices upon the Green Revolution. 


Just help me understanding how the deal works. I kind of get the hang of things after just a single perfectly coherent explanation, but I'm also going through culture shock, so there's really few I can do to improve these broke communication problems. I feel like people just go around the topic by speaking a bunch of empty unrelated words without ever answering my questions. 

[beatriz]

The main aims of IB history are developing your analytical skills in respect to historical events, and to effectively evaluate the reliability of history-related sources.

With the IA, you get to chose a topic and go more in-depth than what you would normally do in a classroom. It is pretty important that you like your topic, and that it is specific. The structure of the IA is reaaally weird because they want to avoid plagiarism and they want YOU to analyse, not to retell what you read in your own words. They don't want you to provide the facts, but you have to be the one synthesising and analysing. So there is a first part purely factual (NO analysis), then an OVLP (objective, value, limitation, purpose) of the main sources and then you get to analyse the facts & get a conclusion. Search structure of history IA in Google for more detail.

I think that you can't do a research of an event that happened pretty recently (i.e. in the 20th century). Therefore I don't think that your idea 1 would be appropriate, it looks more like an anthropological study.

 I think that your idea 4 is too broad -  'global markets' but you can probably concise it a little bit pretty easily. Idea 3 could be a bit broad as well - remember that the word limit is not that high - so you may want to focus on economic relations or military relations. Depends on what you have in mind. I personally LOVE the second idea but remember, you have to chose a topic where you can get factual evident pretty easily. But yeah! I really like that idea.

 

An easy way of coming up with a topic is focusing on a historical event & its impact on x. To what extent... is a good way of starting your research question

Hope that helps and good luck with the amigos!