Examples of Critical Reading
In his book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, Sam Wineburg describes the start of a history of religion course with Professor Jacob Neusner.
“What is the text doing,” [Neusner] asked about Genesis 1, as a hundred students or so collectively quaked in their seats. One after another, baffled freshmen summarized the text, only to have Neusner strike his fist on the podium: “Doing, not saying. What is the text doing?”
That distinction, between saying and doing, lies at the heart of critical reading. To read critically means to extract information actively from a text, rather than taking the author’s own statements as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In some cases, it can mean doubting the factual accuracy of the author’s statements. More commonly, it means asking what we can learn from the way the author selected and arranged facts the way she did.
Here are three examples of critical readings of primary sources. In each case, the historian presented a section of a primary source as a block quotation in order to show readers the basis of his conclusions. I have reformatted the historian’s text to allow easier comparison between source and analysis.
Source |
Analysis |
| Martin Pring, “A Voyage Set Out from the Citie of Bristoll, 1603”As for Trees the Country yeeldeth Sassafras a plant of sovereigne vertue for the French Poxe, and as some of late have learnedly written good against the Plague and many other Maladies; Vines, Cedars, Okes, Ashes, Beeches, Birch trees, Cherie trees bearing fruit whereof wee did eate, Hasels, Wichhasels, the best wood of all other to make Sope-ashes withal, walnut-trees, Maples, holy to make Bird lime with, and a kinde of tree bearing a fruit like a small red Peare-plum. | William Cronon, Changes in the Land, 1983
Visitors inevitably observed and recorded greater numbers of “commodities” than other things which had not been labeled in this way . . . Descriptions framed on such a basis were bound to say as much about the markets of Europe as they did about the ecology of New England . . . Seeing landscapes in terms of commodities meant something else as well: it treated members of an ecosystem as isolated and extractable units. Explorers describing a new countryside with an eye to its mercantile possibilities all too easily fell into this way of looking at things, so that their descriptions often degenerated into little more than lists. Martin Pring’s account of the trees of Martha’s Vineyard illustrates this tendency . . . Little sense of ecological relationships emerges from such a list. One could not use it to describe what the forest actually looked like or how these trees interacted with one another. Instead, its purpose was to detail resources for the interest of future undertakings. |
| Arkansas Supreme Court, Sibley v. Smith, 46 Ark. 275 (1885)
There could be no more flagrant case of the evils resulting from such refusal [to submit to a physical exam] than the present case affords. The plaintiff was an uneducated man, incapable of estimating the consequences of his injury except by the pain and inconvenience which it caused him . . . . His claim for damages was based principally on alleged internal injuries, which could only have been understood and properly estimated by a physician. |
Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty, 2001.
Underlying the groundswell of legal authority approving court-sanctioned exams was a mixture of distrust of those claiming injury, an overweening confidence in the power of courts to protect against unwarranted invasions of the person, and an emphatic embrace of the superiority of expert knowledge . . . Certainly, doctors often understood more fully than their patients the nature of injury, but the level of confidence placed in expert knowledge said more about the distrust of accidental injury victims, new attitudes toward expertise in general, and the success of doctors in raising the scientific profile of the medical profession than knowledge in fact. |
| Muir Fairchild, 1939
The industrial mechanisms which provide the means of war to the armed forces, and those that provide the means of sustaining a normal life to the civil population, are not separate, disconnected entities. They are joined at many vital points. If not electrical power, then the destruction of some other common element, will render them both inoperative at a single blow. The nationwide reaction to the stunning discovery that the sources of the country’s power to resist and sustain itself, are being relentlessly destroyed, can hardly fail to be decisive. |
Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, 1987
The planners’ vacillation about whether the final objective would be the morale of the population or its war-making capacity was a critical weakness of their doctrine. . . [Fairchild’s argument] was a disturbing mixture of confidence about success and evasion about how to achieve it. Admittedly, Fairchild finally considered the enemy’s will as the ultimate objective, and distinctions between will and the capacity to wage war can be arbitrary. Yet it made a great difference, in strategy and in the lives of the attackers and defenders, which objective was singled out. For Fairchild, apparently, one objective was as good as another. As was often the case in strategic thinking, belief in success encouraged imprecision about how to achieve it. |
In each case, the historian tears apart the passage, discrediting the author. Pring’s account has, writes Cronon, “degenerated” into a mere list. The Arkansas Supreme Court, argues Welke, was “overweening” in its confidence in expertise. And, writes Sherry, Fairchild’s argument was weak and imprecise.
Yet each historian finds these flawed writings to be fine sources of information. Having torn the texts apart, they can choose the elements they find of interest: Pring’s obsession with commercial value, the Arkansas court’s faith in professional expertise, and Fairchild’s indifference between military and civilian targets. And they can go further, asking what is missing from each text, such as the ecological relations between species that interests Cronon but not Pring.
To break apart a source and to put it back together in a new way is to criticize and analyze (both verbs derive from words meaning “to separate”). Just as Pring gazed on a forest and saw trees to be cut for profit, so should you gaze on a source and ask which elements you can extract to answer your own questions. In Cronon’s words, your purpose is “to detail resources for the interest of future undertakings.”
Style notes
- Topic sentences are critical. Each of these historians begins with a topic sentence that analyzes the document, rather than merely summarizing it.
- Historians read documents, but they study people. For the most part, the subjects of their sentences are people: visitors, doctors, war planners. Because the historians are describing what these people did in the past, they write mainly in the past tense: in the past tense. Thus, “visitors inevitably observed and recorded. . .”
- When the historian makes the document the subject of the sentence, the verb shifts into the present tense: “Martin Pring’s account . . . illustrates . . . ” I don’t make up these rules; I just enforce them.
- To illustrate historians’ techniques, I have separated quotation and analysis. In most writing, the two are blended together, so be sure to quote striking passages or word choices in the documents you analyze.
For more examples of document analysis by historians, see “Making Sense of Evidence,” History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/browse/makesense/. For more thoughts on source analysis, see “How to Read a Primary Source.”