The focus question that you settled on, "Examine the impact on historiography of Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", is very suitable as a History Project topic. The three inquiry questions that support the division of your essay's argument into three sections help to clarify the nature of this 'impact that you are exploring, although the fact that the three inquiry questions needed little 'explainer' sentences (e.g. "why did he believe these theories") might suggest the inquiry questions themselves needed some reworking to make their points more clearly. Your overall argument is summarised nicely in your opening paragraph, which serves as an abstract for the argument of the essay as a whole. An issue with your response to the first inquiry question is that your amount of direct contact with Gibbon's work during your research for this project is not entirely clear. All your footnote references to Gibbon's work are non-specific, even when you directly quote him (notes 4 and 11) or when you say he referred to Vegetius' work "on several occasions" (note 6). Your paragraphs in this section on barbarian invasions, reliance on mercenaries and "his views on the military" (where you don't directly say what Gibbon's views were) have perhaps been affected by the need to come under the word limit, since they are fairly brief and need to demonstrate a more thorough understanding of what Gibbon himself was arguing. Your following discussion of economic and political factors and Gibbon's criticism of Christianity demonstrate this more effectively, with some good discussion of both what Gibbon's theories were and how you can account for them. There is good use of some secondary sources in your second section, notably Jones and Piganiol. This section and the third one are opportunities to demonstrate the depth of your research into other historians' views about Gibbon, but the point I made in feedback to your draft about the need for more recent views is only partially addressed through a sentence on Heather and an unreferenced mention of Pirenne. This reflects the need to have started researching some aspects of your topic earlier so that you could demonstrate a broader understanding of the historiography. The discussion of Gibbon's methodology at the end of the second section is good, but probably belongs more naturally in the third section, where there is a focus on the impact of Gibbon's methodology as a significant feature of his impact. This would have allowed room for greater emphasis in the second section on what historians such as Heather and Pirenne have thought about Gibbon's theories on Rome's decline and fall. The third section is perhaps the strongest, as you make a clear argument for Gibbon's impact in combining the features of both erudit and philosophe approaches to history. As mentioned above, though, some of the earlier discussion of Gibbon's approach to source analysis, his 8000 footnotes etc, would be quite useful in this part of your argument. The third section of your essay also relies fairly heavily on Momigliano, which suggests that wider research may have been helpful in providing alternative perspectives. You have demonstrated interest in a subject directly related to the development of historiography itself, which makes it very appropriate as a History Project. There are parts of your essay where more thorough research could have been demonstrated, and there are some structural elements of your essay that could have been improved to tighten your argument, but overall this is a solid essay on an important historian and his impact on historiography.
