| Response sheet 4, for class, Thursday | |
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For today we will experiment with a kind of speed-dating of nine essays. Commonplace is an online journal that seeks to make early American history readable and compelling. You shall be the judge of whether it succeeds. These nine essays will give you a glimpse of different angles on economic life in 19th-century America: money, bureaucracy, war financing, slavery, social knowledge, panics, masculinity, urbanization, and parenting. Furthermore, the essays will aim to make their chosen research topics compelling. The question is how do they try to hook you as the reader. So, I would like you to read the first three paragraphs of all nine essays. How does each essay try to hook you into the essay? Did the essay’s technique succeed in luring you in, or not? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. After that, I would like you to read at least two essays to their conclusion. (You may do more, if you feel so inspired.) What did the particular essay do, across its entirety, to make their research topic compelling for the reader? How did they generate importance of their historical argument, and perhaps for their contemporary resonance? What had been missing? What had not been duly questioned? 1. 2. |