History 117 / Close Reading Post
Due at course website by 5pm, December 12, 2014
Objective
By Friday, December 12, students should post a short (1,000 words or less) close reading analysis of an Abraham Lincoln document featured at the new Dickinson website, Lincoln’s Writings: The Multi-Media Edition. A close reading offers a careful summary of the text combined with judicious information about context and thoughtful analysis of subtext. Students who attempt an audio or video version of the close reading (in addition to the text post) will receive up to 5 points of extra credit. Late posts will be penalized 5 points per day.
Guidelines
- The Lincoln’s Writings site offers 150 of Abraham Lincoln’s “most teachable” documents ranked and organized for classroom use. Students are encouraged to find documents on the site that don’t already have close readings associated with them and to try to create a post that might be publishable at the site. However, any of the 150 documents (including the Gettysburg Address) are suitable choices for this assignment. Make sure to check out the “Special Topics” section for ideas.
- Students may consult any sources to begin their research (such as Wikipedia), but the best close readings will rely on peer-reviewed, by-lined secondary sources, such as online articles from the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Michael Burlingame’s multi-volume biography of Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (also available free online), or from books or articles in JSTOR, the Dickinson Library, or (in some cases), Google Books. Students may also find it useful to look at relevant primary sources available online, such as Lincoln’s Collected Works or the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Sometimes it also helps to see Lincoln’s daily schedule, which you can find at The Lincoln Log online or via the Digital Lincoln’s Timemap.
- All close readings should summarize and quote from the text of the Lincoln document, put the story of the document into some historical context (relying on other primary and secondary sources), and then wherever possible, analyze the “subtext” of the document, or what Lincoln intended by his words, even if he didn’t say so explicitly. There are numerous examples of such “close readings” at Lincoln’s Writings, including 25 videos by Prof. Pinsker for the featured documents at the site. Historian James Oakes also provides a litany of examples of close reading techniques in his book, The Radical and the Republican (2007). Students are encouraged to use Oakes’s book as one of their key secondary sources.
- Examples of audio or video close readings are scattered throughout the Lincoln’s Writings site. You can read more about how to “produce” them here: http://abrahamlincoln.quora.com/Producing-AV-Close-Readings