Historical Convergence

We will be using these sources from Earle and Merchant. They are attached.
Review each article, and try to identify the various historical processes each author is
dealing with. These might seem fairly small—e.g., concerns about diet among administrators in
colonial Latin America—but they are in fact relevant to much larger processes—e.g., the
colonization of the New World, the development of ideas of race, the cultural history of ideas of
how bodies relate to environments. You will need to spin out these smaller topics which form the
focal points of research into their wider historical context.
– Once you have worked out the processes involved, you must next identify one (or at most two)
points of convergence between the authors. The point of convergence is the focal point of your
paper, and it should be a single topic—even a broad one—that both authors discuss.
– It may be that you can’t find a point of convergence; if so, select one or even two new articles
because for this paper, you MUST find one.
– Once you have identified a point of convergence in two different works, you can then describe
and hopefully explain it. To describe it, you must explain how the two authors each treat that
issue. The authors don’t have to agree in their explanations or assessments of that issue, but you
MUST be able to show me that the two authors each provide insight into it.
– As a last analytic step, if possible, you should try to explain why the two authors came to either
similar or different conclusions about their point of intersection. (Hint: It’s not because they’re
biased.) Remember that the questions we ask and the evidence we use lead us to the results we
find. Ask yourself if the scholars were asking the same questions or using the same evidence;
this question should give you an opportunity to explain the differences and similarities between
the authors.