I’ve spent the past week writing the narrative paragraphs of my thesis, covering the Atlantic Charter (August 1941) through the Phillips mission (December 1942). I’m planning going up through the Phillips leak (July 1944), though I’m already at 30 pages for the combined 2 chapters.  At this stage in my writing, I’m still pretty wordy, but I not planning on editing until just before I turn it in on March 1st.

When I was writing I didn’t create a break between the two chapters because I wanted to see how my research fit into the narrative. Right now I’ve made a tentative chapter break after the Cripps Mission (April 1942) as the point where India Lobby activity begins to really pick up, but if I can condense the first section a bit, I might move this later. So far the narrative has naturally lent itself to alternating between Lobby testimony (India Today, NAACP Papers) and a more official account (FRUS) of the events. Most of my writing is centered around primary source evidence, and I’m not sure if I should be incorporating more secondary source arguments in these two chapters, or not as much because I will have a chapter devoted to historiography.

Here’s the chronology that I’ve made from my primary sources that I’ve been using while writing my narrative chapters. This version goes through 1943, though I’m working on expanding it through 1945. Because I made indexes for the NAACP Papers and Emanuel Celler Papers previously, I haven’t completely combined all of the sources into this one document, but it’s pretty complete.

As far as research goes, I haven’t done too much this past week since I’ve being doing a lot of writing. I have continued reading Nico Slate’s, Colored Cosmopolitanism, now that I have the physical book, and I’ve started to look into sources on the American Zionist Emergency Council using the book that Prof. Commins lent me: Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (1987).