Department of & Classics Fall 2011 HIST 4903 X1 –

Time: Wednesdays, 1:30 – 4:30 Place: BAC 401 Instructor: David Duke Office: BAC 451

Office Hours: Mondays and Fridays, 1:00-4:00 Tel: 585 – 1360 Email: [email protected] (remove the „n‟ when emailing me)

* * * COURSE DESCRIPTION: This seminar course will examine historiography which, briefly defined, is the methodology and practice of doing history. In that sense, this course will be different from the other courses you have taken for your major, which have focussed on history; this one will focus on how history has been undertaken in the past and is undertaken today. Philip Bagby once wrote that “historians are the guardians of tradition, the priests of the cult of nationality, the prophets of social reform, the exponents and upholders of national virtue and glory” – a very broad and challenging definition indeed. But historians neither work in a vacuum nor or they unaffected by their own historical preconceptions; as the author Aldous Huxley (he of Brave New World) said, “For if prophecy is an expression of our contemporary fears and wishes, so too, to a very great extent, is history” – and in a world where cultural differences are now perceived as potential threats rather than points of contact, then our attitudes toward history can take on a decidedly, and potentially deadly, partisan tone.

But how true are such views of history and historians‟ work? To what extent is Clio the “queen of the muses”? To what extent does our understanding of history frame our everyday existence? Is history simply the study of the past, or can it be used as a buttress to support modern political, socioeconomic, or cultural perspectives? And if it can be used in this way, then the question naturally arises: should it? We‟ve all heard the expression, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it” – but how true is such a sentiment? Or is an over-rootedness in history dangerous? This course will explore these questions, and others, by examining schools of historical thought that inform the profession today, and we will investigate the ways in which those schools of thought contribute to the evolution and – one would hope – the maintenance and development of history as a discipline.

REQUIRED TEXT: There are two, short, required texts for the course.

Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice 2nd ed. (Hodder Arnold/OUP: New York, 2006). Jeremy Black, Using History (Hodder Arnold/OUP: New York, 2002).

In addition to these introductory texts, there will be weekly readings as outlined below. These are in electronic format and are located on the course's ACORN page.

There are several items in the Vaughan that are listed here although they are not required reading. They are not on reserve, although at least one of the items is in the Reference Section and is therefore non- circulating. The wise amongst you will consult them for ideas, background knowledge, and perspective on weekly discussions:

Bentley, M. (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London: Routledge, 1997). Cannon, J. (ed.), The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians (Oxford, Blackwell, 1988). Hughes-Warrington, M., Fifty Key Thinkers on History (London: Routledge, 2000).

COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND GRADING: Attendance is mandatory for all classes. The seminars will be considerably enriched by contributions from all members of the class; therefore, participation is mandatory as well. If you do not talk in seminars, then I‟ll want to know why I shouldn‟t be giving you an “F” for the course. Your participation mark will be based on (but not restricted to) your preparation for seminars (doing the assigned reading), your participation in discussions, and your analytical grasp of the readings. In addition to participation (worth 25% of your course grade), there is a presentation component (15%) to your course grade. Twice during the term you will be required to present a discussion of the seminar readings and will be required to hand in that presentation in written form for grading. Missing your assigned seminar presentation is strongly discouraged: you will receive a grade of zero on the assignment in such circumstances. Furthermore, there will be no opportunity to make up such a missed assignment in the absence of documented medical or family emergency. Please remember that a missed presentation will disrupt the efforts and the work of the rest of the seminar group. And as I noted above, attendance in seminars is mandatory for non-presenters too: it is a matter of common courtesy to the presenters and absence will be strongly reflected in your participation mark.

Gobbets These are one of the most powerful tools known to humanity. No, really! This is what they are: they are a 100-word distillation of a source – they must include its thesis statement, its main argument, its main sources, and a judgement of its conclusions. In 100 words. For every 10 words over or under that target, your gobbet will automatically lose 10%. Titles and author information presented as a gobbet title do not count. Spelling and grammar matter. Make sure your gobbets are clear, crisp, and to the point. No extraneous material. That‟s what you learn with gobbets – how to take a whack of material and distill it down to its essentials. This is a skill that is immensely important for all of you to learn, whatever your post-Acadia goals may be. Beginning the week of 12 October (Week 6), at the beginning of class, you will submit gobbets for each of the assigned readings, one per article, with a word count for each gobbet. If you fail to submit gobbets on two separate occasions, you receive a grade of zero for the entire gobbet component of the course (20% of the course grade). You do not gobbet articles on the day that you‟re presenting.

Counterfactual Essay Counterfactual history – “what if” history, if you like – has often been heavily criticised as an empty exercise, little more than a sleight-of-hand of the truth. Yet many historians also admit to being intrigued by counterfactuals, both professionally and personally. Personally, because we all wonder how life would be if only certain things had happened, or not happened, differently in the past (often in our pasts). But there is an interesting professional dynamic to counterfactual history as well: on the one hand, it allows us to explore possibilities, thus zeroing back again on what did happen and gaining a sense of its importance. On the other hand, you as students get to explore an alternative history unfettered by the facts of what actually happened. This is not as anarchic as it may seem at first: one crucial component of counterfactual history is that it must be logically consistent internally – that is, you can‟t have the USSR invaded by little green men because Stalin died in 1933. You can have Trotsky returning to the leadership and charting a different course for the USSR, with all the attendant effects that may produce with Hitler, World War II, and so on. The latter scenario is logically consistent with the events of the 1930s; the former is not. The point is that it allows you to explore both Trotsky‟s possibilities as a leader of the USSR, as well as make some judgements about Stalin‟s actual leadership. So, one of the exercises in this course is writing a short (8-10 pp) counterfactual history taking as its starting point one of the twenty events listed at the end of this outline. Remember that this is an exercise not in creativity but analysis: by presenting an alternative history you are, in fact, identifying the important components and outcomes of what did happen. Here‟s an example: suppose the victorious allies had reached a compromise peace with Germany at the end of WWI, one that led to the loss of Alsace and Lorraine but little else. Would Hitler have arisen? Would WWII have occurred? Would the USSR have expanded into Europe in the 1940s? And so on. Note that the answers to these questions indirectly indicate just how important Versailles actually was in reality, how it really did serve as a seed for the Second World War. Not for no reason did the great economist J.M. Keynes call it the most spectacular diplomatic failure in history. The counterfactual essay is worth 15% of the course grade and is due on October 19th.

Final Take-home Examination This will be distributed at the end of the final class (30 November) and will be due by noon on the last day of the examination period (17 December). Note that no late examinations will be accepted for any non-emergency reason. The examination will consist of one or more essay-format questions that will test your understanding and interpretation of our class readings and discussions. I would expect your submissions to be in essay format, approximately 15 pp in length, with appropriate scholarly apparatus (footnotes/endnotes, bibliography, etc.). Successful examination answers will be interpretive and analytic rather than mnemonic in nature.

Grade Table: Assignment Grade Weight Due Date Gobbets 20% (*) Every week, at the beginning of class Seminar Presentation 15% Dates to be selected by you Seminar Participation 25% Ongoing, in each class Writing History: Counterfactual Essay 15% 19th October Take-home Final Essay/Examination 25% During Fall Term Exam Period, Final Due date of noon on December 17th; no late exams will be accepted * If you fail to hand in gobbets on two separate occasions, you will receive a zero for this grade component.

Late penalties for all written assignments are 5% per calendar day overdue, with the exception of gobbets, which will only receive a grade if they are handed in on time, at the beginning of class.

Academic Integrity and Dishonesty I refer you to the section “Academic Integrity” to be found on p. 33-34 of the Acadia University Calendar, 20011/2012. You must be familiar with these guidelines to be enrolled in this course. Plagiarism is also viewed seriously by the Department of History and Classics: it is departmental policy that plagiarised work will receive a grade of F (zero), with no departmental appeal possible. In especially bad cases more severe penalties, including a course grade of F (zero) and/or a recommendation for expulsion from the university, are possible. If the transgression warrants it, I will not hesitate to seek the application of such a penalty. Please note that under no circumstances will I tolerate a breach of academic integrity: transgressions such as cheating, plagiarism, or actively aiding another student in such an act will result in – at the very least – a grade of zero on the offending assignment.

COURSE SCHEDULE

Week 1 (7 Sept) – Course Introduction, Readings Division, Presentation Schedule, etc.

Week 2 and Week 3 (14 Sept and 21 Sept) – The Uses of History

Black, Chapters 1 – 4 (for 14 Sept) and Chapters 5-9 (for 21 Sept).

Week 4 and Week 5 (28 Sept and 5 Oct) – The Practice of History

Jordanova, Chapters 1 – 4 (for 28 Sept) and Chapters 5-8 (for 5 October).

Week 6 (12 Oct) – The Annales School

Michael Harsgor, “Total History: The Annales School.” Journal of Contemporary History 13:1 (January 1978): 1-13.

Francois Furet, “Beyond the Annales.” The Journal of Modern History 55:3 (September 1983): 389-410.

Lynn Hunt, “French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm.” Journal of Contemporary History 21:2 [Twentieth Anniversary Issue] (April 1986): 209-224.

Week 7 (19 Oct) – Marx and History

Oliva Blanchette, "The Idea of History in ." Studies in Soviet Thought 26:2 (Aug 1983): 89- 122.

Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Chapter 3, “Historical Materialism.” In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx/Engels Selected Works, vol 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970): 95-151 [extracts].

Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Marxism and the Course of History.” New Left Review I/147 (September- October 1984): 95–107.

Eric Hobsbawm, “Marx and History.” New Left Review I/143 (January-February 1984): 39–50.

Week 8 (26 Oct) – Women’s History

Bonnie G. Smith, “The Contribution of Women to Modern Historiography in Great Britain, France, and the United States, 1750-1940.” The American Historical Review 89:3 (June 1984): 709-732.

Manuela Thurner, “Subject to Change: Theories and Paradigms of U.S. Feminist History.” Journal of Women’s History 9:2 (Summer 1997): 122-146.

Hilda L. Smith, "Are we Ready for a Comparative Historiography of Women?" Journal of Women's History 1:1 (Spring 1989): 96-100.

Jane Humphries, "'Lurking in the Wings': Women in the Historiography of the Industrial Revolution." Business and Economic History 20 (1991): 32-44.

Week 9 (2 Nov) – Controversy One: History and Postmodernism (Items 1-3 should be read as a unit, as they are a dialogue/debate in the pages of P & P)

Lawrence Stone, “Notes.” Past and Present 131 (May 1991): 217-218.

Patrick Joyce and Catriona Kelly, “History and Post-Modernism.” Past and Present 133 (Nov. 1991): 204-213.

Lawrence Stone and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History and Post-Modernism.” Past and Present 135 (May 1992): 189-208.

F.R. Ankersmit, “Historiography and Postmodernism.” History and Theory 28:2 (May 1989): 137-153.

Week 10 (9 Nov) – Controversy Two: History and Memory

Michael G. Kenny, “A Place for Memory: The Interface between Individual and Collective History.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41:3 (July 1999): 420-437.

R.J.B. Bosworth, “Nations Examine Their Past: A Comparative Analysis of the Historiography of the „Long‟ Second World War.” The History Teacher 29:4 (Aug. 1996): 499-523.

Saul Friedlander, "History, Memory, and the Historian: Dilemmas and Responsibilities." New German Critique, No. 80, Special Issue on the Holocaust (Spring-Summer 2000): 3-15.

Susan A. Crane, “Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum.” History and Theory 36:4, Theme Issue 36: Producing the Past: Making Inside and Outside the Academy. (Dec., 1997): 44-63.

Rana Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Nationalism, History and Memory in the Beijing War of Resistance Museum, 1987-1997.” The China Quarterly No. 161. (Mar. 2000): 279-293.

Week 11 (16 Nov) – Controversy Three: The Russian Revolution

James H. Billington, “Six Views of the Russian Revolution.” World Politics 18:3 (April 1966): 452-473.

Stephen Kotkin, "1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks." Journal of Modern History 70:2 (June 1998): 384-425

Richard Pipes, “1917 and the Revisionists.” The National Interest (Spring 1993): 68-79.

Ronald Grigor Suny, “Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics.” Russian Review 53:2 (April 1994): 165-182.

P.V. Volobuev, “Perestroika and the October Revolution in Soviet Historiography.” Trans. Kurt S. Schultz. Russian Review 51:4 (October 1992): 566-576.

Week 12 (23 Nov) – Controversy Four: World History…The End of History or Clash of Civilisations?

William H. McNeill, “The Changing Shape of World History.” History and Theory 34:2 Theme Issue 34: World Historians and Their Critics (May 1995): 8-26.

Edmund Burke III, “Orientalism and World History: Representing Middle Eastern Nationalism and Islamism in the Twentieth Century.” Theory and Society 27:4 (Aug 1998): 489-507.

Copy of Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest (Summer 1989). No Pagination, so you should number each paragraph when you print your copy, to facilitate discussion. Number the paragraph beginning “In watching the flow of events” as para 1, etc.

Copy of Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations.” Foreign Affairs. 72:3 (Summer 1993): 22- 28. No Pagination, so you should number each paragraph when you print your copy, to facilitate discussion. Number the paragraph beginning “World politics is entering a new phase” as para 1, etc.

Week 13 (30 Nov) – How is History Born? How does a New Field Mature? – Environmental History

Kimberly Coulter and Christof Mauch, eds. "The Future of Environmental History: Needs and Opportunities." RCC Perspectives Issue 3 (2011). [You're not going to like what I'm about to tell you...this source is about 75 pp in length. So don't gobbet it. And read it after the other three sources, please.]

Alfred W. Crosby, “The Past and Present of Environmental History.” American Historical Review 100:4 (Oct. 1995): 1177-1189.

Mart A. Stewart, “Environmental History: Profile of a Developing Field.” The History Teacher 31:3 (May 1998): 351-368.

Douglas R. Weiner, “A Death-Defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Definition of Environmental History.” Environmental History 10:3 (July 2005): 404-420.

* * * COUNTERFACTUAL SCENARIOS:

1605: The Gunpowder Plot succeeds in killing James I. 1588: The Spanish Armada defeats the English navy. 1917: Lenin is assassinated at the Finland Station. 1066: William of Normandy‟s army defeated, William killed at Hastings. 1812/13: Napoleon overwinters successfully in Russia. 1960: the Pill is banned in the United States. 1941: Moscow falls, Stalin flees to the Urals. 1919: the victorious allies reach an honorable peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary. 1980: the Quebec Referendum finishes 59.56 per cent “Oui” to 40.44 percent “Non”. 1500: a Great Council successfully curbs abuses and excesses in the life of the Catholic Church. 1942: the the US Navy loses all of its carriers at the Battle of Midway; the Imperial Japanese Navy loses none. 1863: Lee is victorious at Gettysburg. 1914: Serbia acquiesces to Austrian aggression. 1763: the French coalition emerges victorious from the Seven Years‟ War 1938: July – Hitler suffers a massive and immediately fatal stroke. 1963: Oswald misses. 1967: Canadian Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau reports government policy to be “the state‟s business is in the bedrooms of the nation.” 1435: Zheng He‟s voyages spark a wave of officially-supported exploration and expansion by Ming China. 1866: Nova Scotia rejects the Quebec Resolutions, stays out of Confederation. 1241: Ogedai, Khan of the Mongols, doesn‟t die.