When I first wrote my close reading essays, I spent hours combing through scholarly articles on JSTOR and other databases, reading each work from front to back. Although helpful with producing relevant quotes or ideas to use in my prose, this strategy prevented me from […]
Year: 2025
Primary Source Research Journal
When I started writing my very first close reading essay, I already had an inkling of an idea for a theme to explore throughout the semester. I deliberately chose Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” because they both redefined aspects […]
Research Journal #2: The Unexpected Challenges of Secondary Sources
Intro: Although my search for secondary sources proved to be less difficult than my search for primary sources, it still challenged me in unexpected ways. Where most sources were relatively easy to find, some took me much longer to discover than I anticipated. In this […]
Research Journal #1: Patience and Primary Sources
Intro: Although I had a strong idea as to what my final essay was going to be about, my research process was anything but simple. I chose to focus on the poems, “Bury Me in a Free Land,” “Because I could not stop for Death,” […]
Cultural Resilience Through Poetry
Intro The first Native American poet laureate Joy Harjo serves as a pillar to the preservation of indigenous history through her naturalistic and spiritualistic writing style. As a member of the Muscogee Nation Harjo is able to hone her craft to the recognition […]
Reimagining the Nation: Immigration, Gender, and Refuge in Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus”
https://www.wevideo.com/view/3925063595 Intro Since the birth of democracy in the United States, immigrants have made significant contributions to the ever-evolving American identity. At the age of 34 in 1883, American poet Emma Lazarus was aware of this fact yet existed in an era of xenophobic nationalism […]