A monograph is a scholarly book. A history professor will spend part of his time teaching and part of his time researching. The goal of the research is ultimately to enable him to write original research articles, and hopefully, eventually, a book.
The reason you're supposed to use it for your essay is that it's not a simple textbook or popular book, but a real scholarly contribution to research, with certain standards of quality and fact-checking. These standards involve peer review, which means that when he submitted the book to the press (usually a university press, e.g., Cambridge University Press), it (ideally) had to be read and dissected by other experts in his field, who could criticise aspects of it and say whether its contributions to historical scholarship are up-to-date and meaningful. Part of the reason that professors will publish parts or early ideas from their book as articles is to get feedback and make sure they're on the right track.
>>7298393Osprey books are cool, but popular/commercial. You need something like this, by comparison:
http://search.library.utoronto.ca/details?3014938You can see it's published by a university press, but also that it has a set topic that the author researched (in this case by going to archives in Greece, Turkey, and Italy, and looking over archives through years of work).
Monographs can come in a lot of different shapes and sizes but this is basically what a history one looks like: original research, original ideas, presented as a book from a university press for the purposes of furthering scholarly discourse, usually to a limited audience (i.e., not published commercially).
If you have any doubts though, talk to your professor. They're there to help, even when they're dicks. If that doesn't work, talk to another history professor. If I were you, I'd especially ask about the source requirements, because it sounds like your course wants students to have a bare minimum of scholarly sources, but maybe the bare minimum won't get you a good grade, and also the article requirements ("expert article" from a "magazine"??) are a little odd to me. Do you/they mean "journal?" That's what English usually uses for peer-reviewed academic publications.
