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1 Fall 2018 Stony Brook University Department of History HIS 524.S01 Fall 2018 Stony Brook University Department of History HIS 524.S01 (80833) Core Seminar: History Theory and Practice SBS N-303 Th 4:30-7:00 April Masten Joshua Teplitsky [email protected] [email protected] SBS S-313 SBS S-317 Office Hours: T/Th 12-1 Office Hours: T/Th 3-4pm The purpose of the CORE Seminar is to introduce new graduate students to the issues, questions, and theoretical underpinnings behind major shifts in the historical profession over the last century. It will also present key texts from the five thematic cluster areas of our department, as well as some of the methods and technologies needed to practice historical research and writing. Evaluation will be based on careful attention to assigned readings, active participation in class discussions, engaged oral presentations, clearly written review essays, and a research proposal idea for your work in the spring. Books You Might Want to Purchase: Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, 1988. Sarah Maza, Thinking About History, 2017. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1983. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Harvard, 2005) Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire, 1997. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1978. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, 1998. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848. Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978. Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, Pluto, 1997. Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley, 1991). Short readings will be posted on blackboard. 1 Course Requirements: ● Grading is based on attendance, participation, weekly response papers and/or assignments, and a final research proposal. ● Absences will only be excused with a doctor’s note. ● Each student will lead at least one class discussion. ● Each week students will submit a 1-2 page response paper with thoughts about either a single text in depth or a larger theme that emerges from the texts in conversation with each other. Papers should be emailed to both instructors by 5pm on the Wednesday before each class session. Schedule of Meetings Week 1: Aug 30 Introduction to the Course Assignment 1: Bring to class the book/article/essay/documentary that made you want to become an historian, that piece of history that made you say, “I want to do this.” And be prepared to talk about it what it does and why it moved you for 5-10 minutes. Read before coming to class: Sarah Maza, Thinking About History, Introduction, 1-9, Chapter 4 “How is History Produced” Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, Introduction, 1-17 The Peopling of History Week 2: Sept 6 Politics/Diplomacy/Biography Assignment 2: In what ways do Chernow and Lepore’s biographies fit and/or deviate from “the history of ‘great men’” as described in Maza and practiced in the past and still today? Maza, Thinking About History, Chapter 1 “The History of Whom?” 10-44. Novick, That Noble Dream, 1988, Part I “Objectivity Enthroned,” 21-108. Selected chapters from Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, Penguin, 2004. Selected chapters from Jill Lepore, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, Knopf, 2013. Week 3: Sept 13 Society/Class/Labor “Men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please; They do not make it under circumstances chose by themselves, but under given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past.” Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, 1. Maza, Chapter 5 “Causes or Meanings?” 14-28, 157-198 Novick, Part II, “Objectivity besieged,” 111-278 Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848. E. P. Thompson, “Preface” and chapter 1 from The Making of the English Working Class, 1963. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present, No. 38 (Dec. 1967), 56-97. 2 Fernand Braudel, On History [1969], Transl. by Sarah Matthews (Chicago 1980), 3-5. Raymond Williams, “Introduction” to Culture & Society: 1780-1950, 1958, 1983, xiii-xx. [Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution (Vintage)] Week 4: Sept 20 Women/Gender/Sexual Identity Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91.5 (Dec. 1986): 1053-1075. Joan Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Becoming Visible, 1977, 174-201 Nancy Cott and Drew Faust, “Recent Directions in Gender and Women’s History,” OAH Magazine of History 19.2 (March 2005), 4-5. Caroline Bynum, Chapter 3, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 1987. John Tosh, “What Should Historians Do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain,” History Workshop 38 (1994), 179-202. David M. Halperin, “Is the a History of Sexuality?” History and Theory 28.3 (Oct., 1989), 257-274. Week 5: Sept 27 Social Alchemy/Race/Slavery Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (Pluto, 1997), 5-39. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard, 1998): Intro, Ch. 3. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, ch. I-IV and XIV Rebecca Ann Goetz, “Rethinking the ‘Unthinking Decision’: Old Questions and New Problems in the History of Slavery and Race in the Colonial South,” The Journal of Southern History 75.3 (Aug. 2009), 599-612. Week 6: Oct 4 Interventions: Sociology/Anthropology/Philosophy/Linguistics/ Literary Criticism Assignment 3: Explore the relationship between theory and the historical application of theory. How does the historian in question apply the broader theoretical model to historical episodes? What is gained? What is missing? Maza, Chapter 6 “Fact or Fictions?” 199-134 Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” 239-277 (in Mukerji and Schudson). Robert Darnton, “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre,” 97-120 (in Mukerji and Schudson). Michel Foucault, excerpts from The History of Sexuality and other texts. Jonathan Culler, “Sassure’s Theory of Language,” Sassure (London, 1976), 18-52. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, UC Press, 1984--excerpts [Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther-excerpts] [Novick, That Noble Dream, 1988, Part IV] [Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durèe,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32.2 (2009), 171-203.] 3 The Geographies of History Week 7: Oct 11 States, Nations and Nationalism Maza, Chapter 2 “The History of Where?” 45-57 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso, 1983) Prasenjit Duara, “Transnationalism and the Challenge to National Histories,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender, 2002, Chapter 1. Partha Chatterjee, “Whose Imagined Community?” in Mapping the Nation (1993), ed. Gopal Balakrishnan, 214-225. Tara Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis,” Slavic Review 69, 1 (2010): 93-119. Week 8: Oct 18 Representations: Empire/Subaltern/Post-Colonial Assignment 4: Type up and bring to class your ideas for a research paper. Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1979). Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, “The Empire Effect,” Public Culture 24, 2 (2012): 239-247. Chapters from Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire, 1997. Week 9: Oct 25 Oceans and Borderlands For transnational, reread Maza, 57-71. Atlantic and Pacific: Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Harvard, 2005). Mae Ngai, “The True Story of Ah Jake: Language, Labor, and Justice in Late-Nineteenth-Century Sierra County, California” (in Cultures in Motion) Borderlands, Migrations, and Mobility: Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” 1999: 814-841 Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” The Journal of American History 98, 2 (2011): 338-361. Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place (Harvard, 2004)--excerpts Week 10: Nov 1 Global History and Diasporas For Global and decentering, reread Maza, 71-82 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), into, 1, 4, epilogue. James Clifford, "Diasporas," Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 302-38. Excerpt Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, 1993. Kenneth Pomeranz, “Introduction,” The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000): 3-27. "Crooked Lines of Relevance: Europe and the People without History, by Eric R. Wolf," reviewed by Pekka Hämäläinen. https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/123/3/875/5025242 4 Historicizing Ideas and Things Week 11: Nov 8 Making Knowledge: Ideas, Intellectual History, and Social Context Maza, Chapter 3 “The History of What?” 83-117 Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969): 4-35. Robert Darnton, “Intellectual and Cultural History,” in The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed. Michael Kammen (Cornell, 1980): 327-354. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962): Preface, Ch 1, 10, 13. Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111, 3 (1982): 65-83. Pamela H. Smith, “Knowledge in Motion: Following Itineraries of Matter in the Early Modern World,” Cultures in Motion (Princeton, 2014): 109-133 Week 12: Nov 15 Cultural Histories History of Things Leora Auslander, “Beyond Words,” The American Historical Review, 110, 4 (2005): 1015-1045. Material Culture, Consumer Goods and Behaviors Marcy Norton, “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics,” The American Historical Review, 111, 3 (2006): 660-691. Cultural Practices April Masten, “The Challenge Dance: Black-Irish Exchange in Antebellum America,” in Cultures in Motion, ed. Daniel T. Rodgers, et al. (Princeton, 2014): 23-59. Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (Metropolitan, 214): 95-129. Week 13: Thanksgiving Assignment 5: Using the guidelines we have provided, write a proposal for a research paper that includes possible sources.
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