GL/HIST 4500 HISTORIOGRAPHY Fall, 2013 Prof. Gillian McGillivray, office YH238 [email protected] Tuesdays, 1-3 p.m., YH A108 This course is a survey of history’s evolution as a unique intellectual craft. It examines history’s changing relationship with the broader social and cultural milieu, its varied functions and significant methodological innovations. At the end of this course you should: • Master the concept of historiography and its importance in historical scholarship • Be familiar with the main schools of thought in Modern historical writing • Know recent conceptual and methodological innovations • Have further developed your ability to think through and include these innovations in your specific area of historical research Assignments and evaluations The assignments have been chosen to further your ability to reflect on history as an intellectual craft. The readings, weekly discussions, oral presentation and writing all work together to explain how solid scholarship in any field of historical research begins with the examination of historiography. In addition to active participation in the weekly seminar discussions, each student will submit a paper (5-7 pages) discussing the methodology and critiques surrounding Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre or Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (worth 20% of your grade, due November 4). You will then submit a research paper (8-10 pages) on a historian/historiography of choice (20%, due December 6). This can be the same scholar you do the presentation on (recommended) or a different one. There are 4 modes of evaluation in this course: 1) Oral presentation + 1 page handout for colleagues: 10% (10-15 minutes) 2) Davis or Darnton paper (5-7 pages), due November 4: 20% 3) Research essay (8-10 pages), due December 6: 30% 4) Participation in class: 20% 4) Written questions for class: 20% The main texts are: (1) The Houses of History: a critical reader in twentieth- century history and theory. Eds. Anna Green and Kathleen Troup. Manchester University Press, 1999 (referred to as “HH”) and Eley, Geoff. A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008 (referred to as “Crooked”) + other readings listed below. 1 1. Tuesday September 10. Introduction 2. Tuesday September 17. HH, preface (vii-viii) + 1. The empiricists (1-32) + 3. Freud and Psychohistory (59-86) + Crooked, from preface to page 12 Presentation 1: E.H. Carr, What is History? (Vintage, 1967) 3. Tuesday September 24. HH 2. The Marxists (33-58) + HH 4. The Annales (87-109) + Crooked II. Optimism. 13-60 Presentation 2: E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz (1963); Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980, preface and Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, London: Merlin Press, 1991, introduction, chapter 2 “The Patricians and the Plebes”, chapter 4 “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century”, chapter 5 “The Moral Economy revisted”, chapter 6 “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism.” 4. Tuesday October 1. Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and Historical Method (Italian 1986; English 1989), “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” pp. 96- 125, notes 200-13 (29pp) + “The Inquistor as Anthropologist,” pp 156-64, notes 220-1 (8pp) + start readings for October 8 Presentation 3: historian + book of choice Presentation 4: historian + book of choice Presentation 5: Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (Italian 1976; English 1980). And Dominick LaCapra, “The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Twentieth-Century Historian,” in History and Criticism (1985), 45-69. 5. Tuesday October 8. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983,+ R. Finlay, “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre,” American Historical Review 93:3 (1988), 552-71 (19 pp); and N.Z Davis, “On the Lame,” in the same issue, 572-603 (31 pp) 6. Tuesday October 15: HH 5. Historical Sociology (110-140) + 6. Quantitative History (141-171) + Crooked III, Disappointment, 61-113 (skim heavily) Presentation 6: Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: lord and peasant in the making of the modern world. Boston, 1966. Presentation 7: Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons and selections from Captain Swing or 2 Presentation 8: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 7. Tuesday October 22. HH 7. Anthropology and Ethnohistorians (172-203) + start readings for October 29. Presentation 9: William Roseberry, Anthropology and History: essays in culture, history, and political economy 8. Tuesday October 29 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Vintage Books, 1985, Introduction + chapters 1-4, pp. 3-189) + Dominic LaCapra, "Chartier, Darnton, and the Great Symbol Massacre", Journal of Modern History 60:1 (1988), 95-112 Presentation 10: Clifford Geertz and Robert Darnton, "Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture", in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), pp. 3-32 + other works. + James Fernandez, "Historians Tell Tales: Of Cartesian Cats and Gallic Cockfights", Journal of Modern History 60:1 (1988), 113-27. Roger Chartier, "Text, Symbols, and Frenchness," Journal of Modern History 57:4 (1985), 682-95 + Robert Darnton, "The Symbolic Element in History", Journal of Modern History 58:1 (1986), 218-34 + Harold Mah, "Suppressing the Text: The Metaphysics of Ethnographic History in Darnton's Great Cat Massacre", History Workshop Journal 31 (Spring 1991), 1-20. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4: HAND IN ASSIGNMENT #1 to YH238 or via email 9. Tuesday November 5 HH 8. The question of narrative (204-229) + 9. Oral History (230-252) Presentation 11: Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991)—this week’s presenter can hand in assignment #1 next week. 10. Tuesday November 12. HH 9. Gender and History (253-276), HH 10. Postcolonial Perspectives (277-296) + Crooked, IV. Reflectiveness, 115-181 Presentation 12: Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press, 1988) 11. Tuesday November 19. HH 11. The challenge of poststructuralism/ postmodernism (297-325)+ Crooked, V. Defiance (conclusion), 183-204 Presentation 13: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism, London: Verso, Revised edition 1991. 3 12. Tuesday November 26. M. Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Presentation 14: James Scott, Seeing Like a State: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press, 1999. Presentation 15: James Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton University Press, 2012. Tuesday, December 6 (Last date to submit term work according to university calendar—try to submit it earlier if you can, but, if not): RESEARCH PAPER DUE TODAY; submit via email ([email protected]) or to YH238. Some useful secondary sources for getting started with your research on your chosen historian: Michael Bentley, ed., Companion to Historiography Florence, KY: Routledge, 2002 (see photocopy of the Table of Contents) The text is available electronically through York Library’s library at: http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/lib/oculyork/docDetail.action?docID=101 65499 Iggers, Georg G., Historiography in the twentieth century. From scientific objectivity to the postmodern challenge Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1997 / epilogue 2005 Hughes-Warrington, Marnie, Fifty Key Thinkers on History London and New York: Routledge, 2000 Munslow, Alun, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies London and New York: Routledge, 2nd edition, 2006 (at Frost, reference) French Historians, 1900-2000 Other possible topics (from “Fifty Key Thinkers on History” List of contents: Bede; Marc Bloch; Fernand Braudel; Charles Manning Hope Clark; R.G. Collingwood; Benedetoo Croce; Wilhelm Dilthey; Cheik Anta Diop; G.R. Elton; Lucien Febvre; Michel Foucault; Jean Froissart; Francis Fukuyama; Pieter Geyl; Edward Gibbon; Gregory of Tours; G.W.F. Hegel; Martin Heidegger; Carl Gustav Hempel; Herodotus; Eric Hobsbawm; Ibn Khaldun; Immanuel Kant; Thomas Samuel Kuhn; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie; Livy; Thomas Babington Macaulay; Karl Marx; Jules Michelet; Theodore William Moody; Michael Oakeshott; Polybius; Leopold von Ranke; Paul Ricoeur; Sheila Rowbotham; Oswald Spengler; Ssu-ma Ch’ien; Tacitus; A.J.P. Taylor; Thucydides; Arnold J. Toynbee; Frederick Jackson Turner; Giambattista Vico; W.H. Walsh; Hayden White; Carter G. Woodson. 4 .