What themes does Lepore weave into her narrative. The paper you will write will also include some summary. Once these questions are answered, the historian can write his or her review. Why does she rely on the sources she uses? How do they contribute to her argument? Do they take away from her argument? Are there any weaknesses in the sources she chooses to use or in how she uses them? What kind of primary sources does she use? Newspapers? Speeches? Letters? Diaries? Government documents? Trial transcripts? Political advertisements? The list of possible primary sources goes on and on. To discover these, one has to look through the notes. Once one figures out the answers to the questions above, it is important to critique the primary and secondary sources she uses as evidence to support her thesis, broader argument, and historical narrative. To start, one asks the following questions: What is the thesis of Lepore’s book? What is her argument? What story is she attempting to tell? These related questions are important because they tell us what questions Lepore, herself, is asking and what questions she is attempting to answer. When a historian reads a secondary source, it is her or his responsibility to critique the source as objectively as possible. Her book, and most works written by historians are what historians refer to as secondary sources. We’ve been reading Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States.
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