Over the past week or so we have been reading A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, edited by Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter.  In the course of our discussions of this collection, we have had a chance to become more familiar with a range of frameworks, theories, arguments, source materials, and approaches (particular combinations of theories and frameworks used to analyze sources in support of an argument) that current historians of the body working on the North American context are using.  In this essay your primary responsibility is to weave this collection of approaches together into an essay that compares all of the articles in this collection of essays with one another in a single essay.  Your essay should be 6 to 8 double-spaced pages in length and you should use only Times New Roman font with a 12-pt. pitch.   Your essay must also be appropriately documented, meaning that you must understand to perfection precisely how you should cite an academic article in an essay collection.  

Beyond these basic parameters, there are some more specific guidelines and suggestions I would like to make that I think will lead to your success on this assignment:

First, your paper should be driven by the core questions that you think have been driving the research of the authors in Centre of the World.   There will not be a set number of questions here as each one of you will quite likely come up with a set of central questions all your own.  These questions need, however, to capture the contents and concerns of all of the articles in the collection, and that should be your standard in deciding whether you have identified "enough" questions to discuss.  I would recommend looking for several such questions, each of which plays a role in at least two articles in the collection. 

Second, your thesis in this essay should ideally suggest what you see as linking together all of the questions you identify. 

Thirdly, in order to demonstrate the relevance of the core questions you identify you will need to discuss how these questions relate to how particular authors use frameworks, theories, and particular arguments and sources in their work.  If the question you identify is really a central one, you be able to see how it is incorporated on some level in the articles to which you have linked that question. 

Fourthly, you need not address the same aspects of every article as you make connections between overarching questions and articles.  In one case you might discuss the argument and the use of a particular theory.  In another case you might stress the framework and the sources materials.  The key is to show patterns in the article that match up with the overarching question with which you have associated it. 

Fifthly, the best essays will suggest strengths and weaknesses in the way historians are engaging with the driving questions in their field and will comment on future directions for research in the conclusion on the basis of persistent failings that you identify in the literature in the body of your essay. 

Finally, keep in mind that you only have 8 pages at a maximum for this essay.  Therefore, you cannot spend more that .5 to .75 pages on the introduction and the conclusion cannot be more than about that same length.  Economy of prose is the watchword.

Good luck!