Inverse Outlining and Samples

This week’s blog post was quite the task, and I hope that I successfully complied everything I needed for this entry.

To begin, we need to provide a page of notes from a source we have been reading throughout the week. For this assignment, I chose to provide a brief sample of my own personal notes and thoughts on Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950. I am using this source in an effort to cultivate a definition of religion, which I will then use when viewing both Italian and Irish American notions and practice of Catholicism.

Next, I was also tasked with providing a small report of an interview I had with a specialist in a potential scholarly field relevant to my research project. After conducting three interviews so far, I decided to type up my written notes from my interview with Dr. Carla Simonini from the Italian studies program at Loyola.

My notes on Orsi’s work and my interview with Dr. Simonini can be found here: Recorded Notes

Next, I was tasked with reading and outlining the article “‘How About Some Meat?’: The Office of Price Administration, Consumption Politics, and State Building from the Bottom Up, 1941-1946.” In an effort to adequately understand how historians craft academic arguments, my own personal thoughts on the matter can be best described as a bit overwhelming but also ready for an academic challenge. Before becoming a Ramonat scholar, the longest paper I’ve written was a 15-page research paper for my Theology class, which I wrote on female autonomy within the Biblical books of Ruth, Esther, and Judith. I did an extensive biblical analysis of this theme, how these books overlap, how they differ, and finally what implications of female autonomy can arise from this synthesis. This proved a fun task; however, this previous assignment was much easier to develop since it was only half the required page amount of Ramonat’s research project. Currently, I am drowning in sources. I have somewhat of a direction of what I seek to prove in my current research project; however, I still need to consolidate my themes before I get to overwhelmed and misguided about where to proceed. This article showed me that it is okay to have a lot of sources backing up a position, and that these longer scholarly articles should have many themes they hit upon. For now and for me, it becomes a matter of determining what these themes are, and how I should support them. The outline of the scholarly article assigned from class can be found here: Inverse Outline

Finally, at the end, I was asked to supply a small primary source. This can be found here: Growing Up on the Near West Side in the 1920s