Through an innovative course design for the capstone senior seminar, history majors at Virginia Tech have become published authors in recent years. Small classes of undergraduates have collaborated to create edited volumes of original historical essays that, at the end of the semester, are copied, bound, and distributed to class members. More importantly, copies of the volume are deposited in the Virginia Tech Library, where they are assigned an ISBN number and catalogued for future researchers to consult. Called "The Book Project," this innovative class format is intended to introduce undergraduates to the researching, writing, and publishing experiences of working historians. Both qualitative and quantitative assessments suggest that the Book Project, with its sequenced structure for research and writing that culminates in a publicly available publication, enhances student engagement with the learning objectives of the course even as it demystifies the process of research and invites students to self-identify as historians. While mentoring of individual history research projects as "independent studies" offers some undergraduates a significant research experience, the Book Project extends the reach of research to large numbers of history majors. It not only opens up opportunities for them to present and publish, but also offers possibilities for concrete assessment of undergraduate skills in research and writing. (Contains 3 figures and 19 notes.)