Historical Investigation

[LCM]

I'm having trouble deciding on a topic for my investigation.

"To what extent were Camillo di Cavour's efforts in the unification of Italy successful?"

This is one of the topics I've been considering. Do you believe this is a viable question or should I refine it? Or maybe someone has a better suggestion regarding a completely different topic?

I'm not in my last year of high school--I only need to establish a question, write my plan of the investigation and summary of evidence for tomorrow. My teacher is marking this as part of our history exam for this semester. I have the option to scrap this topic at any point in the future to pursue a different topic but it would be nice to solidify a topic and get started on the rest of the paper early so I have it out of the way.

What do you think about my question?

[Xelar]

Ooh, I'm doing something similar. I'm looking at the Orsini bomb plot and how it led to the Plombières Agreement.

I personally don't like your question because I think that Garibaldi would be a better person to research. Cavour didn't seriously take the idea of unification, he just wanted to extend Piedmont. If you choose to stick with your question I think you should also be more specific... narrow it done to one of his efforts, like his economic reforms.

Good luck!

Edited June 14, 2009 by Xelar

[DeStijl]

I agree with Xelar in the sense that there were far more active individuals in Italian unification, making Cavour seem like a less obvious choice when compared with Garibaldi. However, if you really wanted to do Cavour, you could just simply alter your question around slightly and discuss the extent to which Cavour was responsible for unification. Of course, that's a pretty general question, so you might want to refine it. However, your topic holds promise. *nods*

[Vvi]

Since this sin't your final IA, I guess it's okay if you psot it on here, but be aware that someone might plagiarize it and submit it for their own IA in November/next May. In which case, if you decide you want to use the same IA for your final one, you'll be accused of plagiarism. Not smart to post your work on public forums.

I personally think your question would be better if you asked "To what extent were Cavour's and Garibaldi's efforts to unify Italy successful?", because Italy wasn't really united even after 1861. The north and South were very separate, and Garibaldi/Cavour had only intended to bring together Northern Italy and exclude the South. So there were lots of failures (economic ones, with the north being richer than the south and so on). Then you can talk about how they united Italy, and what the effects of that wre (cause and effect is always good to discuss in history).