For a hundred years, the research paper has been a fixture in courses across the curriculum, and no genre of student writing has generated more despair. There are many reasons for this. One that rarely gets much attention is the research paper's history, and especially the assumptions about the purposes of the assignment that were rarely challenged or theorized. The story of the research paper assignment, which begins just after the turn of the last century, is a narrative that reveals not only the history of a troubled genre and our struggles to teach it. It's a story that leads us to a different way of thinking about student research writing altogether. How can we make the assignment more meaningful? In an age of information overload, what might the contemporary research paper look like if freed from its own history?