Readings in Modern East Central Europe Readings in Modern East Central European History Professor T. Mills Kelly Office Hours: MWF 10-11 or by appointment Holden Hall 139 742-3744 (o) or 799-7652 (h) e-mail: [email protected] web: www2.tltc.ttu.edu/kelly Overview This seminar is designed to give you the opportunity to develop a working knowledge of the historiography of modern East Central Europe. Because we meet only a dozen times during the semester, there is a limit to what we can cover from the rich bibliography on nationalism. As a result, I have selected what amounts to a greatest hits list for us to work our way through. However, I am fairly flexible about what we will cover, so if there is a particular topic or author that you would like to see us address in more detail, let me know before the third week of the semester and we can negotiate a revision in the topic list. My objectives for this seminar, over and above introducing you to the historiography, are to work with you on the skills you need to be successful in the study of modern European history at the graduate level, for all of us to develop new insights into the material we will be discussing, and to have you leave the course with the sorts of bibliographical materials you will be able to use in your further study of European history. Readings We will read four books in common this semester, all of which have been ordered through the University Bookstore: Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change Ivan T. Berend, Central and Eastern Europe 1944-1993. Detour from the periphery to the periphery Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1809-1999 Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down and Gary Cohen, "Neither Absolutism nor Anarchy: New Narratives on Society and Government in Late Imperial Austria," Austrian History Yearbook, XXIX, 1998, pp. 37-61 (reserve) In addition these common readings, you will select many different works from the list provided below. Some of the readings for a particular week are monographs, others are articles in various journals, and some are edited collections of articles. At a minimum I expect you to select one work from that list. However, if you choose to read an article in a particular week, it may be that you will need to read more than one in order to have much to say in class. In the case of the edited collections I expect you to select one or several of the articles included in the collection. No matter what, when you are selecting your readings, remember that it is you, not me, who will be asked probing questions about your knowledge of East Central European history and historiography at comprehensive examination time, so use this semester as your opportunity to acquire a more complex understanding of the material than you would if I simply gave you a reading list for your examination. Scholarly journals are an important source for anyone seeking a more in-depth knowledge of the history and historiography of nationalism, especially because it is in journals that historians float trial balloons, offer up more controversial ideas, argue with one another in a more specific way, and give their colleagues a chance to criticize their work in a (usually) more congenial fashion. Among the many journals you will want to take a look at during the semester are: Austrian History Yearbook Slavic Review Kellygrad.htm[26.06.17, 16:36:08] Readings in Modern East Central Europe Journal of Modern History Slavonic and East European Review East European Quarterly Nationalities Papers Social History Journal of Women's History Central European History If you do not feel that you have a good grasp of the general narrative of events in 19th and 20th century European history that form the backdrop for our readings, it is going to be up to you to acquire that knowledge on your own. We will not be discussing what happened in an organized fashion, but instead will focus most of our time on the interpretation of what happened. Therefore, if you think you need to know more about (or to review) what happened, I suggest consulting a general survey text such as: Norman Stone, Europe Transformed William Langer, ed., The Rise of Modern Europe (multi-volume series) Wilkinson & Hughes, Contemporary Europe Lonnie Johnson, Central Europe Leo Loubere, Nineteenth Century Europe Robert Paxton, Europe in the Twentieth Century Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity (exclusively East Central Europe) Assignments The most important expectation that I have of you is that you will come to class having done your reading for the week and prepared to discuss it. Seminars only work if the participants participate and I am not willing to conduct a Socratic Monologue all semester long. That means you have an equal responsibility with me to keep the discussion going. In addition to your participation in class, each week during the semester you will produce a one-page summary of the work(s) you read for a particular week. These summaries are not easy. To do it right, you have to reduce an entire book/article to one page. How do you do that? Obviously, you can't say more than a few words about the content of the book. Instead, you have to focus all of your effort on summarizing the argument the author presents. When you read one another's summaries, you should find there the author's thesis, a few words about the sources the work is built upon, and a few sentences about how the argument is developed from those sources. Anything more than that will take you onto page 2. The method we will use for making your summaries available to everyone in class is the on-line discussion forum that is part of the course website. You are expected to post your summary to that site before midnight on Sunday so that everyone will have most of Monday to read one another's summaries. That way, we can avoid having class time taken up by presentation of the summaries. You can see that there is an additional assignment that results from this method of communicating with one another. I expect each of you to take a few minutes to read everyone else's summaries before class. Because I expect everyone to do these readings, I'm going to be a stickler about holding you to one page. If your summaries are longer, everyone's Monday reading assignment gets longer. The more substantial assignment for the semester is the creation of a bibliographic essay. This essay should discuss all the historiographical work (monographs and articles) produced on some aspect of East Central European history in the last decade, with reference to any classic works written before 1990 which are crucial to our understanding of that topic. Needless to say, with the opening of the archives in the formerly communist countries after 1989, much of the work that has been produced since 1990 is quite different from that which came before. The older works are not necessarily flawed, however, more recent scholarship is generally preferred in many cases. As an alternative to what I have just described, you also may take a comparative approach, looking instead at the historiography of women in the region, architecture (a particularly fruitful field at present), or some other topic that appeals to you. You may look at your summaries as foundations of such an essay, in that the bibliographic essay should say a lot about the historiography of a topic, but not too much about the specific works it surveys. Your essay should be more focused on recent work and should say more (but not too much more) on those works. The length of your essay Kellygrad.htm[26.06.17, 16:36:08] Readings in Modern East Central Europe depends, of course, on your topic, but should be somewhere between 10 and 20 pages in length. Anything longer than that probably says too much or the topic is too generally defined. Anything shorter probably does not say enough or the topic is too narrowly defined. Like your summaries, your bibliographical essay should say very little about what happened, instead focusing almost entirely on what historians have had to say about what happened. All topics must be approved by me during individual conferences in the first two weeks of October. The Friday before that conference you should have given me a working bibliography for your topic so I can spend some time in intelligent contemplation of your project before we meet. One hint that may help you with your selection of a topic includes making sure there are more than a dozen or so works (monographs/articles) written on the topic. If not, your topic is probably too narrow. A second hint is that there should be some sort of on-going discussion among historians about the topic, meaning that something comes out almost every year. Some great historical controversies die for lack of additional archival discoveries or methodological disputes. Try not to pick one that has stopped breathing or that is on its last legs. No matter what, you will have to think carefully and critically about your topic. Otherwise, you will end up spending too much time in the library stacks and not enough time in front of your word processor. Finally, a bibliographical essay that takes into account only those works published in English will be considered less than complete.