IA IA on Salem Witch Trials?

[Julia]

I keep changing my IA topic and now I'm thinking of asking "Were the Salem witch trials planned by Abigail Williams for personal retribution?"

There seems to be evidence that points toward this but I'm not sure how many books there will be on it. I'm also not sure if it's just too commonly accepted that she believed she was actually bewitched, which disproves my argument.

My original questions was "How politically effective was the Tongzhi Restoration of China compared to the Meiji Restoration of Japan?" but my teacher said that this was too vague and to only focus on one restoration. I want to do the Tongzhi Restoration, but I'm not sure where to go with it (which is why I want to change). I was thinking of asking "To what extent did Confucianism affect the failure of the Tongzhi Restoration?" but I think the answer is pretty well understood. Should I just stay with this topic, though? Even if it's good, it's honestly very boring but I don't know what else to do.

[Finney]

The number one piece of advice that my teacher gave me was "Don't do anything that you're not interested in." If that topic bores you, you're not going to want to spend your time researching it. There's just as good of a topic out there that just might interest you if you look for it.

But really, if you want to do something with the Tongzhi Restoration, do it. I don't know anything about it, so I can't offer any help there, but I'm fairly certain that it's a big enough topic that there's something you can find that would help to narrow this topic down. Sorry to not be of more help there, just wanted to encourage you to not do something you're not interested in.

Oh, by the way - not to throw a wrench in the works, but we recently talked about Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" in history, looking at it as he wrote it during the Second Red Scare in the US to draw the parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) trials from the 1940s to 1970s. Not sure if you would be at all interested in doing some type of study on that, was just on my mind since we talked about it last class.