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Introduction
How
have -- and do -- historians think about history? Taking Richard T. Ely's words as inspiration, I have designed
this course to give the incoming graduate student, regardless of field, a
good sense of the ways in which historians in the Western nations have
approached their task from the late 18th century to the present. Reading a mixture of historiographic and primary writings, we
will explore the shifting variety of theoretical frameworks that historians have
brought to bear on their work. You
will not become an expert in any field of history by taking this seminar; but
you should put yourself, in Ely's words, "in a position to learn
something."
Organization
of the Course
The
course is divided in three parts, each punctuated by a paper assignment.
The first offers a "quick and dirty" overview of two
centuries of historiography. The
second focuses on several influential schools of thougt in the mid-twentieth
century. The third give a
sampling of works published in the last five years.
Readings.
For details, see the reading list below. Copies of the articles or chapters that marked with a single
asterisk will be available for borrowing in the "out" box on my
office door. Please return them
promptly! If books are
available in paperback, I've ordered them at the University Bookstore
(except for those marked tentative). Reserve
copies of all the books may (if not yet, soon) be found at College Library
or at the State Historical Society, depending on who owns the book.
I'll distribute a list organized by location.
For recommended readings, see the "Historian's Toolkit"
below.
Requirements. Each week a team of two or three students will facilitate
class discussion. This task
should include a brief report on the critical reception accorded the work
under discussion (assessed by finding and reading book reviews). At the students' option, discussion facilitators may also
meet with me the day before seminar.
Written
work will take two forms: take-home
essays (ca. 5-10 pp.) will conclude parts I and II of the course; a longer
(ca. 25-30) essay will be due during exam week.
Although your topic for
the final paper is negotiable, I have in mind essays that survey
historiographic trends in a field or regarding a topic of special interest
to you. During the two weeks when the take-home essays are due, the
seminar will not meet; instead I'll meet individually with the students to
discuss and refine their final paper topics.
Grades.
These will be based on the take-home essays (25% each) and the final
paper (50%), with participation as the critical factor if your results fall
between official grades.
Historian's Toolkit.
The
following works are indispensable to your graduate education.
If you are not yet familiar with them, now is the time!
All have been ordered as recommended books at the University Bookstore
and will also be available on reserve..
William
Strunk, Jr., and E. G. White, The Elements of Style, 3d ed. (New
York: Macmillan, 1979).
Kate
L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations,
5th ed., revised and expanded by Bonnie Birtwistle Honigsblum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Jacques
Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher, 5th ed. (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992).
M.
Neil Browne and Stuart M. Keeley, Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking, 4th ed.
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall,
1994).
Richard
Marius, A Short Guide to Writing about History (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1989).
David
Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
Raymond
Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
For
inspirational reading, finally, I would recommend:
Marc
Bloch, The Historian's Craft (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1953).
SCHEDULE OF READINGS
Part I. An Overview of
Two Centuries
January 25
Introduction,
mechanics of course, etc.
February 1
*
Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987),
Preface + chs. 1-3 (pp. ix-xi, 1-82);
*
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), chs. 1-2 (pp. 27-80).
February 8
Fritz
Stern, ed., The Varieties of History:
From Voltaire to the Present, 2d ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1972/3), complete.
Note second edition!
February 15
*
Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American
History," in The Frontier in American History, Foreword by Wilbur
R. Jacobs (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press ,1986), pp. ---;
*
[Frederick Jackson Turner], "The United States, History: From 1865 to 1910," Encyclopedia
Britannica, 14th ed., vol. 22, 1929/30, pp. 810-30;
*
W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which
Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880
(orig. pub. 1935; Cleveland and New York:
The World Publishing Company, 1964), chs. 16-17 (pp. 670-737).
February 22 - first take-home essay
topic handed out
Peter
Novick, That Noble Dream: The
"Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988).
*"AHR
Forum: Peter Novick's That Noble
Dream: The Objectivity Question and
the Future of the Historical Profession," American Historical Review
96 (June 1991): 675-708.
March 1 - first take-home essay
due. No seminar meeting; students will meet individually with me to
discuss possible final-paper topics.
Part II.
Mid-Twentieth Century Ferment
March
8
*
John Higham, "The Cult of the 'American Consensus':
Homogenizing Our History," in Richard M. Abrams and Lawrence
W. Levine, eds., The Shaping of Twentieth-Century America:
Interpretive Essays, 2nd ed. (Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1971), pp. 699-709.
Reprinted from
Commentary, February 1959.
*
Clark Kerr, John T. Dunlop, Frederick H. Harbison, and Charles A. Myers,
Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1960), pp. 1-46, 265-297. This
is the classic statement of what became
known as "modernization theory."
Fernand
Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), complete. Major figure in the Annales
school.
March
15
Spring break
March
22
[tentative]
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.
[tentative]
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I:
Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European
World-Economy in
the Sixteenth Century (New York:
Academic Press, 1974).
March
29 - second take-home essay topic handed out
*
Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1984),
pp. 169-256 (excerpts from Discipline and
Punish).
April
5 - second
take-home essay due. No seminar
meeting; students will meet individually with me to finalize their
final-paper topic.
Part III. Late
Twentieth-Century Sampler
April 12
Eric
Foner, ed., The New American History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1990), complete.
April 19
Lynn
Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989), complete.
April 26
William
Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1992), complete.
May 3
*
Theda Skocpol, "Bringing the State Back In:
Strategies of Analysis in Current Research," in Peter B.
Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol,
eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge:
Cambridge University
Press, 1985), pp. 3-37.
*
Colleen A. Dunlavy, "Political Structure, State Policy, and
Industrial
Change: Early Railroad Policy
in the United States and Prussia, " in Sven Steinmo,
Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth, eds., Structuring Politics:
Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 114-54.
*
Victoria C. Hattam, "xxxx," in ibid., pp. 155-xxx.
May
10
[tentative]
David William Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago:
University
of Chicago Press, 1994), complete;
or
[tentative]
James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian, eds., Questions
of Evidence: Proof, Practice,
and Persuasion across the Disciplines
(Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), complete.
or
something
on memory/identity/nationalism
rev.
2/6/95
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