1
HIST-GA 2168: Approaches to History (MA) Fall 2020 Thursdays 5pm – 7.20pm
Guy Ortolano [email protected] Office hours: Wednesday afternoons, by appointment
Course description This course serves as a triple orientation. It introduces MA students to about a dozen areas of historical work, to NYU’s History Department, and to the historical profession. Though inevitably partial, with too many fields and approaches not covered, collectively these readings, discussions, and assignments will expose students to a range of the discipline’s preoccupations. By the end of the semester, students will have (1) expanded their historiographical literacy; (2) developed their ability to read and discuss unfamiliar work, and (3) reflected upon a range of questions and approaches that might inform their own work.
Logistics This class will be blended, combining in-person and remote elements as university policy and collective safety permits.
During the semester, we will meet individually or in small groups to discuss your progress. For students in New York City, when circumstances permit, these meetings will take place in person.
No student with four absences will pass the course.
Before each meeting, you should view the uploaded presentation on that week’s material.
Papers should be double-spaced, in twelve-point font, with one-inch margins and numbered pages, formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style (footnotes + bibliography).
This plan will inevitably change, as we learn how best to utilize Zoom, but as a rule-of-thumb each class (160 minutes) will look something like the following:
1. Presentation, viewed before class (10-15 minutes) 2. Discussion of the readings (45 minutes) 3. Break (15 minutes) 4. Discussion of the readings (30 minutes) 5. Break (15 minutes) 6. Additional discussion, often with a visitor (30 minutes) 7. Concluding remarks and preview of the next week (10 minutes)
Zoom policies Though we will all suffer from Zoom fatigue, especially as the semester proceeds, please make a point of treating every Zoom meeting as a professional activity:
1. Include your full name in the lower left corner of your Zoom window. 2
2. Activate your video when class is in session, unless you need to step away. 3. Refrain from having other windows or applications open during class.
Weekly meetings may be accessed via the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/93309957781?pwd=c3o4ZGdoWnZsN1B6dG0vTEsrLzJhZz09
Assessment 33% Participation (includes engagement in our discussions + 2 presentations) 33% Review essays (2 essays of 1000 words, on a week other than your presentation) 33% Final paper (4,000 words on “Historiography and the Problem of ______”)
Texts Most readings are available electronically through Bobcat. Items marked with an * will be posted to NYU Classes.
We will be reading four books in their entirety. Bobst Library is working to make them all available through course reserves – just log into your library account, and your courses this semester should automatically appear. Eley and Farge are available electronically. Davis is available through Hathi Trust, a free but unattractive interface, which only permits a single reader at a time. And the staff at Bobst are making the assigned readings from Maza available each week via .pdf – but they are severely overworked, so there might be some glitches in the rollout. If feasible, then, I’d suggest buying these four books:
• Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard, 1984). • Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Michigan, 2005). • Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven, 2013). • Sarah Maza, Thinking about History (Chicago, 2017).
Week 1, September 3 Introduction
Week 2, September 10 A History of Historiography
Eley, A Crooked Line (2005).
+ discussion of historical writing with Professor Martha Hodes (NYU).
Week 3, September 17 Social History
Maza, “The History of Whom?”, Thinking about History, 10-44. 3
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “I. Bourgeois and Proletarians,” in The Communist Manifesto.
E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50:1 (1971): 76-136.
*Shahid Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-1,” Subaltern Studies 3 (1984): 1-61.
Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, “The Mysterious Case of the Missing Men: Gender and Class in Early Industrial Medellín,” International Labor and Working-Class History 49 (1996): 73-92.
+ discussion of the New Social History with Professor Emeritus Danny Walkowitz (NYU).
Week 4, September 24 Cultural History
Maza, “Causes or Meanings?”, Thinking about History, 157-198.
Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm,” Theory and Society 7:3 (1979): 273-288.
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Basic Books, 1984), 75-104.
Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (California, 2005), 9-37.
Alon Confino, “Why Did the Nazis Burn the Hebrew Bible? Nazi Germany, Representations of the Past, and the Holocaust,” Journal of Modern History 84:2 (2012): 369-400.
+ discussion of the New Cultural History with Professor Sarah Maza (Northwesstern).
Week 5, October 1 Microhistory
Maza, “Facts or Fictions?”, Thinking about History, 199-234.
Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (1984).
Robert Finlay and Natalie Zemon Davis, “Forum: The Return of Martin Guerre,” American Historical Review 93:3 (1988): 553-603.
+ discussion of Italian microhistory with Professor Karl Appuhn (NYU).
Week 6, October 8 4
Women, Gender, & Sexuality
Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91:5 (1986): 1053-1075.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (California, 1987), 277-296.
Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago, 2003), 176-226.
Matthew H. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 2000), 114-165.
Katherine Turk, “‘The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Should Rock the U. of C.’: The Faculty Wife and the Feminist Era,” Journal of Women’s History 26:2 (2014): 113-134.
+ class discussion of the final paper.
Week 7, October 15 Race, Slavery, & Diaspora
Tiffany Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review 43:1 (2000): 11-45.
Jennifer L. Morgan, “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology,” William and Mary Quarterly 54:1 (1997): 167-192.
James H. Sweet, Domingos Álavares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, 2011), 1-8, 27-52.
João José Reis, “‘The Revolution of the Ganhadores’: Urban Labour, Ethnicity, and the African Strike of 1857 in Bahia, Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29:2 (1997): 355-393.
H. Reuben Neptune, “Throwin’ Scholarly Shade: Eric Williams in the New Histories of Capitalism and Slavery,” Journal of the Early Republic 39:2 (2019): 299-326.
+ discussion of Eric Williams and U.S. historiography with Professor Harvey Neptune (Temple).
Week 8, October 22 Political History
Susan Pedersen, “What is Political History Now?”, in What is History Now?, ed. David Cannadine (New York, 2002), 36-56.
Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (2004; Berkeley, 1984), xi-xvi, 52-86. 5
Christopher Bonner, “Runaways, Rescuers, and the Politics of Breaking the Law,” in New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition, eds. Ashley D. Farmer, Christopher Cameron, and Keisha N. Blain (Evanston, 2018), 201-215.
Gregory P. Downs, “The Mexicanization of American Politics: The United States’ Transnational Path from Civil War to Stabilization,” American Historical Review 117:2 (2012): 387-409.
Kim Phillips-Fein, “Our Political Narratives,” Modern American History 1 (2018): 83-86.
+ discussion of political history with Professor Kim Phillips-Fein (NYU).
Week 9, October 29 Intellectual History
Anthony Grafton, “The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950-2000 and Beyond,” Journal of the History of Ideas (2006): 1-32.
Judith Surkis, “Of Scandals and Supplements: Relating Intellectual and Cultural History,” in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, eds. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (2014), 94-111.
Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8:1 (1969): 3-53.
Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History,” in Global Intellectual History, eds. Moyn and Sartori (2013), 3-30.
Daniel R. Magaziner, “Two Stories about Art, Education, and Beauty in Twentieth-Century South Africa,” American Historical Review 118:5 (2013): 1403-1429.
+ discussion of intellectual history with Professor Andrew Sartori (NYU).
Week 10, November 5 Oral History
Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different?” (1979), reprinted in The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, 1991), 45-58.
Barbara M. Cooper, “Oral Sources and the Challenge of African History,” in Writing African History, ed. John Edward Phillips (Rochester, 2005), 191-215.
Karen Fields, “What One Cannot Remember Mistakenly,” Oral History 17:1 (1989): 44-53.
6
Kathleen M. Blee, “Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan,” Journal of American History 80:2 (1993): 596-606.
Orlando Figes, “Private Life in Stalin’s Russia: Family Narratives, Memory, and Oral History,” History Workshop Journal 65 (2008): 117-137.
+ class discussion on identifying and working with advisors.
Week 11, November 12 History of Technology
Maza, “The History of What?”, Thinking about History, 83-117.
Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, Daedalus 109:1 (1980): 121-136.
Ken Alder, “To Tell the Truth: The Polygraph Exam and the Marketing of American Expertise,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 24:3 (1998): 487-525.
Marie Hicks, “Computer Love: Replicating Social Order through Early Computer Dating Systems,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 10 (2016).
David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (2007): 1-27.
+ discussion of local archives with Professor Ellen Noonan (NYU).
Week 12, November 19 Environmental History
Alfred W. Crosby, “The Past and Present of Environmental History,” American Historical Review 100:4 (1995): 1177-1189.
Joyce Chaplin, “The Other Revolution,” Early American Studies 13:2 (2015): 285-308.
Alan Mikhail, “Climate and the Chronology of Iranian History,” Iranian Studies 49:6 (2016): 963- 972.
Brett Walker, “Meiji Modernization, Scientific Agriculture, and the Destruction of Japan’s Hokkaido Wolf,” Environmental History 9:2 (2004): 248-274.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35:2 (2009): 197- 222.
+ discussion of online resources with Dr. Andrew Lee (Librarian for History, NYU).
7
Week 13, December 3 Supranational Histories
Maza, “The History of Where?”, Thinking about History, 45-82.
C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111:5 (2006): 1441-1464.
Kenneth Pomeranz, “Political Economy and Ecology on the Eve of Industrialization: Europe, China, and the Global Conjuncture,” American Historical Review 107:2 (2002): 425-446.
Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109:5 (2004): 1405- 1438.
David Bell, “Questioning the Global Turn: The Case of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 37:1 (2014): 1-24.
+ preview of the MA Proseminar with Professor John Shovlin (NYU).
Week 14, December 10 Into the Archive
Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (2013).
+ student presentations on local and/or online archives.
Final papers due via email by the end of the day on Friday, Dec. 18.
A note on copyright Materials in this course are protected by U.S. copyright law and NYU policy. Distribution of recorded or written materials associated with this course is not permitted to any information- sharing platform without my written consent.
A note on privacy Recordings will be treated as educational records under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the U.S. federal law governing access to educational information and records. Instructors and students must provide notification if any part of these sessions are recorded, and any such recordings may not be circulated outside of the course.
A note to international students The History Department is committed to helping students who may be facing political risk to participate safely in their classes. We encourage students based in any site that monitors internet 8 use to carefully consider how you participate. If you have any concerns about your safety, please email me so that we can discuss the best way to proceed together this semester.
A final note on flexibility I reserve the right to modify the requirements and policies as circumstances may require. I will provide notification of any such changes to all students as soon as possible. Any changes will also be posted via NYU Classes.