American history text analysis essay
Write a 5-7 page analysis on the following excerpt, using the 2 theoretical texts.
- Analyze the object through the lens of these theoretical approaches, demonstrating how the theories produce different interpretations of the object.
- Note that the theoretical texts should generate substantially different readings rather than a similar, shared view of the object.
- The essay should be typed in 12-point font, double-spaced, with one-inch margins.
“When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem….[e]astward I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west….Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow.”
Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’ (1862)
