Fall 2010 Instructor: Jeff Ravel T 10-1

STS 210J/21H.991J: Theories and Methods in the Study of History

Overview

We will doggedly ask two questions in this class: “What is history?” and “How do you do it in 2010?” In pursuit of the answers, we will survey a variety of approaches to the past used by historians writing in the last several decades. We will examine how these historians conceive of their object of study, how they use primary sources as a basis for their accounts, how they structure the narrative and analytical discussion of their topic, and the advantages and limitations of their approaches. One concern is the evolution of historical studies in the western tradition, which is not to say that the western approach is the only valid one, nor is it to suggest that we will only read histories of the west. But MIT and many of the institutions in which you will work during your careers are firmly rooted in western intellectual paradigms, and the study of times and places far removed from the western past has been deeply influenced by western historical assumptions. (And, to be honest, this is the historical tradition with which I am most familiar!)

We will begin with a brief overview of the construction and deconstruction of historical thinking in the west from the beginnings of Christianity to the present. Then we will consider questions of scale, a major preoccupation of post-WWII historians. In the second half of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, history has been written at the national, global, and micro level. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? Next, we will consider five of the more recent important influences on historians. These include environmental history, women‟s and gender history, new developments in the history of British industrialization, and the emerging fields of visual culture and media studies. How does the incorporation of these perspectives alter national, global, and micro perspectives? In each of these five cases, we will be joined by a leading MIT expert in the field, some of whom teach in the HASTS Program. Finally, we will read several essays by leading historians who are directly implicated in efforts to digitize the study and preservation of the past.

Our focus, therefore, is on scale, sources, and methodology, not on specific historical content. A sizeable proportion of the studies here focus on early modern Europe (roughly 1500 - 1800 A.D.), because of the richness of its historiographical tradition. We will think about the reasons for the broad influence of this work throughout the semester. I would urge you to read in areas with which you are not familiar as well as in home ground. It is not necessary to "know the facts" or become an expert in any of these areas; the point is to find out how similar historical approaches work in different cultural areas and time periods.

Requirements for the course:

1) Read the required readings for each week and be prepared to discuss them in class. Some of these works are large, fat books. I will give you some hints to devise the best way of tackling them. (Starting at page one and plowing straight through is almost never the best method.) 2) I will post two or three forum questions on our web site for each week‟s readings; these will appear by the Friday before the class session when the readings are due. Each week you should submit before the class meeting (Tuesday morning by 8 AM at the latest), a forum posting of at least two to three substantial paragraphs with your reactions to the reading. These should be critiques, not summaries. Reasoned argument is preferred, but gripes and raves are allowed. These posts will be useful in stimulating discussion. This is mainly a discussion course; our guests or I may sometimes give brief orienting lectures, but we will try to keep them short. 3) Each of you will be responsible for reports on two of the books listed in the partial bibliographies for each week. At our first class meeting I will ask each of you to select the two weeks for which you will do a report on one title in the partial bibliography list. You will prepare a one-page hard copy summary of the book you read, which you will distribute to us at the start of class. You will then present the book to your classmates and me, and our guests when we have them. In these presentations, you should summarize the book‟s argument and indicate how it intersects with the week‟s required reading. I will say more about this requirement, and pass out an example, at our first class meeting. 4) Finally, at the end of the term, a longer paper is due (ca. 15 pp double-spaced). You are free to choose the subject, but you should probably take one of two tacks: a) "Horizontal": examine the characteristics of the same historical approach used in several different countries and time periods (one of these countries should be non-Western), e.g.: the historical demography of 17th century France and Japan; the history of women in twentieth-century Russia and China; or b) "Vertical": examine a variety of perspectives on the same historical topic. The French Revolution is the classic one: it is open to Marxist, populist, economic, cultural, feminist, and many other interpretations. Other good possibilities are the British Industrial Revolution, American slavery, or European imperialism. In either case, you need to search out the major works in the literature, analyze the basic terms of debate, discuss the different analytic tools and sources employed, and evaluate the relative merit of different approaches. Your paper should consider at least four works in the field in depth. You might have ideas of your own about where work in this subfield should go, which you should feel free to develop. 5) Fifty percent of your grade for this class will be based on your forum postings, contributions to our in-class discussions, and your two reports on external readings. The rest of your grade will be based on your final paper.

Books to Acquire

These books are available for sale at the MIT Bookstore, and have also been placed on 2-hour reserve in the Humanities Library. Other required readings indicated below with an asterisk will be available in .pdf format on the web site for this subject.

 G.W.F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History trans. Robert S. Hartman (Bobbs-Merrill, 1952)  Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. David Waldstreicher (Bedford/St Martin‟s, 2002)  James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Omohundro/North Carolina, 2002)  C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Blackwell, 2004)

2  William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, rev. ed. (Hill & Wang, 2003)  Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (California, 1992)  Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2009)  James Elkins, Six Stories From the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics (Stanford, 2008)  Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds. New Media, 1740-1915 (MIT, 2003)

Books to be Provided by Instructor

I will provide a copy of the following:

 Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in Seventeenth-Century France (Houghton Mifflin, 2008)

3 Schedule of Readings

Week 1

9/7. Reg Day – No Classes

Week 2

9/14. Introduction: Constructing and De-Constructing History in the Western Tradition

Required Reading:

1) G.W.F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History trans. Robert S. Hartman (Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), ix-xlii, 3-95 2) *Jacques Revel, “Introduction,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds., Histories: French Constructions of the Past (New York: The New Press, 1995): 1-63. 3) *Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event,” in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon, 1995), 70-107, 167-76. 4) *For fun: look at visual representations of time in Cabinet issue 13 (2004) on-line at http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/13/timelines.php 5) *Also study Houghton Library. MS Typ 041. Chronique du monde depuis la création, et des rois de France et d'Angleterre, jusqu'à l'an 1461, available online.

Partial Bibliography:

 Lynn Hunt, ed. The New Cultural History (California, 1989)  Brian D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Temple UP, 1990)  Donald Kelley, ed., Versions of History (1991)  Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Penn State UP, 1992)  Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York, 1994)  Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds., Histories: French Constructions of the Past (New York: The New Press, 1995):  Anthony Molho & Gordon S. Wood, Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton UP, 1998)  Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge UP, 1998)  Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (California, 1999)  Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza, eds. A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Blackwell, 2002)  Laura Lee Downs & Stéphane Gerson, eds. Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination (Cornell UP, 2007)

4  Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007)

Week 3

9/21. National History: The Case of the United States (Class meets 9-11:30 AM)

Required Reading:

1) Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. David Waldstreicher (Bedford/St Martin‟s, 2002), 1-38, 79-208. 2) *Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1891), chapter 1. 3) *Henry Nash Smith, “The Myth of the Garden and Turner‟s Frontier Hypotheses” in Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, p. 291-305. (1950) 4) *Richard Hofstadter, “The Frontier as an Explanation” in The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington, 118-64. (1968) 5) *Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Turnerians All: The Dream of a Helpful History in an Intelligible World,” American Historical Review 100 (June 1995): 697-716.

Partial Bibliography:

A. Theories of nationalism

 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Cornell UP, 1983)  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983)  E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge UP, 2nd ed., 1992)  Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard, 1992)

B. Non-US Case Studies

 Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, 2001) [Contrast with Jefferson‟s Notes, and Waldstreicher‟s intro.]  Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (Yale UP, 1992)  David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800 (Harvard UP, 2001)  Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York, 1988-1990) [Vol. 1: History and Environment; Vol. 2: People and Production. See Steven Laurence Kaplan, “Long-Run Lamentations: Braudel on France,” Journal of Modern History 63 (June 1991): 341- 53 for a telling critique of this work.]  Pierre Nora, ed., Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire trans. Mary Trouille, 3 vols (Chicago, 2001-2009) [Vol 1: The State; Vol. 2: Space; Vol. 3: Legacies]

5  Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (California, 1990)  C. A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998)  Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Duke, 2007)  Roderick J. Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798-1852 (Stanford, 1988)  Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago, 1997)

Week 4

9/28. Borderlands

Required Reading:

1) James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Omohundro/North Carolina, 2002), all. 2) *Peter C. Perdue, “Boundaries, Maps, and Movement: Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian Empires in Early Modern Central Eurasia,” The International History Review, Vol. 20, No. 2 (June 1998): 263-286

Partial Bibliography:

 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, 1991)  Special Issue of American Quarterly: “Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders,” eds. Mary L. Dudziak and Leti Volpp, Sept. 2005  David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in Northern America (Yale, 1992)  David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch, eds. Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History (Wilimington DE: SR Books, 1994)  Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands =La Frontera: The New Mestiza 2nd ed. (San Francisco, 1999)  Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the US-Mexico Borderlands (Yale, 2006)  Peter Sahlins, Borders: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (California, 1989)  Peter Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Cornell, 2004)  Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II trans. Siân Reynolds (New York, 1972)  Paul d‟Arcy, People of the Sea: Environment, Identity and History in Oceania (Hawai‟i UP, 2006)  Milo Kearney, The Indian Ocean in World History (Routledge, 2004)  Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Blackwell, 1989)  Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 2001)  Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard UP, 2005).

6 Week 5

10/5. Global Perspectives

Required Reading:

1) C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Blackwell, 2004), all.

Partial Bibliography:

 William McNeill, A World History (Oxford, 1967)  Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century trans. Siân Reynolds. 3 vols. [Original French volumes published in 1979]  Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 3 vols. (Academic Press, 1974-1989)  Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford, 1989)  John R. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (Norton, 2003)  Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Harvard UP, 2005).  J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (Yale UP, 2006), all.  David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard, 2007)  Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford UP, 2008)  David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds. The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

Week 6

10/12. Microhistory

Required Reading:

1) *Jacques Revel, “Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social,” in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds. Histories: French Constructions of the Past (New Press, 1996) 2) *David A. Bell, “Total History and Microhistory: The French and Italian Paradigms,” in Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza, eds. A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Blackwell, 2002), 262-76. 3) Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in Seventeenth-Century France (Houghton Mifflin, 2008)

Partial Bibliography:

 Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in Peter Burke, ed. New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Penn State Press, 1995), 93-113.

7  Clifford Geertz, "Notes on the Balinese Cockfight", in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 412-453  Robert Darnton, “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint Séverin,” in The Great Cat Massacre, and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, p. 75-107 [and critiques by Roger Chartier and Dominick LaCapra in the Journal of Modern History, and H. Mah in the History Workshop Journal.]  Arlette Farge & Jacques Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics Before the French Revolution trans. Claudia Miéville (Harvard UP, 1991)  Nathalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard UP, 1983). [& the AHR debate]  James R. Farr, A Tale of Two Murders: Passion and Power in Seventeenth-Century France (Duke, 2005)  Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight (Harvard, 2003)  James Clifford,"Identity in Mashpee", in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art.  Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Penguin, 1982)  Emmanuel LeRoy-Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (Vintage, 1979)  Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang (Viking, 1978)  Philip Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Harvard, 1990)  Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds. Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe: Selections from Quaderni Storici, trans. Eren Branch (Johns Hopkins, 1991)

Week 7

10/19. Environmental History (Guest: Prof. Harriet Ritvo, History, MIT)

Required Reading:

1) William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, rev. ed. (Hill & Wang, 2003), all. 2) *Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford, 2004), 107-140. 3) *Harriet Ritvo, “Counting Sheep in the English Lake District: Rare Breeds, Local Knowledge, and Environmental History,” in Dorothee Brantz, Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History (Virginia, 2010): 264-79. 4) *John R. McNeill, “Revolutionary Mosquitoes of the Atlantic World : Malaria and Independence in the United States of America,” in Paolo Squatriti, ed., Natures Past; The Environment and Human History (Michigan, 2007): 145-71

Partial Bibliography:

 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard, 1987)  Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard, 1997)

8  Harriet Ritvo, The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and the Victorian Environment (University of Chicago Press, 2009)  Peter McPhee, Revolution and Environment in Southern France, 1780-1830: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbières (Oxford, 1999)  Tamara L. Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France (Yale, 2000)  David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (Norton, 2006)  William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (Norton 1991)  Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Conseuqences of 1492 (Greenwood, 1972)  Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2003)  Elinor Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge, 1994)  John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (California, 2003)  John R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (Cambridge, 2010)  John R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth- Century World (Norton, 2000)  Shawn William Miller, An Environmental History of Latin America (Cambridge, 2007)  Michael C. Meyer, Water in the Southwest: A Social and Legal History, 1550-1850 (Arizona, 1996)  William Turkel, The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau (University of British Columbia Press, 2007)  "A Round Table: Environmental History", Journal of American History, 1990/3

Week 8

10/26. Women’s History and Gender (Guest: Prof. Elizabeth Wood, History, MIT)

Required Reading:

1) *Mary Poovey, "The Ideological Work of Gender," in her Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Univ of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 1-23 2) *Carole Pateman, "'The Disorder of Women': Women, Love and the Sense of Justice," in Joseph L. Devites, ed., Women, Culture and Morality: Selected Essays (NY: Peter Lang, 1987), pp. 65- 90. 3) Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (California, 1992), all. 4) *Elizabeth Wood, "Putin and the Façade of Autocracy: Masculinity and Hypermasculinity in a Modern Presidency" [ms.]

Partial Bibliography:

9  Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Indiana, 1997)  Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary (Vintage, 1991)  Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (California, 1997)  Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: the First 20,000 Years (Norton, 1994)  Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia UP, 1988)  Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard, 1990)  Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, 2008)  Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (California, 1995)  Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, rev. ed. (Routledge, 2002)  Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of the Old Regime, 1675-1791 (Duke, 2001)  Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Cornell, 2009)  Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructiong Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago, 1994)  Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (Duke UP, 2001)

Week 9

11/2. The Industrial Revolution: Why Britain? (Guest: Prof. Anne McCants, History, MIT)

Required Reading:

1) *Anne McCants, “Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World” Journal of World History, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2007, pp. 433-462. 2) *Jan Luiten van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution: The European Economy in a Global Perspective, 1000-1800 (Brill, 2009), pp. 69-91, 269-300 3) *Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 (Yale, 2009), “Useful Knowledge and Technology,” and “An Enlightened Political Economy,” in The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 (Yale, 2009), pp. 40-78. 4) Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 1-22, 135-275; and skim “Part 1: The Pre-Industrial Economy.”

Partial Bibliography:

 Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820 (Cambridge, 1992)  Larry R. Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain (Cambridge, 1992)

10  Margaret Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (Oxford, 1997)  Robert S. Duplessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997)  Maxine Berg, “Product Innovation in Core Consumer Industries in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Maxine Berg and Kristine Bruland, eds. Technological Revolutions in Europe: Historical Perspectives (Edward Elgar, 1998)  R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Cornell, 1997)  Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000)  Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002)  Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present 2nd ed. (M.E.Sharpe, 2006)  *Sevket Pamuk, “The Black Death and the Origins of the Great Divergence across Europe,” European Review of Economic History, Vol. 11, part 3, Dec. 2007, pp. 289-318.  Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008).  Paolo Malanima, Pre-Modern European Economy: One Thousand Years (10th-19th centuries) (Brill, 2009)

Week 10

11/9. Visual Culture: Definitions, Issues (Guest: Prof. Caroline A. Jones, Architecture, MIT; class meets 11:30 AM – 2 PM)

Required Reading:

1) *Rosalind Krauss, “Welcome to the Cultural Revolution,” October 77 (Summer 1996): 83-96. 2) *Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Introdcution: What is Visual Culture?” in An Introdcution to Visual Culture (Routledge, 1999), 1-33. 3) *W.J.T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” in Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, eds., Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies (Clark Art Institute, 2002), 231-50. 4) James Elkins, Six Stories From the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics (Stanford, 2008)

Partial Bibliography:

A. General

 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (MIT, 1990)  Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (California, 1993)  Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey, eds. Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (Wesleyan, 1994)

11  Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (MIT, 1999)  Mieke Bal, Looking In: The Art of Viewing (Amsterdam, 2001)  Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, eds. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford, 2001)  Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, eds. Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002)  Sunil Manghani, Arthur Piper, and Jon Simons, eds., Images: A Reader (Sage, 2006)  Caroline A. Jones, ed. Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (MIT, 2006)  Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (2007)  James Elkins, ed., Visual Literacy (Routledge, 2008)

B. Case Studies (some emphasis on 18th and 19th-century France)

 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (California, 1980)  Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 1981)  Karl A. Schorske, “Gustav Klimt: Painting and the Crisis of the Liberal Ego,” in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Vintage, 1981)  Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983)  T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, 1984)  Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Yale, 1985)  Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1988)  Deborah L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (California, 1989)  Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (MIT, 1991)  Martin Kemp, Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance (Yale, 1997)  Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago, 2005)

C. Web Sites

 Journal of Visual Culture: http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/current  Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester: http://www.rochester.edu/college/aah/VCS/  List of Programs in Media and Visual Studies: http://cscl.umn.edu/ugrad/mvstudies.html

12 Week 11

11/16. Media Studies: Old and New Media ca. 1450, 1890, & 2010 (Guest: Prof. William Uricchio, Literature and Comparative Media Studies, MIT)

Required Reading:

1. *Michael T. Clanchy, “Looking Back from the Invention of Printing”, in Daniel P. Resnick, ed., Literacy in Historical Perspective (Washington DC, 1983), 7-22. 2. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds. New Media, 1740-1915 (MIT, 2003), xi-xxxiii, 91- 264 3. *William Uricchio, “Television‟s First Seventy-Five Years: The Interpretive Flexibility of a Medium in Transition,” The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 286–305 4. *William Uricchio, “The Future of Television?” in Pelle Snikkars and Patrick Vonderau, ed., The YouTube Reader (London: Wallflower Press, 2009): 24-39 5. *View the videos on Prof. Uricchio‟s web site: http://uricchio.wordpress.com/

Partial Bibliography:

A. General

 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York, 1964; rpt, MIT Press, 1994)  Raymond Williams, “The Technology and the Society”, in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York, 1975), 9-31.  Walter Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2004)  Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982)  Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young & Michael Wurz (Stanford, 1999; German ed. 1986)  Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU, 2006)  William Uricchio, ed., We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities (Intellect Books, 2008)

B. History of the Book

 Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (Blackwell, 1993, 2nd ed.)  Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, 1997)  Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450- 1800 trans. David Gerard (London and New York, 1976)  Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962)  Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1979)  Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998)

13  Donald F. McKenzie, Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, eds. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S.J. (Massachusetts, 2002)  Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton, 1987)  Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Hong Kong, 2006), all.  *Tobie Meyer-Fong, “The Printed Word: Books, Publishing Culture and Society in Late Imperial China,” Journal of Asian Studies 66.3 (August 2007): 787-817.  The web site of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publication (SHARP): http://www.sharpweb.org/

C. Histories of Other Media, and Media Change

 Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electronic Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1988)  David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940 (MIT, 1990)  Patrice Flichy, Dynamics of Modern Communication: The Shaping and Impact of New Communication Technologies, trans. Liz Libbrecht (Sage, 1995; French ed. 1991)  William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton, 1993)  Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (California, 1995)  Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in fin-de-siècle Paris (California, 1998)  Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers (New York, 1998)  Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, 1999)  Julie Stone Peters; Theatre of the Book, 1480-1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford, 2000)  Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850 (Oxford, 2000)  Gary Urton, Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records (Texas, 2003)  David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, eds. Rethinking Media Change: The Esthetics of Transition (MIT, 2003)  Jane Chapman, Comparative Media History. An Introduction: 1789 to the Present (Polity, 2005)  Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT, 2006)  Charles Acland, ed. Residual Media (Minnesota, 2007)

14 Week 12

11/23. Individual Consultations with Instructor.

Week 13

11/30. Digital Humanities, Publishing, and the Library

Required Reading:

1) *Wendell Piez, “Something Called „Digital Humanities,‟” Digital Humanities Quarterly (Summer 2008), http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/2/1/000020/000020.html; and browse the journal at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/ 2) *Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era,” American Historical Review 108, 3 (June 2003): 735–62. 3) *Robert Darnton, “Google and the Future of Books,” New York Review of Books February 12, 2009 4) *Anthony Grafton, “Codex in Crisis: The Book Dematerializes,” in Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Harvard, 2009), 288-324

Week 14

12/7. Class Presentations of Final Projects

*Final Paper Due on December 14*

15 MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu

21H.991J / STS.210J Theories and Methods in the Study of History Fall 2004

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