Explain and develop the evaluation made in your thesis.

Essay Breakdown:

1) Introduction: brief (one or two paragraphs); provide background and thesis.
Background = identify the article and author under review along with any essential historical or historiographical background: What time period and region are discussed? What is the historical question or topic that the article addresses?
Thesis = somewhere in your introduction (generally toward the end) you must provide a succinct, clear evaluation of the article. This evaluation is the thesis for your article review. Your thesis should encompass three main components:
a) What the main argument of the article is.
b) Your evaluation of the article such as its strengths and contributions or weaknesses and shortcomings.
c) Why and/or in what ways you think the work demonstrates these strengths and weaknesses.

2) Summary of Key Arguments:
After your introduction, you should generally provide a very brief summary or overview of the article. Take great care not to simply repeat or mirror everything in the article. Try to take a step back and tell me what its essential arguments are and briefly summarize them.
You may want to comment on:
What is the article’s thesis? How is it similar to or different from other historians’ work on a similar topic? How is it organized? What are the major arguments?
What types of evidence are presented? (See above for other ‘critical’ questions).

3) Evaluation/Analysis
This section should constitute the bulk of your review. In it, you need to explain and develop the evaluation made in your thesis. Make sure to use examples but use no direct quotations from the article to illustrate and prove your assessment of the work. For example, if your thesis argues that the article provides a careful and detailed examination of a topic, you should point toward places in the article where it does so. Similarly, if you argue that the work fails to recognize a particular perspective, give examples of places in the article that you think would have benefited from attention to that perspective.

Article Review

Your essay is based on ONE OF the articles from the reading list and your goal for this paper is to write a comprehensive review of that article. A review is a critical evaluation of a book or article, etc., which provides a very brief summary and, more importantly, makes an argument. The most important element of a review is that it is a commentary, not a summary. It allows you to enter into a literary dialogue and discussion with the work’s creator and with other audiences. You can offer agreement or disagreement and identify what you believe to be its strengths and weaknesses in areas such as: knowledge, judgments, research, or organization. You should clearly state your opinion of the work in question (without using personal pronouns such as “I” or “My”), and that statement should resemble other types of academic writing, with a thesis statement, supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

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