historical lens thesis

Historical Lenses (Social, Political, Economic), Explained!

historical lenses definition and examples

Historical lenses are ways of understanding and interpreting the past. They are frameworks that help us understand how different social, political, and economic factors have shaped and influenced history.

There are three main types of historical lenses: social, political, and economic. Here is a brief overview of each:

Social lens : A social lens looks at how social factors, such as class, race, gender, and ethnicity, have shaped and influenced events and developments in history. This lens helps us understand how different groups of people have interacted with each other and society as a whole.
Political lens : A political lens looks at how political factors, such as governments, laws, and power structures, have shaped and influenced events and developments in history. This lens helps us to understand how different political systems and ideologies have impacted the course of history.
Economic lens : An economic lens looks at how economic factors, such as trade, industry, and wealth, have shaped and influenced events and developments in history. This lens helps us to understand how different economic systems and policies have impacted the course of history.

By using these different historical lenses, we can gain a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the past and how social, political, and economic factors have shaped the world.

Historical Lenses Definition

A historical lens is a way of understanding and interpreting the past. It is a framework that helps us understand how different factors shape and influence history.

There are several historical lenses, including social, political, and economic lenses. Each of these lenses focuses on specific factors that have shaped history.

For example, a historian might use a social lens to examine how class, race, and gender have shaped history. They might look at how different social groups have interacted with each other and society and how these interactions have impacted history.

Similarly, a historian might use a political lens to examine how governments, laws, and power structures have shaped history.

They might look at how different political systems and ideologies change history and how political actors have influenced the course of events.

Finally, a historian might use an economic lens to examine how trade, industry, and wealth have shaped history. They might look at how different economic systems and policies change the world and how economic factors have influenced the actions and decisions of actors.

Examples of Historical Lenses

1. the social lens.

A social lens looks at how social factors, such as class, race, gender, and ethnicity, have shaped and influenced events. This lens helps us understand how different groups of people have interacted with each other.

Here are some examples of how events and developments can be examined through a social lens:

Akhenaten’s Rule : A social lens might consider how the pharaoh’s religious reforms, which involved the promotion of the sun god Aten and the suppression of other gods (Ridley, 2019, pp. 13-15), impacted different social groups. It could examine how these reforms shaped social relations and cultural practices and how they impacted the lives of ordinary people.
The Civil Rights movement in the United States : A social lens might focus on how class, race, and gender influenced the Civil Rights movement and the struggles for civil rights and equality. It could examine how different social groups, such as African Americans, women, and LGBTQ+ individuals, were impacted by discrimination and segregation and how they organized and fought for their rights.
The French Revolution : A social lens might focus on how class, race, and gender influenced the French Revolution and the overthrow of the monarchy (Desan et al., 2013). It could examine how different social groups, such as the aristocracy, the middle class, and the working class, were impacted by the Revolution and how they participated in and shaped its outcome.
The Industrial Revolution : A social lens might focus on how class and wealth influenced the Industrial Revolution and the rise of industrial societies (Foster, 1982). It could examine how different social classes , such as the working class, the middle class, and the upper class, were impacted by the transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy and how this changed social relations and mobility.

A social lens can help us to understand how different social factors, such as class, race, and gender, have influenced events and developments in history.

2. The Political Lens

Historians can analyze the past through a political lens by examining how different political factors, such as governments, laws, and power structures, have shaped and influenced events and developments.

To do this, historians might look at a variety of sources, such as political documents, laws, and speeches, to understand how different political actors have interacted and influenced each other over time.

Here are some examples of how events and developments in history might be explained through a political lens:

The American Revolution : A political lens might focus on how different governments and power structures influenced the American Revolution and the formation of the United States. It could examine how political actors, such as the colonial leaders and the British government, shaped the course of events and how their actions and decisions impacted the outcome (Allison, 2015).
The Arab Spring : A political lens might focus on how different governments and power structures influenced the wave of protests and uprisings that swept across the Middle East and North Africa (Sadiki, 2014). It could examine how different political actors, such as governments, opposition groups, and international powers, shaped the course of events and how their actions and decisions impacted history.
The fall of the Berlin Wall : A political lens might focus on how different governments and power structures influenced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. It could examine how political actors, such as the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States, shaped the course of events and how their actions and decisions impacted the outcome.
The Glorious Revolution : A political lens might focus on how different power structures and political actors influenced the Glorious Revolution (Schwoerer, 1992). It could examine how the struggle for power between King James II and his opponents, such as the Parliament and the aristocracy, shaped the course of events.

A political lens can help us understand how different political factors, such as governments, laws, and power structures, have influenced history.

3. Economic Lens

An economic lens can help us understand how different economic systems and policies have impacted history and how they have influenced the actions and decisions of people.

It can also help us understand how economic factors affect the distribution of power and resources within societies and how they shape social relations.

Here are some examples of how historical developments might be explained through an economic lens:

The globalization of the world economy : An economic lens might focus on how different economic factors, such as trade, industry, and wealth, influenced the globalization of the world economy and the integration of countries and regions into a single global market. It could examine how economic policies and systems, such as free trade and protectionism, shaped the course of events and how they impacted the lives of ordinary people.
The Great Depression : An economic lens might focus on how different economic factors influenced the economic downturn of the 1930s. It could examine how economic policies and systems, such as laissez-faire capitalism and the gold standard, shaped the course of events (Garraty, 1986).
The Renaissance : An economic lens could examine how the growth of trade networks and the development of new technologies, such as the printing press, impacted the economy and shaped the course of events; how the growth of cities and the rise of wealthy merchant classes contributed to the development of the Renaissance; and how the exploitation of resources, such as gold and spices, impacted the economy of the period.
The rise of China as an economic superpower : An economic lens might focus on how different economic factors, such as trade, industry, and wealth, influenced the rise of China as an economic superpower. It could examine how economic policies and systems, such as state socialism and market capitalism, shaped the course of events and how they impacted the lives of ordinary people.

By using an economic lens, we can gain a better understanding of how different economic factors have shaped and influenced the world we live in today.

Historical lenses are frameworks that help historians to understand and interpret the past. There are three main types of historical lenses: social, political, and economic. Either of these can be useful in a myriad of contexts. By using these different historical lenses, we can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities of the past.

Allison, R. J. (2015). The American Revolution: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford University Press.

Desan, S., Hunt, L., & Nelson, W. M. (2013). The French Revolution in Global Perspective . Cornell University Press.

Foster, J. (1982). Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution [sound Recording]: Early Industrial Capitalism in Three English Towns . Peterborough : Ontario Audio Library Service.

Garraty, J. A. (1986). The Great Depression: An Inquiry Into the Causes, Course, and Consequences of the Worldwide Depression of the Nineteen-thirties, as Seen by Contemporaries and in the Light of History . Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Ridley, R. T. (2019). Akhenaten: A Historian’s View . American University in Cairo Press.

Sadiki, L. (2014). Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring: Rethinking Democratization . Routledge. Schwoerer, L. G. (1992). The Revolution of 1688-89: Changing Perspectives . Cambridge University Press.

Tio Gabunia (B.Arch, M.Arch)

Tio Gabunia is an academic writer and architect based in Tbilisi. He has studied architecture, design, and urban planning at the Georgian Technical University and the University of Lisbon. He has worked in these fields in Georgia, Portugal, and France. Most of Tio’s writings concern philosophy. Other writings include architecture, sociology, urban planning, and economics.

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This article was peer-reviewed and edited by Chris Drew (PhD). The review process on Helpful Professor involves having a PhD level expert fact check, edit, and contribute to articles. Reviewers ensure all content reflects expert academic consensus and is backed up with reference to academic studies. Dr. Drew has published over 20 academic articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education and holds a PhD in Education from ACU.

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How to Write a Thesis Statement for a Critical Lens Essay

How to Do an In-Depth Analysis Essay

"Everyone's a critic," or so the saying goes. When it comes to writing a critical lens essay, it's true that you get the chance to view wisdom and literature through a critical lens. The thesis statement is the center point of any essay, so crafting a strong example takes work. Take your inspiration from the format of the critical lens essay introduction, making sure to revise the wording to make your statement as convincing as possible.

Critical Lens Essay

A critical lens essay is a type of literary analysis paper. In this case, you start with a quotation, which you view through a "critical lens." This viewing involves restating the quotation in your own words, thus interpreting it. You take a position in this paper by stating whether you agree or disagree with the quotation as interpreted. The majority of the essay consists of elements from literature, usually two works, that support your position on the legitimacy of the quotation.

Elements of the Thesis Statement

The thesis statement, the final sentence of the introduction, consists of one sentence only. This statement includes the title, author and genre of the works of literature you are using to support your position. The thesis statement also includes literary elements, like characterization or theme, from the pieces that help support your position. Altogether the thesis statement connects the works to the quote. For example, you write, "In the drama, 'Othello,' by William Shakespeare, the development of the characters and the treatment of the themes shows how literature mirrors life."

Writing Process

The process for writing the introduction informs how you write your thesis statement. Start by recopying the given quotation and interpreting it. Decide whether you agree or disagree with the quotation as interpreted. Next, think about why you agree or not, brainstorming literary works that support your position. Consider which elements of the piece support your opinion. For instance, if the quotation suggests problems, consider the conflict and resolution of literary works. The interpretation and your agreement or disagreement serve as the foundation of your thesis statement.

Strengthening the Thesis Statement

Because thesis statements contain a lot of information, you should revise it to avoid awkward wording. Since your agreement sentence comes directly before, you can start the thesis statement with, "The truth of this statement is shown by" then list the literary works and elements. The phrase "The truth of" serves as a transition between the agreement sentence and your thesis, but it leads you to write in the passive. An active statement is more decisive: "The conflict in the novel 'The Old Man in the Sea' shows the truth of the quotation." The certainty of this statement sets the stage for supporting your position.

How to write an essay with a thesis statement.

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Greenwich Central School District High School English: Writing a Critical Lens Essay – Steps to Follow

Nadia Archuleta has a B.A. in English writing. She spent five years working abroad and has traveled extensively. She has worked as an English as a Foreign/Second Language teacher for 12 years.

Writing a “Lens” Essay

This handout provides suggestions for writing papers or responses that ask you to analyze a text through the lens of a critical or theoretical secondary source.

Generally, the lens should reveal something about the original or “target” text that may not be otherwise apparent. Alternatively, your analysis may call the validity of the arguments of the lens piece into question, extend the arguments of the lens text, or provoke some other reevaluation of the two texts. Either way, you will be generating a critical “dialogue between texts.”

Reading the Texts

Since you will eventually want to hone in on points of commonality and discord between the two texts, the order and manner in which you read them is crucial.

First, read the lens text to identify the author’s core arguments and vocabulary. Since theoretical or critical texts tend to be dense and complex, it may be helpful to develop an outline of the author’s primary points. According the to Brandeis Writing Program Handbook, a valuable lens essay will “grapple with central ideas” of the lens text, rather than dealing with isolated quotes that may or may not be indicative of the author’s argument as a whole. As such, it’s important to make sure you truly understand and can articulate the author’s main points before proceeding to the target text.

Next, quickly read the target text to develop a general idea of its content. Then, ask yourself: Where do I see general points of agreement or disagreement between the two texts? Which of the lens text’s main arguments could be applied to the target text? It may be easier to focus on one or two of the lens text’s central arguments.

With these ideas in mind, go back and read the target text carefully, through the theoretical lens, asking yourself the following questions: What are the main components of the lens text and what are their complementary parts in the target text? How can I apply the lens author’s theoretical vocabulary or logic to instances in the target text? Are there instances where the lens text’s arguments don’t or can’t apply? Why is this? It is helpful to keep a careful, written record of page numbers, quotes, and your thoughts and reactions as you read.

Since this type of paper deals with a complex synthesis of multiple sources, it is especially important to have a clear plan of action before you begin writing. It may help to group quotes or events by subject matter, by theme, or by whether they support, contradict, or otherwise modify the arguments in the lens text. Hopefully, common themes, ideas, and arguments will begin to emerge and you can start drafting!

Writing the Introduction and Thesis

As your paper concerns the complex interactions between multiple texts, it is important to explain what you will be doing the introduction. Make sure to clearly introduce the lens text and its specific arguments you will be employing or evaluating. Then introduce the target text and its specific themes or events you will be addressing in your analysis.

These introductions of texts and themes should lead into some kind of thesis statement. Though there are no set guidelines or conventions for what this thesis should look like, make sure it states the points of interaction you will be discussing, and explains what your critical or theoretical analysis of the target text reveals about the texts.

Writing the Body

The body is where you apply specific arguments from the lens text to specific quotes or instances in the target text. In each case, make sure to discuss what the lens text reveals about the target text (or vice versa). Use the lens text’s vocabulary and logical framework to examine the target text, but make sure to be clear about where ideas in the paper are coming from (the lens text, the target text, your own interpretation etc.) so the reader doesn’t become confused.

By engaging in this type of analysis, you are “entering an academic conversation” and inserting your own ideas. As this is certainly easier said than done, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s concept of “Templates” may prove useful. In their book, They Say, I Say, the authors lay out numerous templates to help writers engage in unfamiliar forms of critical academic discourse. They encourage students to use the templates in any capacity they find useful, be it filling them in verbatim, modifying and extending them, or using them as an analytical entry point, then discarding them completely.

Here I modify their basic template (They say ________. I say ________.), to create lens essay-specific templates to help you get started:

The author of the lens text lays out a helpful framework for understanding instances of ________ in the target text. Indeed, in the target text, one sees ________, which could be considered an example of ________ by the lens author’s definition. Therefore, we see a point of commonality concerning ________. This similarity reveals ________.

According to the lens text _______ tends to occur in situations where _______. By the lens author’s definition, ________ in the target text could be considered an instance of _______. However, this parallel is imperfect because _______. As such, we become aware of ________.

One sees ________ in the target text, which calls the lens author’s argument that ________ into question because ________.

If the author of the lens text is correct that ________, one would expect to see ________ in the target text. However, ________ actually takes place, revealing a critical point of disagreement. This discord suggests that ________. This issue is important because ________.

Wrapping Things up and Drawing Conclusions

By this point in your essay, you should be drawing conclusions regarding what your lens analysis reveals about the texts in questions, or the broader issues the texts address. Make sure to explain why these discoveries are important for the discipline in which you are writing. In other words, what was the point of carrying out your analysis in the first place? Happy lens writing!

Brandeis UWS Writing Handbook, 70.

UWS Handbook, 76.

Birkenstein, Cathy and Gerald Graff, They Say, I Say. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 2-3.

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3. Historical Analysis and Interpretation

One of the most common problems in helping students to become thoughtful readers of historical narrative is the compulsion students feel to find the one right answer, the one essential fact, the one authoritative interpretation. “Am I on the right track?” “Is this what you want?” they ask. Or, worse yet, they rush to closure, reporting back as self-evident truths the facts or conclusions presented in the document or text.

These problems are deeply rooted in the conventional ways in which textbooks have presented history: a succession of facts marching straight to a settled outcome. To overcome these problems requires the use of more than a single source: of history books other than textbooks and of a rich variety of historical documents and artifacts that present alternative voices, accounts, and interpretations or perspectives on the past.

Students need to realize that historians may differ on the facts they incorporate in the development of their narratives and disagree as well on how those facts are to be interpreted. Thus, “history” is usually taken to mean what happened in the past; but written history is a dialogue among historians, not only about what happened but about why and how events unfolded. The study of history is not only remembering answers. It requires following and evaluating arguments and arriving at usable, even if tentative, conclusions based on the available evidence.

To engage in historical analysis and interpretation students must draw upon their skills of historical comprehension . In fact, there is no sharp line separating the two categories. Certain of the skills involved in comprehension overlap the skills involved in analysis and are essential to it. For example, identifying the author or source of a historical document or narrative and assessing its credibility (comprehension) is prerequisite to comparing competing historical narratives (analysis). Analysis builds upon the skills of comprehension; it obliges the student to assess the evidence on which the historian has drawn and determine the soundness of interpretations created from that evidence. It goes without saying that in acquiring these analytical skills students must develop the ability to differentiate between expressions of opinion, no matter how passionately delivered, and informed hypotheses grounded in historical evidence.

Well-written historical narrative has the power to promote students’ analysis of historical causality–of how change occurs in society, of how human intentions matter, and how ends are influenced by the means of carrying them out, in what has been called the tangle of process and outcomes. Few challenges can be more fascinating to students than unraveling the often dramatic complications of cause. And nothing is more dangerous than a simple, monocausal explanation of past experiences and present problems.

Finally, well-written historical narratives can also alert students to the traps of lineality and inevitability . Students must understand the relevance of the past to their own times, but they need also to avoid the trap of lineality, of drawing straight lines between past and present, as though earlier movements were being propelled teleologically toward some rendezvous with destiny in the late 20th century.

A related trap is that of thinking that events have unfolded inevitably–that the way things are is the way they had to be, and thus that individuals lack free will and the capacity for making choices. Unless students can conceive that history could have turned out differently, they may unconsciously accept the notion that the future is also inevitable or predetermined, and that human agency and individual action count for nothing. No attitude is more likely to feed civic apathy, cynicism, and resignation–precisely what we hope the study of history will fend off. Whether in dealing with the main narrative or with a topic in depth, we must always try, in one historian’s words, to “restore to the past the options it once had.”

HISTORICAL THINKING STANDARD 3

The student engages in historical analysis and interpretation:

Therefore, the student is able to:

Compare and contrast differing sets of ideas , values, personalities, behaviors, and institutions by identifying likenesses and differences.
Consider multiple perspectives of various peoples in the past by demonstrating their differing motives, beliefs, interests, hopes, and fears.
Analyze cause-and-effect relationships bearing in mind multiple causation including (a) the importance of the individual in history; (b) the influence of ideas , human interests, and beliefs; and (c) the role of chance, the accidental and the irrational.
Draw comparisons across eras and regions in order to define enduring issues as well as large-scale or long-term developments that transcend regional and temporal boundaries.
Distinguish between unsupported expressions of opinion and informed hypotheses grounded in historical evidence.
Compare competing historical narratives.
Challenge arguments of historical inevitability by formulating examples of historical contingency, of how different choices could have led to different consequences.
Hold interpretations of history as tentative , subject to changes as new information is uncovered, new voices heard, and new interpretations broached.
Evaluate major debates among historians concerning alternative interpretations of the past.
Hypothesize the influence of the past , including both the limitations and opportunities made possible by past decisions.

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What is lens analysis?

Lens analysis requires you to distill a concept, theory, method or claim from a text (i.e. the “lens”) and then use it to interpret, analyze, or explore something else e.g. a first-hand experience, visual text, physical object or space, historical or current event or figure, a cultural phenomenon, an idea or even another text (i.e. the “exhibit”).

A writer employing lens analysis seeks to assert something new and unexpected about the exhibit; he or she strives to go beyond the expected or the obvious, exploiting the lens to acquire novel insights. Furthermore, there is a reciprocal aspect in that the exploration of the exhibit should cause the writer to reflect, elaborate, or comment on the selected concept or claim. Using a concept developed by someone else to conduct an analysis or interpretation of one’s own is a fundamental move in academia, one that you will no doubt be required to perform time and time again in college.

Note: The first part of the process (ICE) is also known as a “quote sandwich,” which makes sense if you think about it.

How to Perform Lens Analysis

Introduce selected quotation from lens text i.e. provide the source for the quote as well as its context.
Cite the quotation i.e. use a signal phrase and partial quotation to present the author’s ideas clearly to your reader. Make sure to provide the required citation (MLA for this class).
Explain what the quotation means in terms of your argument i.e. ensure that the meaning of the quotation is clear to your reader in connection to your argument.
Apply the quotation to a specific aspect of the exhibit i.e. use the idea expressed in the quotation to develop an insightful interpretation about an aspect of the exhibit.
Reflect on the particular lens idea more deeply i.e. complicate it, extend its scope, or raise a new question that you will address next in your analysis, if applicable.

Writing About Literature Copyright © by Rachael Benavidez and Kimberley Garcia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Importance of Historic Context in Analysis and Interpretation

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M.Ed., Education Administration, University of Georgia
B.A., History, Armstrong State University

Historical context is an important part of life and literature, and without it, memories, stories, and characters have less meaning. Historical context deals with the details that surround an occurrence. In more technical terms, historical context refers to the social, religious, economic, and political conditions that existed during a certain time and place. Basically, it's all the details of the time and place in which a situation occurs, and those details are what enable us to interpret and analyze works or events of the past, or even the future, rather than merely judge them by contemporary standards.

In literature, a strong understanding of the historical context behind a work's creation can give us a better understanding of and appreciation for the narrative . In analyzing historical events, context can help us understand what motivates people to behave as they did.

Put another way, context is what gives meaning to the details. It's important, however, that you don't confuse context with cause. Cause is the action that creates an outcome; context is the environment in which that action and outcome occur.

Words and Deeds

Whether dealing with fact or fiction, historical context is important when interpreting behavior and speech. Consider the following sentence which, devoid of context, sounds innocent enough:

"Sally hid her hands behind her back and crossed her fingers before she answered."

But imagine that this statement comes from a transcript of court documents in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 during the famed Salem Witch Trials . Religious fervor was at an extreme, and villagers were nearly obsessed with the devil and witchcraft. At that time, if a young woman were to tell a lie, it was fodder for hysteria and a violent reaction. A reader would assume that poor Sally was a candidate for the gallows.

Now, imagine you're reading a letter from a mother that contains this sentence:

"My daughter will be heading to California shortly after she marries."

How much information does this statement give us? Not much, until we consider when it was written. Should we discover that the letter was written in 1849, we will realize that one sentence can sometimes say a lot. A young woman heading for California in 1849 might be following her husband on a treacherous treasure-seeking expedition for the gold rush. This mother would probably be quite fearful for her child, and she would know that it would be a very long time before she'd see her daughter again, if ever.

Historical Context in Literature

No work of literature can be fully appreciated or understood without historical context. What may seem nonsensical or even offensive to contemporary sensibilities, might actually be interpreted in a completely different manner by considering the era it is from.

A good example is Mark Twain's " Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ," published in 1885. It is considered an enduring work of American literature and a biting social satire. But it is also criticized by modern critics for its casual use of a racial epithet to describe Huck's friend Jim, a freedom-seeking enslaved person. Such language is shocking and offensive to many readers today, but in the context of the day, it was the commonplace language for many.

Back in the mid-1880s, when attitudes toward newly liberated enslaved African Americans were often indifferent at best and hostile at worst, the casual use of such racial epithets wouldn't have been considered unusual. In fact, what is actually more surprising, given the historical context of when the novel was written, is Huck's treating Jim not as his inferior but as his equal—something rarely portrayed in the literature of the time.

Similarly, Mary Shelley's " Frankenstein" cannot be fully appreciated by a reader who is unaware of the Romantic movement that took place in art and literature in the early 19th century. It was a time of rapid social and political upheaval in Europe when lives were transformed by the technological disruptions of the Industrial Age.

The Romantics captured the public's sense of isolation and fear that many experienced as a result of these social changes. "Frankenstein" becomes more than a good monster story, it becomes an allegory for how technology can destroy us.

Other Uses of Historical Context

Scholars and educators rely on historical context to analyze and interpret works of art, literature, music, dance, and poetry. Architects and builders rely on it when designing new structures and restoring existing buildings. Judges may use it to interpret the law, historians to understand the past. Any time critical analysis is required, you may need to consider historical context as well.

Without historical context, we are only seeing a piece of the scene and not fully understanding the influence of the time and place in which a situation occurred.

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Historical or Biographical Critical Lens

Author-based/historical criticism.

Though generally author-based and historical criticism are seen as two different categories, for the purpose of simplicity, we are going to combine them together in this text. An author-based/historical critical lens is focused on uncovering the person of the author in a text. Since this text focuses on discovering the voices of women through history, this approach can be very useful in helping us to get to know the women behind the texts we read.

When looking through this ‘lens,’ our goal is to find out as much as possible about the author and their life and context. We might read a biography on the author or read about the time in history in which they lived. Learning about the author’s life and where and when they lived can tell us a lot about a text, and vice versa.

For example, many students have trouble with Emily Dickinson’s poems. They don’t seem to make sense with their strange punctuation and fixation on death. But, as we investigate her life, we find that she didn’t intend for her poetry to ever be read. In fact, her poems are like a journal that she kept of her thoughts and experiences. Further, discovering that she lived close to the front lines of the Civil War helps us to make sense of her preoccupation with death.

Watch It: What is Historical Criticism

Watch What is historical criticism (4:30 minutes) on YouTube

Video source: Nance, T. [Tim Nance]. (2015, March 2). What is historical criticism? [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/SMxkN81QhKw

What to look for:

Who? Who is/was the author? Who is their family? What are the author’s core values/beliefs?
What? What is the text about? How does that topic connect with the author’s experiences or the author’s historical context?
When? When did the author live? What significant events happened? What was life like? How is the time period significant?
Where? Where did the author live? How is that location significant?
Why? Why did the author write? Do we know? Was the work in response to something that happened in the author’s life or in history?

Attribution & References

Except where otherwise noted, this chapter is adapted from “ Reading Through a Critical Lens ” In Say Her Name: Discovering Women’s Voices in History by Dr. Karen Palmer, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. /Adaptations include removal of content referring to Feminist theory including text and videos.

English for Degree Entrance (EDE) Copyright © by Carrie Molinski and Sue Slessor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Literary Criticism: Critical Literary Lenses

Getting Started
1. What is Literary Criticism

Critical Literary Lenses

Literary Elements
Comparing/Contrasting Works, Characters, or Authors
3. Find Literary Criticism
4. Write Your Paper
MLA Citation This link opens in a new window

A Critical Literary Lens influences how you look at a work. A great example that is often used, is the idea of putting on a pair of glasses, and the glasses affecting how you view your surroundings. The lens you choose is essentially a new way to focus on the work and is a great tool for analyzing works from different viewpoints. There are many approaches, but we will look at four common ones.

Socio-Economic (Marxist Criticism)

Questions to ask:

What role does class play in the text?
How does class affect the characters and the actions they choose?
Maybe a character moves from one class to a new one, what are the implications?
What characters have money? What characters are poor? What are the differences?
Does money equate to power?
Perhaps a rich character is a villainess and poor character is morally rich, why is this? What causes this?

Explore more:

Marxist Criticism

Feminist/Gender

Is the author male or female? How do they connect with the text?
Are there traditional gender roles? Do characters follow these roles? How would they view a character that did not follow traditional roles?
Are women minor characters in the text or do they take on a prominent role? What roles do they have? Does it relate back to the gender of the author?
How does the author define gender roles?
What role does society/culture play in gender roles/sexuality in the text?
Would an LGBTQIA character be accepted in the text? Why or why not?

Explore More:

Feminist Criticism
Gender Studies and Queer Theory

Historical

What time period was the work written, and what time period is the literary work taking place in? Is there a connection?
What is the background of the author? How does this affect their world-view? What role does this world-view have in the text?
Were major historical events taking place? What were they? How does the text reflect this?
Are the characters a product of their time?
Are any of the characters a voice for change? What message is the author trying to convey through them?
New Historicism, Cultural Studies

Psychoanalytic

What does the text reveal about the author? What message is the author trying to relay?
What attitudes appear in the text? How do they change or progress through the piece?
What kinds of family dynamics are happening in the work?
Perhaps a character shows signs of mental repression, what events have influenced this? How does it affect their daily life? How does it affect relationships with family and/or friends?
Psychoanalytic Criticism
<< Previous: 2. Finding a Literary Criticism Approach
Next: Literary Elements >>

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1.2: What is Historical Analysis?

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Page ID 174463

Stephanie Cole, Kimberly Breuer, Scott W. Palmer, and Brandon Blakeslee

Stephanie Cole, Kimberly Breuer, Scott W. Palmer, and Brandon Blakeslee
University of Texas at Arlington via Mavs Open Press

The principal goal of students in history classes and historians in practice is to master the process of Historical Analysis . History is more than a narrative of the past; the discipline cares less for the who, what, where, and when of an event, instead focusing on how and why certain events unfolded the way they did and what it all means. History is about argument, interpretation, and consequence. To complete quality historical analysis—that is, to “do history right”–one must use appropriate evidence, assess it properly (which involves comprehending how it is related to the situation in question), and then draw appropriate and meaningful conclusions based on said evidence.

The tools we use to analyze the past are a learned skill-set. While it is likely that the history you enjoy reading appears to be centered on a clear and direct narrative of past events, creating that story is more difficult than you might imagine. Writing history requires making informed judgments; we must read primary sources correctly, and then decide how to weigh the inevitable conflicts between those sources correctly. Think for a moment about a controversial moment in your own life—a traffic accident perhaps or a rupture between friends. Didn’t the various sources who experienced it—both sides, witnesses, the authorities—report on it differently? But when you recounted the story of what happened to others, you told a seamless story, which—whether you were conscience of it or not—required deciding whose report, or which discrete points from different reports—made the most sense. Even the decision to leave one particular turning point vague (“it’s a he said/she said unknowable point”) reflects the sort of judgment your listeners expect from you.

We use this same judgment when we use primary sources to write history; though in our case there are rules, or at least guidelines, about making those decisions. (For precise directions about reading primary sources, see the sections on “Reading Primary Sources” in the next chapter). In order to weigh the value of one source against other sources, we must be as informed as possible about that source’s historical context, the outlook of the source’s creator, and the circumstances of its creation. Indeed, as they attempt to uncover what happened, historians must learn about those circumstances and then be able to evaluate their impact on what the source reveals. Each actor in a historical moment brings their own cultural biases and preconceived expectations, and those biases are integral to the sources they leave behind. It is up to the historian to weave these differences together in their analysis in a way that is meaningful to readers. They must compare differences in ideologies, values, behaviors and traditions, as well as take in a multiplicity of perspectives, to create one story.

In addition to knowing how to treat their sources, historians and history students alike must tell a story worth telling, one that helps us as a society to understand who we are and how we got here. As humans, we want to know what caused a particular outcome, or perhaps whether a past actor or event is as similar to a present-day actor or event as it seems, or where the beginnings of a current movement began. (“What made Martin Luther King, Jr. a leader, when other activists had failed before him?” “Were reactions to the Civil Rights Movement similar to those of the current Black Lives Matter movement?” “How similar is the Coronavirus pandemic to the 1918 flu pandemic?” “Who were the first feminists and what did they believe?”) Even small aspects of larger events can help answer important questions. (“How did the suffrage movement (or Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, or the gun rights movement, or …) play out in my Texas hometown?”)

The very essence of historical analysis is about analyzing the different cause-and-effect relationships present in each scenario, considering the ways individuals, influential ideas, and different mindsets interact and affect one another. It is about figuring out what facts go together to form a coherent story, one that helps us understand ourselves and each other better. But such understandings, or indeed what exactly counts as “coherent,” can change with each generation. That’s where you and your interests as a student of history come in. Of key importance to the discipline is that our analysis of an event or individual is tentative or impermanent. The job of historians is to study the available evidence and construct meaningful conclusions; therefore, when new evidence and perspectives (including yours!) present themselves it may very well alter our understanding of the past.

As the section on historiography pointed out, a significant part of historical analysis is integrating new understandings of past events and actors with history as it already written. We don’t want to “reinvent the wheel” or simply retell the same story, using the same sources. Even as scholars provide new perspectives or uncover new evidence, revising what was thought to be known, they cannot simply ignore previous historical writing. Instead they need to address it, linking their new understanding to old scholarship as a part of building knowledge. Sometimes the linkage is a direct challenge to past explanations, but more likely new historical writing provides a nuance to the older work. For example, a scholar might look at new evidence to suggest a shift in periodization (“actually the rightward shift in the Republican Party began much earlier than Ronald Reagan’s campaigns”) or the importance of different actors (“middle-class Black women were more critical in the spreading of Progressive reforms in the South than we once thought”). Because historians are concerned with building knowledge and expanding scholarship, they choose their subjects of research with an eye toward adding to what we know, perhaps by developing new perspectives on old sources or by finding new sources.

For another view on historical thinking, this one offered by the American Historical Association, see “What does it mean to think historically?”

What Does It Mean to Think Historically?

Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke | Jan 1, 2007

Introduction

When we started working on Teachers for a New Era, a Carnegie-sponsored initiative designed to strengthen teacher training, we thought we knew a thing or two about our discipline. As we began reading such works as Sam Wineburg's Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts , however, we encountered an unexpected challenge. 1 If our understandings of the past constituted a sort of craft knowledge, how could we distill and communicate habits of mind we and our colleagues had developed through years of apprenticeship, guild membership, and daily practice to university students so that they, in turn, could impart these habits in K–12 classrooms?

In response, we developed an approach we call the "five C's of historical thinking." The concepts of change over time, causality, context, complexity, and contingency, we believe, together describe the shared foundations of our discipline. They stand at the heart of the questions historians seek to answer, the arguments we make, and the debates in which we engage. These ideas are hardly new to professional historians. But that is precisely their value: They make our implicit ways of thought explicit to the students and teachers whom we train. The five C's do not encompass the universe of historical thinking, yet they do provide a remarkably useful tool for helping students at practically any level learn how to formulate and support arguments based on primary sources, as well as to understand and challenge historical interpretations related in secondary sources. In this article, we define the five C's, explain how each concept helps us to understand the past, and provide some brief examples of how we have employed the five C's when teaching teachers. Our approach is necessarily broad and basic, characteristics well suited for a foundation upon which we invite our colleagues from kindergartens to research universities to build.

Change over Time

The idea of change over time is perhaps the easiest of the C's to grasp. Students readily acknowledge that we employ and struggle with technologies unavailable to our forebears, that we live by different laws, and that we enjoy different cultural pursuits. Moreover, students also note that some aspects of life remain the same across time. Many Europeans celebrate many of the same holidays that they did three or four hundred years ago, for instance, often using the same rituals and words to mark a day's significance. Continuity thus comprises an integral part of the idea of change over time.

Students often find the concept of change over time elementary. Even individuals who claim to despise history can remember a few dates and explain that some preceded or followed others. At any educational level, timelines can teach change over time as well as the selective process that leads people to pay attention to some events while ignoring others. In our U.S. survey class, we often ask students to interview family and friends and write a paper explaining how their family's history has intersected with major events and trends that we are studying. By discovering their own family's past, students often see how individuals can make a difference and how personal history changes over time along with major events.

As historians of the American West and environmental historians, we often turn to maps to teach change over time. The same space represented in different ways as political power, economic structures, and cultural influences shift can often put in shocking relief the differences that time makes. The work of repeat photographers such as Mark Klett offers another compelling tool for teaching change over time. Such photographers begin with a historic landscape photograph, then take pains to re-take the shot from the same site, at the same angle, using similar equipment, and even under analogous conditions. 2 While suburbs and industry have overrun many western locales, students are often surprised to see that some places have become more desolate and others have hardly changed at all. The exercise engages students with a non-written primary source, photographs, and demands that they reassess their expectations regarding how time changes.

Some things change, others stay the same—not a very interesting story but reason for concern since history, as the best teachers will tell you, is about telling stories. Good story telling, we contend, builds upon an understanding of context. Given young people's fascination with narratives and their enthusiasm for imaginative play, pupils (particularly elementary school students) often find context the most engaging element of historical thinking. As students mature, of course, they recognize that the past is not just a playful alternate universe. Working with primary sources, they discover that the past makes more sense when they set it within two frameworks. In our teaching, we liken the first to the floating words that roll across the screen at the beginning of every Star Wars film. This kind of context sets the stage; the second helps us to interpret evidence concerning the action that ensues. Texts, events, individual lives, collective struggles—all develop within a tightly interwoven world.

Historians who excel at the art of storytelling often rely heavily upon context. Jonathan Spence's Death of Woman Wang , for example, skillfully recreates 17th-century China by following the trail of a sparsely documented murder. To solve the mystery, students must understand the time and place in which it occurred. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich brings colonial New England to life by concentrating on the details of textile production and basket making in Age of Homespun . College courses regularly use the work of both authors because they not only spark student interest, but also hone students' ability to describe the past and identify distinctive elements of different eras. 3

Imaginative play is what makes context, arguably the easiest, yet also, paradoxically, the most difficult of the five C's to teach. Elementary school assignments that require students to research and wear medieval European clothes or build a California mission from sugar cubes both strive to teach context. The problem with such assignments is that they often blur the lines between reality and make-believe. The picturesque often trumps more banal or more disturbing truths. Young children may never be able to get all the facts straight. As one elementary school teacher once reminded us, "We teach kids who still believe in Santa Claus." Nonetheless, elementary school teachers can be cautious in their re-creations, and, most of all, they can be comfortable telling students when they don't know a given fact or when more research is necessary. That an idea might require more thought or more research is a valuable lesson at any age. The desire to recreate a world sometimes drives students to dig more deeply into their books, a reaction few teachers lament.

In our own classes, we have taught context using an assignment that we call "Fact, Fiction, or Creative Memory." In this exercise, students wrestle with a given source and determine whether it is primarily a work of history, fiction, or memory. We have asked students to bring in a present-day representation of 1950s life and explain what it teaches people today about life in 1950s America. Then, we have asked the class to discuss if the representation is a historically fair depiction of the era. We have also assigned textbook passages and Don DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall , then asked students to compare them to decide which offers stronger insights into the character of Cold War America. 4 Each of these assignments addresses context, because each asks students to think about the distinctions between representations of the past and the critical thinking about the past that is history. Moreoever, each asks students to weave together a variety of sources and assess the reliability of each before incorporating them into a whole.

Historians use context, change over time, and causality to form arguments explaining past change. While scientists can devise experiments to test theories and yield data, historians cannot alter past conditions to produce new information. Rather, they must base their arguments upon the interpretation of partial primary sources that frequently offer multiple explanations for a single event. Historians have long argued over the causes of the Protestant Reformation or World War I, for example, without achieving consensus. Such uncertainty troubles some students, but history classrooms are at their most dynamic when teachers encourage pupils to evaluate the contributions of multiple factors in shaping past events, as well as to formulate arguments asserting the primacy of some causes over others.

To teach causality, we have turned to the stand-by activities of the history classroom: debates and role-playing. After arming students with primary sources, we ask them to argue whether monetary or fiscal policy played a greater role in causing the Great Depression. After giving students descriptions drawn from primary sources of immigrant families in Los Angeles, we have asked students to take on the role of various family members and explain their reasons for immigrating and their reasons for settling in particular neighborhoods. Neither exercise is especially novel, but both fulfill a central goal of studying history: to develop persuasive explanations of historical events and processes based on logical interpretations of evidence.

Contingency

Contingency may, in fact, be the most difficult of the C's. To argue that history is contingent is to claim that every historical outcome depends upon a number of prior conditions; that each of these prior conditions depends, in turn, upon still other conditions; and so on. The core insight of contingency is that the world is a magnificently interconnected place. Change a single prior condition, and any historical outcome could have turned out differently. Lee could have won at Gettysburg, Gore might have won in Florida, China might have inaugurated the world's first industrial revolution. Contingency can be an unsettling idea—so much so that people in the past have often tried to mask it with myths of national and racial destiny. The Pilgrim William Bradford, for instance, interpreted the decimation of New England's native peoples not as a consequence of smallpox, but as a literal godsend. 5 Two centuries later, American ideologues chose to rationalize their unlikely fortunes—from the purchase of Louisiana to the discovery of gold in California—as their nation's "Manifest Destiny." Historians, unlike Bradford and the apologists of westward expansion, look at the same outcomes differently. They see not divine fate, but a series of contingent results possessing other possibilities.

Contingency demands that students think deeply about past, present, and future. It offers a powerful corrective to teleology, the fallacy that events pursue a straight-arrow course to a pre-determined outcome, since people in the past had no way of anticipating our present world. Contingency also reminds us that individuals shape the course of human events. What if Karl Marx had decided to elude Prussian censors by emigrating to the United States instead of France, where he met Frederick Engels? To assert that the past is contingent is to impress upon students the notion that the future is up for grabs, and that they bear some responsibility for shaping the course of future history.

Contingency can be a difficult concept to present abstractly, but it suffuses the stories historians tend to tell about individual lives. Futurology, however, might offer an even stronger tool for imparting contingency than biography. Mechanistic views of history as the inevitable march toward the present tend to collapse once students see how different their world is from any predicted in the past.

Moral, epistemological, and causal complexity distinguish historical thinking from the conception of "history" held by many non-historians. 6 Re-enacting battles and remembering names and dates require effort but not necessarily analytical rigor. Making sense of a messy world that we cannot know directly, in contrast, is more confounding but also more rewarding.

Chronicles distill intricate historical processes into a mere catalogue, while nostalgia conjures an uncomplicated golden age that saves us the trouble of having to think about the past. Our own need for order can obscure our understanding of how past worlds functioned and blind us to the ways in which myths of rosy pasts do political and cultural work in the present. Reveling in complexity rather than shying away from it, historians seek to dispel the power of chronicle, nostalgia, and other traps that obscure our ability to understand the past on its own terms.

One of the most successful exercises we have developed for conveying complexity in all of these dimensions is a mock debate on Cherokee Removal. Two features of the exercise account for the richness and depth of understanding that it imparts on students. First, the debate involves multiple parties; the Treaty and Anti-Treaty Parties, Cherokee women, John Marshall, Andrew Jackson, northern missionaries, the State of Georgia, and white settlers each offer a different perspective on the issue. Second, students develop their understanding of their respective positions using the primary sources collected in Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents by Theda Perdue and Michael Green. 7 While it can be difficult to assess what students learn from such exercises, we have noted anecdotally that, following the exercise, students seem much less comfortable referring to "American" or "Indian" positions as monolithic identities.

Our experiments with the five C's have confronted us with several challenges. These concepts offer a fluid tool for engaging historical thought at multiple levels, but they can easily degenerate into a checklist. Students who favor memorization over analysis seem inclined to recite the C's without necessarily understanding them. Moreover, as habits of mind, the five C's develop only with practice. Though primary and secondary schools increasingly emphasize some aspects of these themes, particularly the use of primary sources as evidence, more attention to the five C's with appropriate variations over the course of K–12 education would help future citizens not only to care about history, but also to contemplate it. It is our hope that this might help students to see the past not simply as prelude to our present, nor a list of facts to memorize, a cast of heroes and villains to cheer and boo, nor as an itinerary of places to tour, but rather as an ideal field for thinking long and hard about important questions.

—Flannery Burke and Thomas Andrews are both assistant professors of history and Teachers for a New Era faculty members at California State University at Northridge. Burke is working on a book for the University Press of Kansas tentatively entitled Longing and Belonging: Mabel Dodge Luhan and Greenwich Village's Avant-Garde in Taos . Andrews is completing a manuscript for Harvard University Press, tentatively entitled Ludlow: The Nature of Industrial Struggle in the Colorado Coalfields .

1. Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).

2. Mark Klett, Kyle Bajakian, William L. Fox, Michael Marshall, Toshi Ueshina, and Byron G. Wolfe, Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2004).

3. Jonathan D. Spence, Death of Woman Wang (New York: Viking, 1978); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001).

4. Don DeLillo, Pafko at the Wall: A Novella (New York: Scribner's, 2001).

5. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation , ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Random House, 1952).

6. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

7. Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents 2nd ed. (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005).

Tags: K12 Certification & Curricula Teaching Resources and Strategies

The American Historical Association welcomes comments in the discussion area below, at AHA Communities , and in letters to the editor . Please read our commenting and letters policy before submitting.

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Secrets to Literature Lenses for Textual Analysis

June 30, 2022 // by Lindsay Ann // 1 Comment

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We all want our English students to have deeper, more meaningful discussions about their reading , and literature lenses provide a framework for textual analysis. Teaching students to think about texts through the literary criticism lenses helps students to do this independent of our constant scaffolding and guidance.

That’s what we call a win win in the teaching biz.

Today I’m going to dive into how bringing literary criticism and the idea of reading through the critical lenses associated with literary criticism can help deepen the experiences of your student readers.

Let’s jump in!

What is Literary Criticism?

Okay, so what is literary criticism anyway?

You may remember this term from those ginormous Norton Anthologies we had to read in college (or “back in the day” as my students so kindly refer to it…🙃). Simply put, literary criticism is the reader’s text-based interpretation of an author’s deeper meaning in a work of fiction. Literary criticism is the way we analyze, evaluate, judge, and talk about literature.

At its most sophisticated , literary criticism is the way you discussed The Grapes of Wrath in your American Lit. survey course, and at its most practical , literary criticism is the way you share your frustrations about the gratuitous descriptions of nature in Where the Crawdads Sing over a cold glass of Pinot with your book club gals.

Literary criticism is what we hope students do as they read their independent reading books, book club books, and study whole class texts. We want learners to pick up on the nuanced way the author creates the theme or the way that the setting impacts the behavior of the characters or the use of dialogue to create the mood and to do all of this by citing examples from the text to support how their thinking was shaped, all of this discussion is literary criticism .

Types of Literature Lenses

Literary lenses allow readers to focus on particular elements of a text when reading. When readers put on these figurative critical lenses, they can hone in on patterns that emerge.

It’s sort of like when you’re watching an episode of House Hunters and are absolutely ready to throw the remote at the wall because no matter what a house looks like, the prospective buyers can’t get past the fact that the walls are painted gray. They can only see through the lens of not wanting to have to paint the whole house (and hey, who really can blame them?) because that’s what they’re choosing to focus on .

Similarly, readers make the choice to read through certain lenses in order to see things from a certain perspective .

This allows us to ignore other moves happening in a work of literature and really zero-in on specified elements . These elements are dictated by the type of literary lens a reader is choosing to read through.

There are many different literary lenses, but they can be categorized into four main types:

Traditional literary criticism
Sociological criticism
Psychological criticism
Criticism of specific ideas/ways of thinking

It often helps to read through multiple lenses and we usually do this pretty naturally.

For example, it can be difficult to extrapolate the sociological and psychological lenses. Oftentimes a character may behave in a way because of how their society has influenced their psychological thought patterns, and so looking at a text from multiple perspectives allows the reader a richer reading experience .

Sometimes we read through certain lenses based on our prior experiences (e.g., text to text, text to self, text to world connections) which is known as “reader response theory,” but readers can also be trained to view a text through the different types of literary lenses.

Literary Lenses List

Use this handy-dandy literary lenses list (say that four times fast) to help you plan mini-lessons on how to intentionally read through the literature lenses.

Gender/queer theory
Moral criticism
Formalism/new criticism
Historical/biographical/cultural
Eco-criticism
Structural/semiotic
Affliction/disability
Aestheticism
Reader response/personal mirrors

Critical Lenses for Poetry Analysis

Poetry makes for quick and easy but meaningful scaffolding when teaching students to read through literature lenses. Take a look at this excerpt from “Oil” by Fatima Asghar :

I’m young & no one around knows where my parents are from. A map on our wall & I circle all the places I want to be. My auntie, not-blood but could be, runs the oil through my scalp. Her fingers play the strands of my hair. The house smells like badam. My uncle, not-blood but could be, soaks them in a bowl of water. My auntie says my people might be Afghani. I draw a ship on the map. I write Afghani under its hull. I count all the oceans, blood & not-blood, all the people I could be, the whole map, my mirror.

This short excerpt can be read through a multitude of literature lenses, but perhaps the three that students would most easily identify are Formalism, Feminism, Historical/Biographical/Cultural.

Encourage students to start with the lenses they feel most comfortable with or feel the most obvious when they read.

When reading this excerpt through the Feminist lens, encourage students to answer these questions as they read:

How are female roles portrayed?
How do women and men behave? Is this in accordance with socially accepted gender norms or does it seem to contradict those norms?
Is the narrator male or female? What helps you to determine this?

When reading this excerpt through the Historical/Biographical/Cultural lens, encourage students to answer these questions as they read:

How do the events in the text reflect the time period in which this text was written?
Can you identify any important “shifts” or cultural changes?
What words standout as representations of a particular time in history, significant to the author’s life experiences, or culturally significant?

When reading this excerpt through the Formalist lens, encourage students to answer these questions as they read:

How does the structure of the text contribute to the meaning?
How does the author use imagery to develop the reader’s understanding?
What connections between details can you make? Why do you suppose the author chose to include those details?

Getting students to feel confident applying the literature lenses as they read will require a great deal of modeling and the gradual release model may feel slower than ever, but hang in there!

Poetry reading and analysis allows you to model reading through one lens to start then layering on another and another until eventually you can take off the training wheels!

Challenge students to ask themselves questions associated with the literature lenses every time they read!

AP Literature Lenses

The Advanced Placement (AP) Literature and Composition course exists to challenge students to see literature as a pursuit to better understand humanity. The College Board asserts that students should understand how literature shapes and is shaped by society.

Using AP literature lenses gives students an anchor of sorts to connect themselves to while they explore these complex ideas in rich literary works.

Each FRQ on the AP Lit. test requires students to demonstrate a deep understanding of a passage or a complete work. This understanding moves well beyond the DOK 1 questions and demands them to assert their understanding of how an author used literary techniques and devices to shape meaning and reveal a truth, assumption, or behavior essential to the human experience.

In order to do that, students would benefit greatly from routine experience practicing reading texts using AP literature lenses .

A fun way I’ve seen an AP teacher teach this idea is having students study the lenses independently and then in “literature lens groups,” they’re tasked with identifying and analyzing ideas through their assigned lenses as the class watches Shrek . I love how accessible the teacher made this abstract concept, even more an advanced course!

There are so many ways to introduce literature lenses into your classroom. Children’s books are a particularly fun way to engage the gradual release of responsibility for student readers. My high schoolers always think it’s cheesy to be reading The Giving Tree until we start having in-depth discussions about the elements of feminist critical theory represented in the book and then their minds are blown.

Another great way to practice reading using literature lenses in the classroom is to use hexagonal thinking . You know I’m a huge fan of this retrieval and connection strategy, and it can be a real challenge for students to connect together elements of an assigned or self-selected text to represent elements of one or more of the literature lenses.

As you can tell, my mind is absolutely racing with possibilities for bringing in this concept to my classroom. Have you done anything like this in your classrooms? I’d love to hear more in the comment section below!

Hey, if you loved this post, you’ll want to download a FREE copy of my guide to streamlined grading .

I know how hard it is to do all the things as an English teacher, so I’m excited to share some of my best strategies for reducing the grading overwhelm.

About Lindsay Ann

Lindsay has been teaching high school English in the burbs of Chicago for 19 years. She is passionate about helping English teachers find balance in their lives and teaching practice through practical feedback strategies and student-led learning strategies. She also geeks out about literary analysis, inquiry-based learning, and classroom technology integration. When Lindsay is not teaching, she enjoys playing with her two kids, running, and getting lost in a good book.

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University Writing Program

Introducing the lens.

The lens essay can be difficult for students to grasp conceptually: what are we asking them to do? And why are we asking them to do it? I find it is most effective to explain the lens essay by talking about it in a lot of different ways on a lot of different days, rather than setting aside one large chunk of time to “teach” the concept of the lens. Therefore, I’m including some quick soundbites/exercises/talking points on how to get ideas flowing about the lens essay.

Defining a Lens

I usually begin the lens unit by writing the word on the board. (I’ve borrowed this exercise from Christian Gentry.) I ask the students to tell me what a lens does. The salient points here are:

A lens tends to magnify or exaggerate certain details
Sometimes a lens blurs or distorts other details
A lens frames your field of vision (for instance, if you wear glasses, you typically have trouble seeing things outside the frame of your lens)

Everyday Lenses

Depending on your class dynamic, it can also be useful to talk about how we use lenses in our everyday social interactions. However, these examples presume some familiarity with American culture and social conventions, so it might not work for a class with a lot of foreign students. Additionally, since some of these talking points touch on sensitive issues, you might not want to try this if your class dynamic is uncertain.

Politics . What if I am talking about a politician, and I claim, “Of course he doesn’t believe in this” or “Of course he supports that: he’s a Republican!” How am I using a lens?
Aesthetic trends . What if we’re talking about a movie, and I say, “Of course there are talking animals! It’s a Disney movie” or “Of course there’s a lot of violence – it’s a Scorsese film!” How am I using a lens?
Stereotypes . How do stereotypes function as lenses? Do we use lenses to form opinions about other people and our social interactions? Some examples: feminist, hipster, party girl, “Brandeis students” (as opposed to “Harvard students” or what have you)?

Class Conversation

At some point, presumably, you will discuss your lens texts as a class. After you have defined a certain concept (like Freud’s definition of the ego and the id or Marx’s definition of commodity fetishism), just ask your students to connect it to the primary text. They struggle tremendously to do this in writing, yet most can do it quite naturally in conversation. Some leading questions (I’m using Marx and Citizen Kane as examples):

Okay, so we understand commodity fetishism to mean x. Where do we see that idea at work in Citizen Kane ? Be sure to press students on specifics. Where do you see this happening? Name a scene or quote a line.
What do you think Marx would say about a character like Charles Foster Kane? How would Marx explain Kane’s downfall?
Does Marx seem outdated, when we look at Citizen Kane ? What do you think Marx would say, if we asked him to explain y (some conceptual wrinkle)?

Limitations of the Lens Assignment

One of the most productive conversations I ever had with my class about the lens essay came when I admitted that the assignment is inherently difficult because it is inherently constrained. At one point near the end of the lens unit, I had a student say, “I’m sorry, but this paper still does not feel like anything I’ve been asked to do in other classes.” I told him that he was right, because for the lens essay, I had selected both the primary text and two possible lens essays. In other words, I had already limited the field of his interpretation by saying, implicitly, “I think these things go together in an interesting way.” I explain to the students that we do this for the sake of efficiency and ease (they don’t have very long to write these essays), but that in the research unit, it will be their turn to locate, select, and defend their choice of a theoretical lens.

I generally explain this to students somewhere between their rough and final drafts, and it seems to help them relax. I think the lens essay generates a lot of anxiety because, like it or not, we’re asking students to adopt a theoretical stance that we think is productive or provocative. To many students, this feels like we’re asking them to live inside our heads and try to intuit some Platonic ideal an essay. Try to persuade the students that this is not the case; in fact, the lens essay is really just an exercise (which they will be asked to repeat many, many times in their academic careers). It is an exercise in trying on a critical perspective, with which they may or may not agree. In the future, they’ll be free to find their own perspectives and, in most cases, their own primary texts, as well.

Amy Easton-Flake (2010)

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Literary Criticism

Introduction
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Steps to Literary Criticism
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thesis examples

SAMPLE THESIS STATEMENTS

These sample thesis statements are provided as guides, not as required forms or prescriptions.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The thesis may focus on an analysis of one of the elements of fiction, drama, poetry or nonfiction as expressed in the work: character, plot, structure, idea, theme, symbol, style, imagery, tone, etc.

In “A Worn Path,” Eudora Welty creates a fictional character in Phoenix Jackson whose determination, faith, and cunning illustrate the indomitable human spirit.

Note that the work, author, and character to be analyzed are identified in this thesis statement. The thesis relies on a strong verb (creates). It also identifies the element of fiction that the writer will explore (character) and the characteristics the writer will analyze and discuss (determination, faith, cunning).

Further Examples:

The character of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet serves as a foil to young Juliet, delights us with her warmth and earthy wit, and helps realize the tragic catastrophe.

The works of ecstatic love poets Rumi, Hafiz, and Kabir use symbols such as a lover’s longing and the Tavern of Ruin to illustrate the human soul’s desire to connect with God.

The thesis may focus on illustrating how a work reflects the particular genre’s forms, the characteristics of a philosophy of literature, or the ideas of a particular school of thought.

“The Third and Final Continent” exhibits characteristics recurrent in writings by immigrants: tradition, adaptation, and identity.

Note how the thesis statement classifies the form of the work (writings by immigrants) and identifies the characteristics of that form of writing (tradition, adaptation, and identity) that the essay will discuss.

Further examples:

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame reflects characteristics of Theatre of the Absurd in its minimalist stage setting, its seemingly meaningless dialogue, and its apocalyptic or nihilist vision.

A close look at many details in “The Story of an Hour” reveals how language, institutions, and expected demeanor suppress the natural desires and aspirations of women.

The thesis may draw parallels between some element in the work and real-life situations or subject matter: historical events, the author’s life, medical diagnoses, etc.

In Willa Cather’s short story, “Paul’s Case,” Paul exhibits suicidal behavior that a caring adult might have recognized and remedied had that adult had the scientific knowledge we have today.

This thesis suggests that the essay will identify characteristics of suicide that Paul exhibits in the story. The writer will have to research medical and psychology texts to determine the typical characteristics of suicidal behavior and to illustrate how Paul’s behavior mirrors those characteristics.

Through the experience of one man, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, accurately depicts the historical record of slave life in its descriptions of the often brutal and quixotic relationship between master and slave and of the fragmentation of slave families.

In “I Stand Here Ironing,” one can draw parallels between the narrator’s situation and the author’s life experiences as a mother, writer, and feminist.

SAMPLE PATTERNS FOR THESES ON LITERARY WORKS

1. In (title of work), (author) (illustrates, shows) (aspect) (adjective).

Example: In “Barn Burning,” William Faulkner shows the characters Sardie and Abner Snopes struggling for their identity.

2. In (title of work), (author) uses (one aspect) to (define, strengthen, illustrate) the (element of work).

Example: In “Youth,” Joseph Conrad uses foreshadowing to strengthen the plot.

3. In (title of work), (author) uses (an important part of work) as a unifying device for (one element), (another element), and (another element). The number of elements can vary from one to four.

Example: In “Youth,” Joseph Conrad uses the sea as a unifying device for setting, structure and theme.

4. (Author) develops the character of (character’s name) in (literary work) through what he/she does, what he/she says, what other people say to or about him/her.

Example: Langston Hughes develops the character of Semple in “Ways and Means”…

5. In (title of work), (author) uses (literary device) to (accomplish, develop, illustrate, strengthen) (element of work).

Example: In “The Masque of the Red Death,” Poe uses the symbolism of the stranger, the clock, and the seventh room to develop the theme of death.

6. (Author) (shows, develops, illustrates) the theme of __________ in the (play, poem, story).

Example: Flannery O’Connor illustrates the theme of the effect of the selfishness of the grandmother upon the family in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

7. (Author) develops his character(s) in (title of work) through his/her use of language.

Example: John Updike develops his characters in “A & P” through his use of figurative language.

Perimeter College, Georgia State University, http://depts.gpc.edu/~gpcltc/handouts/communications/literarythesis.pdf

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Events Calendar

Art & Art History News - April 9, 2024

Upcoming events.

King Awards Ceremony & Exhibition

Awards Ceremony & Reception: THIS FRIDAY!! April 12, 2024, 4:00-6:00PM Exhibition in the Visual Arts Complex: Wednesday, April 10 - April 19, 2024

Undergraduate Finalists: Lisa An, Annabelle Farris, Sarah Mak, Alice Neild, Brooke Schuh

Graduate Finalists: Dati Alsaedi, Ana González Barragán, Cody Norton, Silvia Alejandra Saldivar Romero, Natalie Thedford

View online exhibition

Image: Lisa An, Untitled, October 2023, photographic print on matte paper, 20in x 30in with borders

Setsuko and Hiroki Morinoue: Visiting Artist Lecture

Monday, April 22 at 4:00 PM Visual Arts Complex, Auditorium 1B20

Born in 1947, in Holualoa on the Island of Hawaii, Hiroki Morinoue received his BFA degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA) in 1973. For Hiroki the landscape of Hawaii, its light, rocks, skies, and water has deeply influenced his work alongside the aesthetic of Japanese arts, crafts and landscaped gardens, which is prevalent in his work. In all of Morinoue's work there is a compelling sense of place, curiosity and dialogue between the art and its viewer. He transcends these observations in various mediums, including watercolor, oil, acrylic and mixed media paintings, monotypes, sculptures, photography, ceramics and Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock prints). He has completed several major public art commissions, including projects at the Honolulu Public Library, and for the Hawaii Convention Center. Hiroki's work is represented in art collections around the world.

Born in Kanagawa, Japan, Setsuko began her interest in art through photography in high school. Later it transformed into the love for fiber art in Kusaki and Roketsu-zome, a Japanese natural dye with wax resist. She began her journey with clay at the Kona Arts Center in Holualoa. Setsuko is mainly self-taught by exploring and experimenting while taking many workshops throughout her career by well-established artists. She has participated in numerous group shows in Japan, Hawaii, and the US Mainland. Her works are in numerous private, public and corporate collections.

Hiroki and Setsuko Morinoue established Studio 7 Fine Arts Gallery in November 1979, as the first and now longest-standing contemporary art gallery in Hawaii. A humble space in a small village with a charmed history, the gallery holds an open-ended mission: to create and promote Contemporary Art.

Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibitions

Currently on View at CU Art Museum [Round 1] April 6–18, 2024 Artists featured: Brianna Autin, Erin Hyunhee Kang, Dani Wasserman, Elisa Wolcott

Next exhibition: April 27–May 11 [Round 2] Opening reception: Fri. April 26 from 4–6 PM Artists featured: Natalie Thedford, Noa Fodrie, Aunna Moriarty, Cody Norton

Spring 2024 Art History Graduate Student Symposium

Visual Arts Complex, Rm 303 Tuesday, April 16, 2024, 9:00-10:45 AM

9:00 AM — Welcome, introductions, Albert Alhadeff, Director of Graduate Studies, Art History 9:15-9:30 — Brittany Ashley, Collections as Medium 9:30-9:45 — Kat Bertram, Manga Introduction to Nichiren: Unveiling Nichiren Buddhism through Manga Study Aids 9:45-10:00 — Natalie Ginez, Hybridity and Indigeneity in Colonial Ecuador BREAK 10:15-10:30 — Sam Hensley, Gathering for Tea: Modernity, Material Culture, and Tea Ceremony in Japan and Abroad 10:30-10:45 — Taite Shomo, Theatre of the Horrible: Self-Immolation, Violence, and Representation 10:45-11:00 — Bella Malherbe, Bhekisisa, Sakouli Beach, Mayotte: The Black Queer Figure as an Apoptotic Agent of the Anthropocene

Audrey Lebsack, The Vietnam American War

The 2024 Art History Showcase

Join us on Tuesday, April 16, 3:30 - 4:30pm in the 3rd floor lobby of the Visual Arts Complex for a reception celebrating the Art History Showcase . This exhibition highlights Art History students’ research and coursework, raises the visibility of their scholarship, and honors their accomplishments. Refreshments will be served. The exhibition will be on view April 15-19, 2024.

Participants include M.A. candidate Kat Bertram ( Manga Introduction to Nichiren: Unveiling Nichiren Buddhism through Manga Study Aids ) and B.A. with Honors candidate Bella Malherbe ( Bhekisisa, Sakouli Beach, Mayotte: The Black Queer Figure as an Apoptotic Agent of the Anthropocene ), as well as students in Professor Brianne Cohen's capstone seminar: Photo and Political Violence, who have collaborated to create the "Waging Peace Through AI" exhibition.

Waging Peace Through AI This exhibition investigates the potential of generating AI-based images to advocate for peace. Each artwork has been created using AI-generating software, and students have conceived the artworks in the context of an undergraduate course, Photography and Political Violence. In the seminar, we have examined photographic histories of more visible violence from centuries of wars and genocide (e.g. WWII and the Holocaust, the Vietnam War) as well as more invisible, structural violence (e.g. racism in the U.S. prison system, the AIDS epidemic). The title of the exhibition is an homage to another contemporary, widely circulating exhibition, “Waging Peace in Vietnam,” about the efforts of U.S. soldiers and veterans who opposed the war.

Image caption: Audrey Lebsack, The Vietnam American War

Department Announcements

Art & Environments Field School

Registration is now open!

Art & Environments Field School Summer 2024 — June 10-28 ARTS 4444 6 Credits, 3 weeks in the field & 3 weeks asynchronous online

Field Instructor: Aaron Treher Artist and Exhibitions Developer, CU Museum of Natural History Visiting Artist: Nina Elder, Interdisciplinary Artist and Researcher Field Technician: Delaney Gardner-Sweeney, Installation Artist and Researcher Program Director I Online: Richard Saxton, lnterdiscipinary Artist and Researcher

Please email [email protected] or [email protected]

Marina Kassianidou, Assistant Professor, Painting & Drawing

A Partial History Solo exhibition by Marina Kassianidou

NARS Foundation Brooklyn, NY

Opening: April 12, 6:00 - 8:00 pm Duration: April 12 – May 15, 2024 https://www.narsfoundation.org/2024-exhibitions/marina-kassianidou-a-partial-history

A Partial History unfolds histories/stories of touch, movement, language, and translation. The artist recreates books from her late grandmother’s library, focusing on marks of use and time on the books’ pages. She then makes drawings that magnify and superimpose the marks from the books, compressing time while potentially expanding space. The recreated books and drawings become alternative history books and maps, recording shared histories and spaces of handling and holding.

Megan O'Grady, Assistant Professor, Critical and Curatorial Studies

O'Grady's book review of CHASING BEAUTY: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, by Natalie Dykstra was recently published in the New York Times

An Exquisite Biography of a Gilded Age Legend Link to read the full review

Art & Art History Department Commencement

Friday, May 10 at 10:00am to 12:00pm Visual Arts Complex, Plaza — in front of the building 1085 18th Street, Boulder, CO 80309

Join us from 10 AM-12 Noon for the Art & Art History graduation on the Visual Arts Complex plaza. The ceremony is from 10-11 AM followed by morning refreshments served from 11AM-12PM.

Seating is limited! Please consider 2-4 guests per student.

IMPORTANT: Students should check in with their advisors about all graduation details!!! Are you registered to graduate? CLICK HERE to register. CLICK HERE to order regalia If you are graduating this Summer or Fall and want to participate in the Spring 2024 Art & Art History graduation ceremony you will need to contact [email protected] in advance to be included in the event.

Solar flares reported during total eclipse as sun nears solar maximum. What are they?

Earthlings have reported spotting solar flares during Monday's total eclipse .

The sun on Monday was expected to be at the height of its activity during its 11 year solar cycle also known as its "solar maximum." During this moment, the sun emits more solar flares and coronal mass ejections, massive bubbles of plasma threaded by rejected magnetic field lines.

Weather photographer John White shared photos that he said showed two solar flares right as the eclipse approached totality.

A solar flare on New Year's Eve, rated as an X-5, was the largest detected since the 2017 eclipse, when a X8.2 flare X8.2 flare occurred, according to NOAA.

Solar flares are only expected to become more common by 2025 as the sun continues to reach its solar maximum.

What are solar flares?

Considered our solar system's largest explosive events , solar flares occur when magnetic energy associated with sunspots is released, creating intense bursts of radiation.

Solar flares can last mere minutes, or can drag on for hours, depending on their intensity. NASA classifies solar flares based on their strength, with B-class being the smallest and X-class – which is what was detected last New Year's Eve – being the largest.

Weaker solar flares won't be noticeable here on Earth, but those with enough energy output to rank as an X-class have the potential to disrupt radio communications, electric power grids and navigation signals. In extreme cases, such powerful flares even pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts, according to NASA.

How big are solar flares

Solar flares are giant explosions of electromagnetic radiation that emit light, energy and high-speed particles.

They are measured by their strength from the smallest B-class, followed by C, M and the largest X class. Each class represents a ten-fold increase in energy output making is M 10 times a C and 100 times a B.

The largest solar flare ever recorded occurred on Monday, April 2, 2001 at 4:41 p.m. EDT, according to NASA. The flare, detected by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite, surpassed the power of the one on March 6, 1989, which played a role in disrupting power grids in Canada.

How long do solar flares last

Solar flares can last a few minutes to several hours.

The outburst of electromagnetic energy travels are the meeting of light, according to the NOAA, making the event occurring at the same time the event is observed.

Monday's total eclipse began in Mexico at about 11:07 a.m. PDT, before reaching Texas at 1:27 p.m. CDT and ending in Maine at 3:35 p.m. EDT.

Schneier on Security

History of rsa conference. bruce schneier. the first ‘exhibitor’ in 1994..

Cybercrime Magazine
April 11, 2024

Listen to the Audio on SoundCloud.com

Bruce Schneier was at the first ever RSA Conference in 1991, and he was the first ‘exhibitor’ in 1994 when he asked Jim Bidzos, Creator of the RSA Conference, if he could sell copies of his book “Applied Cryptography.” Bidzos set Schneier up in the hotel lobby where the conference was being held—and the rest is history. Listen to some great RSA Conference memories on this episode of the History of RSA Conference.

Categories: Audio , Recorded Interviews

Tags: Cybercrime Magazine

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.

IMAGES

SOLUTION: History Lenses And History Value Final Copy Ppt Nku
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Influences of Historical Lenses by Katherine Winchek
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SOLUTION: Historical Lenses And History S Value

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Historical Photos that you need to see. Part 266 #historicalphotos
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Historical Photos that you need to see. Part 271
A reader using a historical lens to analyze a text will be most concerned with
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Interesting facts about Aristotle!!?? #history #shortvideo

COMMENTS

Historical Lenses (Social, Political, Economic), Explained!
There are three main types of historical lenses: social, political, and economic. Here is a brief overview of each: Social lens: A social lens looks at how social factors, such as class, race, gender, and ethnicity, have shaped and influenced events and developments in history. This lens helps us understand how different groups of people have ...
How to Write a Thesis Statement for a Critical Lens Essay
When it comes to writing a critical lens essay, it's true that you get the chance to view wisdom and literature through a critical lens. The thesis statement is the center point of any essay, so crafting a strong example takes work. Take your inspiration from the format of the critical lens essay introduction, making sure to revise the wording ...
Viewing History Through a Lens: The Influence of Film on Historical
Bales, Brittany, "Viewing History Through a Lens: The Influence of Film on Historical Consciousness" (2020). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 3688. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3688 This Thesis - unrestricted is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Works at Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University.
Writing a "Lens" Essay
Make sure to clearly introduce the lens text and its specific arguments you will be employing or evaluating. Then introduce the target text and its specific themes or events you will be addressing in your analysis. These introductions of texts and themes should lead into some kind of thesis statement. Though there are no set guidelines or ...
3. Historical Analysis and Interpretation
HISTORICAL THINKING STANDARD 3. The student engages in historical analysis and interpretation: Therefore, the student is able to: Compare and contrast differing sets of ideas, values, personalities, behaviors, and institutions by identifying likenesses and differences. Consider multiple perspectives of various peoples in the past by ...
PDF QC Writing Center Guide to Writing Critical Lens Essays
Crafting a critical lens essay. 1) Understand the critical lens and what it is asking of you. Remember that a critical lens is a certain viewpoint that you should look through as you analyze your target text. 2) Analyze the piece of literature. The best thing is to reread it, if possible, with your critical lens in mind.
Lens Analysis
Lens analysis requires you to distill a concept, theory, method or claim from a text (i.e. the "lens") and then use it to interpret, analyze, or explore something else e.g. a first-hand experience, visual text, physical object or space, historical or current event or figure, a cultural phenomenon, an idea or even another text (i.e. the ...
10.7: New Historicism
Apply New Historicism To Your Reading. When reading a work through a New Historicism reading, apply the following steps: Determine the time and place, or historical context of the literature. Choose a specific aspect of the text you feel would be illuminated by learning more about the history of the text. Research the history.
Using Historic Context in Analysis and Interpretation
The Importance of Historic Context in Analysis and Interpretation. Historical context is an important part of life and literature, and without it, memories, stories, and characters have less meaning. Historical context deals with the details that surround an occurrence. In more technical terms, historical context refers to the social, religious ...
How to read a document: analyzing a historical text
We get to make some generalizations about that era, when combined with other documents, gives us a more complete view of history. We might be able to tell the price of goods, maybe even inflation and wages, the level of consumerism, what goods or food or commodities people bought at the time, maybe how those goods affected peoples' daily lives, if the goods were produced or imported, telling ...
The Lens of History
For this reason historians often feel that the lens of history can provide a fuller and more realistic understanding of a situation than we can get by reacting to analogies based on the past. This section may make it sound as if the first use of lens (analogy) leads to false understandings while the second use (the understanding of the actual ...
Historical or Biographical Critical Lens
Do we know? Was the work in response to something that happened in the author's life or in history? Attribution & References. Except where otherwise noted, this chapter is adapted from "Reading Through a Critical Lens" In Say Her Name: Discovering Women's Voices in History by Dr. Karen Palmer, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
PDF Using a Critical Lens
paper's thesis statement will focus on what in the text is revealed by the critical lens. Your thesis will likely use terminology and/or concepts from your research. Steps to Literary Analysis with a Critical Lens: 1. Identify a passage from the text and perform a close reading. This includes an introduction to the passage (context), a quote
Lens Essay Overview
Lens Essay Overview. Note: this handout is available for download in PDF format and as an MS Word DOCX that instuctors can customize. Close Reading. While lens essays consist of more than close reading, they can't function without it! In fact, in lens analysis you will perform two different, but related, forms of close reading:
PSCC Libraries: Literary Criticism: Critical Literary Lenses
A Critical Literary Lens influences how you look at a work. A great example that is often used, is the idea of putting on a pair of glasses, and the glasses affecting how you view your surroundings. The lens you choose is essentially a new way to focus on the work and is a great tool for analyzing works from different viewpoints.
1.2: What is Historical Analysis?
The very essence of historical analysis is about analyzing the different cause-and-effect relationships present in each scenario, considering the ways individuals, influential ideas, and different mindsets interact and affect one another. It is about figuring out what facts go together to form a coherent story, one that helps us understand ...
PDF UNIVERSITY WRITING PROGRAM
Example: Introduction paragraph from a successful student lens essay. 2. of. For the United States, and especially in New York, the middle of the 19th century meant an increase in immigration, which lead to a more diverse society and a huge rise in the population of cities. Consequently, a belief that prostitution was growing became widespread ...
What Does It Mean to Think Historically?
To argue that history is contingent is to claim that every historical outcome depends upon a number of prior conditions; that each of these prior conditions depends, in turn, upon still other conditions; and so on. The core insight of contingency is that the world is a magnificently interconnected place. Change a single prior condition, and any ...
Secrets to Literature Lenses for Textual Analysis
Use this handy-dandy literary lenses list (say that four times fast) to help you plan mini-lessons on how to intentionally read through the literature lenses. Marxism. Feminism. Gender/queer theory. Moral criticism. Formalism/new criticism. Historical/biographical/cultural. Freudian.
Introducing the Lens
Defining a Lens. I usually begin the lens unit by writing the word on the board. (I've borrowed this exercise from Christian Gentry.) I ask the students to tell me what a lens does. The salient points here are: A lens tends to magnify or exaggerate certain details; Sometimes a lens blurs or distorts other details
thesis examples
The thesis may draw parallels between some element in the work and real-life situations or subject matter: historical events, the author's life, medical diagnoses, etc. Example: In Willa Cather's short story, "Paul's Case," Paul exhibits suicidal behavior that a caring adult might have recognized and remedied had that adult had the ...
A 'Humanitarian Idea': Using a Historical Lens to Reflect on Social
A 'Humanitarian Idea': Using a Historical Lens to Reflect on Social Justice in Early Childhood Education and Care. Sandie Wong [email protected] View all authors and affiliations. Volume 14, Issue 4. ... Unpublished Master of Education thesis, University of Sydney. Google Scholar. Wong S. (2006) ...
PDF Writing Resources Center Writing a History Paper: The Basics (Example
1. Identify the assignment's goals. Have the assignment's goals in mind as you familiarize yourself with your sources/evidence, develop a thesis, outline your main points, and write your essay. *Note: Always follow your professor's specific guidelines before the general suggestions in this handout. Example Essay Prompt: The assignment is ...
Finding Our Place in Space Through the Lenses of Art, Culture, History
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M.A. Thesis Defense: Lauren Elyse Elyaman
Elyse Elyaman will defend her M.A. thesis, "Republican Nuns: Conventual Reform in Chile, 1840-1891," in conference with her graduate advisory committee. The Major Professor is Dr. Cassia Roth. The university community is invited. If you wish to attend please contact the graduate program office in advance.
Art & Art History News
Currently on View at CU Art Museum [Round 1] April 6-18, 2024. Artists featured: Brianna Autin, Erin Hyunhee Kang, Dani Wasserman, Elisa Wolcott. Next exhibition: April 27-May 11 [Round 2] Opening reception: Fri. April 26 from 4-6 PM. Artists featured: Natalie Thedford, Noa Fodrie, Aunna Moriarty, Cody Norton.
Solar flares during a solar eclipse are expected. Here's what to know
Solar flares are giant explosions of electromagnetic radiation that emit light, energy and high-speed particles. They are measured by their strength from the smallest B-class, followed by C, M and ...
History of RSA Conference. Bruce Schneier. The First 'Exhibitor' in 1994
About Bruce Schneier. I am a public-interest technologist, working at the intersection of security, technology, and people.I've been writing about security issues on my blog since 2004, and in my monthly newsletter since 1998. I'm a fellow and lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School, a board member of EFF, and the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.
M.A. Thesis Defense: Austin Coke
Austin Coke. Graduate Student, Teaching Assistant. [email protected]. Mon, 04/15/2024 - 2:00pm. 201 LeConte Hall. Austin will defend his Master's thesis, "The Jewish South: A Comparison of Jewish Integration into Southern Society", with his thesis committee. The Major Professor is Dr. Scott Reynolds Nelson. The university community is invited.

Historical Lenses (Social, Political, Economic), Explained!

Historical Lenses Definition

Examples of Historical Lenses

2. The Political Lens

3. Economic Lens

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How to Write a Thesis Statement for a Critical Lens Essay

How to Do an In-Depth Analysis Essay

Critical Lens Essay

Elements of the Thesis Statement

Writing Process

Strengthening the Thesis Statement

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HISTORICAL THINKING STANDARD 3

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Literary Criticism: Critical Literary Lenses

Critical Literary Lenses

Socio-Economic (Marxist Criticism)

Feminist/Gender

Historical

Psychoanalytic

1.2: What is Historical Analysis?

What Does It Mean to Think Historically?

Introduction

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University Writing Program

Defining a Lens

Everyday Lenses

Class Conversation

Limitations of the Lens Assignment

Literary Criticism