Editing History of the American Home (section)

===Description of mental tasks needed to overcome the bottleneck===
Students must be able to:
* Understand that a text can have multiple meanings
* Ask questions about what did not happen in a text, as well as what was actually on the page.
* Recognize that carefully reading requires an investment of time beyond just passing one’s eyes over the words
* Read more than once
* Compare the text to a series of prompts or questions
* Look for clues that relate the text to the secondary scholarship on the topic
* Consider other possible models of the phenomena being presented (in this case the family)
* Recognize the biases that a figure from the past brings to his or her description of phenomena
* Look for contradictions and tensions within the text
* Distinguish between what is and is not important in a text
* Step back and take themselves out of the story
* Recognize that the text is the creation of particular people
* Compare different sources to understand each of them better
* Recognize that people in the 19th century are different than us, that they have very different assumptions
* Reconstruct the identity of the person who produced the text
* Ask questions about the text – why was it produced, what was its purpose, what is it arguing