• a thesis is not a statement of fact
• a thesis is not a description of the topic
• a thesis is not an opinion

What a thesis is

• a statement that reflects the conclusions the author has reached about the topic under consideration in the paper
• an arguable/debatable point
• the central point of the paper

Consider the following examples, taken from Mary Rampolla’s The Pocket Guide to Writing in History:

A student is asked to write a paper on Samuel George Morton, a nineteenth-century physician and scientist who specialized on the human skull and wrote several treatises on craniometry. In his first draft he has the following thesis statement:

Morton measured the size and shape of human skulls from various racial and ethnic groups, concluding that Caucasians had the largest skulls and where therefore superior to all other races.

The sentence above is not a thesis since it merely describes Morton’s work. Notice the difference:

Morton and his contemporaries used his skull studies, which he said were objective and quantitative, to justify their belief in the superiority of the Caucasian race; however, a close examination of Morton’s work reveals, as Stephen Jay Gould has suggested, that his supposedly scientific data were created by his own prejudices and racism.

This statement, as you can see, not only indicates what Morton and his contemporaries claimed but also what the writer of the paper has concluded after careful investigation.

Consider, also, that a thesis should be arguable. This means that two people could look at the same source and come up with very different arguments about it. For example, when asked to compare the views of the late-medieval philosopher Nicole Oresme and Galileo Galilei on the whole of religion in their views of the natural work, one student might want to focus on the similarities of their ideas, arguing that:

Popular descriptions of Galileo imply that he believed science and religion were incompatible, but a comparison of his ideas with those of Nicole Oresme suggests that Galileo’s ideas about God and nature were similar to the beliefs held by medieval natural philosophers.

While another student might want to focus on the distinctions:

Both Galileo and Oresme believe in God, but the similarities end there: While Oresme sees Scripture as the ultimate font of all knowledge, Galileo dismisses it as irrelevant to the issues explored by scientists.

Both theses are equally valid as long as they are well demonstrated in the essay.

But don’t fret too much about trying to come up with the perfect thesis statement. Consider first what your want your essay to be able and what is the main point of it. Once you figure out your main point, the thesis will be there.

• divisions among East European Jews
• Zionism
• relations between Jews and their non-Jewish environments, acculturation/assimilation
• anti-Semitism
• the first Aliyyot
• political responses among Jews
• Mandate Palestine and the growth of the Jewish community
• the different experiences and cultures of European Jews and Jews from the Arab or Muslim world
• the Holocaust
• Messianism

Stage 2 – read through the chapters highlighted in the book with those themes in mind

Stage 3 – Take notes of every time one of these themes emerge, paying particular attention on how they are remembered /understood. You won’t need to talk about *every* theme in your essay but you’ll need to draw from more than one as your examples.

Stage 4 -  Ask yourself: how do these different voices view and understand the past (the past being all those events, ideologies, processes mentioned in stage 1)?  What are the similarities and differences in the way they understand the past?  How is Israeli society shaped by these differences? Are there aspects of the past that are left out?

Stage 5 – Your answers to stage 4 will form the focus of your essay.

Paragraph in the body of your paper:
Kearny blames white workers’ unemployment in part on the slave mentality of Chinese workers. He argues that corporations go as far as China to recruit workers because it is easier to control them “as serfs.”¹ He claims that their character predisposes them to obedience: “They are wipped curs, abject in docility, mean, contemptible and obedient in all things.”² As Eric Foner shows in the texbook, this attitude was shared by the majority of working class white men.³ This notion of innate difference between the “white” and “Asian” races justified Chinese exclusion. [Body paragraphs expand and give evidence for the argument raised in the thesis statement - notice here how she uses information from the textbook to help contextualize her argument]

¹ Dennis Kearney, President, and H. L. Knight, Secretary, “Appeal from California. The Chinese Invasion. Workingmen’s Address,” Indianapolis Times, 28 February 1878.
² Ibid.
³ Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty: An American History, Volume 2, Seagull Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 75.

Purpose of the assignment
This is an exercise to allow you to think about how historians use primary sources (that is, direct historical evidence) to understand the past. The most persuasive historical arguments are those based directly on this sort of evidence. As explained in tutorial, you will build an argument about an aspect of Jewish history based on the document assigned. For background, use the lectures and the textbook. You should, however, rely primarily on the document itself for your essay. While reading the document, be alert for themes, comparisons, issues that arise. These will form the basis of your paper.

In answering the main question of the assignment, “What does this document tell me about Jewish history?,” you must always think about where the evidence comes from: Who produced it? When? Why? What was the document’s purpose? You may not be able to answer all of these questions fully, but you should take advantage of lectures and your textbook to try to understand the context.

Also, remember that being critical doesn’t mean dismissing the document out of hand. A bias doesn’t invalidate a document. If it did, we would have no medieval Jewish history since the most detailed documentation available about Jews in the Middle Ages come from non-Jewish sources. Bias just means you need to handle the document more carefully and not take it at face value.

Writing the Essay

The purpose of a historical essay is to put forward an argument, clearly, logically, and concisely. According to proper historical method, your argument will be based on the evidence from the document, and you will present both the argument and the evidence to the reader in your essay. You do not have to summarize the document for this assignment. You can assume the reader knows the content of the document.

Although each essay will be short, it should still have a proper form: a short introduction, a middle section or body where you will develop your points, and then a conclusion, drawing the material together. Presentation of your ideas is important. Be sure to write carefully, and once you finished a rough draft, revise it, thinking about whether or not you have said things as clearly as you can. Others will find your ideas more persuasive if they are presented clearly. Use criticisms of the first Document Analysis assignment to improve your second assignment.

You can present the evidence both by quoting the document, as in the example above, and by providing references to it. Every time you refer to a specific point in the document you are analyzing, use footnotes or endnotes to provide references. Remember that the whole point of providing such notes is for another reader to be able to retrace your steps, so make the notes clear. No bibliography is necessary. Each paper should be double-spaced, include a cover page, and use 1-inch margins, Times 12 point font, and page numbers.

• The professor’s introduction
• Source

Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any problem viewing or downloading these files. I will go over some strategies to write this assignment in tutorial this week and Prof. Meyerson will also talk more about it in class.