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Going back on my own posts, and my classmates, it shows how much we have grown in terms of being able to analyze historical writing. One thing I’ve grown at myself is being able to analyze exactly what the thesis of the writing is, or basically what point the author is trying to make with their  writings. Going back to my first post you can see how much I struggled to really grasp exactly what Cronon was saying,  I contradicted myself a couple of times as well as being a bit unclear on exactly what Cronon was saying with in his chapters. As time went on and I had more experience my posts became more focused on the concepts presented within the chapters and addressing those, rather than addressing just the points the author was making. A good example of this was my own writing on the great fire and how I addressed the themes of classism and sexism rather than just the idea of how ridiculous it is to blame an entire fire on one farmer with very little evidence.

On the topic of classism, that seems to be a common theme in a lot of our class’ writings. For example in a writing by CLUNA3  she discussed how Ms. O’Leary’s class and sex were two great factors that led to her being blamed for the fire, and in CRISCOBARS writing he explains how in Faith and Doubt the author made it clear that the fire didn’t spare the lives of the poor of the rich, everyone stuffered. This was once again brought up in Isaac’s Storm with a post by SEVALLOS  on how both the commoners and upper class of Galveston wanted the city to be rebuilt to protect their investments.  I think classism is a prevalent theme in all of our writings because it’s a prevalent theme within all of these texts. Most of the texts we are reading were written in, or about a time period of extreme wealth disparity which then affected everything in that time from the most minute day to day things to government agendas.  I think as we learned about more themes from the early 20th century (racism, naturalism, immigration, etc.) we can see these themes discussed in the blog posts about how each one was either in the writing or not in it at all, and why that was so important. As we go forward we will most likely learn new themes and then relate those back to what we’ve read and create some discussions on that.