1 P U R M 10.1 Douglas W. Leonard, Ph.D., United States Air Force Academy (douglas.leonard@usafa.edu) Jackson R. Ayers, B.S., United States Air Force Academy Undergraduate teaching in the discipline of history in the United States has long revolved around the production of a research paper. As Blakey (1997) has described, in the past, many professors expected students to generate a paper with little to no guidance over the course of a semester, and the class tended to be centered on instructor lecture. However, the last several decades have brought noticeable changes in history education and in undergraduate research experiences, more specifically. Ishiyama (2002) found that first- and second-year social science and humanities students engaging in collaborative research reported substantial increases in their overall learning and analytical abilities. Wolfgram et al. (2012) similarly indicated that undergraduates who were engaged in research projects reported greater self-confidence, particularly when mentored by a professional in the discipline who encouraged students by assuring them that their research had real meaning and value, and who respected student work on its own merits without erecting barriers. Pacifici and Thomson (2011) concluded that students register the greatest value when research is explicitly connected to the content of a course. The problem for university history teachers, or more generally, humanities teachers, then, is finding a way to help students conduct meaningful research while also building a trusting relationship with their instructor, all within the scope of a single-semester course. In history, research paradigmatically occurs almost exclusively through individual projects employing substantial primary sources related to the place, period, and people in question. Students must locate their own sources, analyze them, and then employ them as supporting evidence for an argumentative answer to a difficult “how” or “why” question situated in a past context. Fitting all of these activities into an undergraduate course — typically scoped to generate entry-level depth to the history of a place, idea, period, or people — appears daunting. Fortunately, recent research experiences offer some possibilities to help students gain both greater disciplinary understanding as well as improved self-confidence from course- embedded work. The greatest advances in this area have come largely from the natural sciences in an approach known as Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs). As described by Auchincloss et al. (2014), CUREs involve all students in a course on a shared research topic of wide interest to the discipline, exposing participants to a range of cutting-edge knowledge while reducing their anxieties about entering the field. Lopatto (2010) agreed that students take away great value from integrated, semester-long experiences in research. Shortlidge et al. (2016) have added that faculty also find great value in these experiences, which enhance their own research through explicit connections to teaching. Experiencing Course-Based Undergraduate History Research in a Technically Intensive Curriculum