History 700: History as a Field of Knowledge
San Francisco State University
Thursday, 16:10-18:55
Science 268
Prof. Jackson Telephone: (415) 338-6184
e-mail: jacksonc@sfsu.edu
web page: http://bss.sfsu.edu/jacksonc
"History is a pack of
lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there."
-- George Santayana
“Those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
-- George Santayana
This course is a graduate level seminar concerning recent developments in the research and writing of history by professional historians. It is required of all history graduate students. It will explore various schools and methods of history and attempt to understand some of the trends of historiography. It will also serve to teach how to read critically and write logically. Time limitations demand that this course be selective rather than comprehensive, and students should bear in mind that it will raise issues that cannot be answered during a particular class meeting or possibly at all. The instructor is available by appointment outside of the office hours scheduled above for discussion of issues that cannot be addressed during class meetings and for suggestions regarding additional reading on particular topics.
Required Texts:
1.Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso Books, 1991). ISBN: 0860915468
2.Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men Reprint edition (March 1993) Harperperennial Library; ISBN: 0060995068
3.Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 2nd ed. (Pennsylvania State UP). ISBN 0271008342
4.Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 2000 )ISBN: 0195133323
5.David Landes, Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton 1998). ISBN: 0393318885
6.Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1990). ISBN 0674543556
7.Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge) ISBN: 0521357454
8.Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes : Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (University of Chicago Press, 1994). ISBN 0226721221
9.Willie Thompson, Postmodernism and History Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ISBN 0333963385
10.Norman J. Wilson, History in Crisis? 2nd ed. (Prentice-Hall, 2004) ISBN: 0131835521
Requirements:
Five single book reviews 50%
One long review essay 25%
Class participation and oral reports 25%
Evaluation of student performance:
All written work will be evaluated on the basis of substance and composition. See the writing guidelines on the instructor’s web site for further details, as well as chapter eight of Lichtman and French, Historians and the Living Past for useful guidelines for historical composition.
Students are expected to turn in their assignments on time. Late papers will be accepted only for serious reasons; suitable documentation will be required. Likewise, a student petition for an “incomplete” grade must be accompanied by suitable documentation.
This course is a reading seminar. Students should be prepared to play an active role in both initiating and guiding discussion during class meetings. Comments should be critical, but constructive.
Week 2 (2/9/06): Macrohistory
David Landes, Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton 1998). ISBN: 0393318885
Gale Stokes, “The Fates of Human Societies: A Review of Recent Macrohistories,” American Historical Review 106 (2001), pp.508-525.
Reports
William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976)
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997).
Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Culture Life (New York: 2000).
Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (Cambridge: 1997). (AHR discussion April 2000, 485-508)
Norman J. Wilson, History in Crisis (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1999)
Peter Burke, “Overture: The New History, its Past and its Future,” in Burke, New Perspectives
Reports
Thomas Cochran, “The Presidential Synthesis in American History,” American Historical Review, 53 (1948), pp.748-59.
Bernard Bailyn, “The challenge of Modern Historiography,” American Historical Review, 87 (1982), pp.1-24.
Thomas Bender, “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History, 73 (1986), pp.120-136.
Eric H. Monkkonen, “The Dangers of Synthesis,” American Historical Review, 91 (1986), pp.1146-57.
Norman J. Wilson, History in Crisis
Peter Burke, “History of Events and the Revival of Narrative,” in Burke, New Perspectives
Reports
Peter N. Stearns, “Uncivil War: Current American Conservatives and Social History,” Richard Jensen, “The Culture Wars, 1965-1995: A Historian’s Map,” Gary B. Nash, “The History Standards Controversy and Social History,” Jan Lewis, “The Double-Consciousness of the Academic Historian,” Barry W. Bienstock, “Everything Old is New Again: Social History, the National History Standards and the Crisis in the Teaching of High School American History,” and Louise A. Tilly, “History as Exploration and Discovery,” all in The Journal of Social History 29: supplement (1995), 9-63, 115-118.
Theodore Hamerow, “The Bureaucratization of History,” and Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Some Reflections on the New History,” American Historical Review, 94 (1989), pp.654-70.
Lawrence Levine, “The Unpredictable Past,” Joan Scott, “History in Crisis?” and John Toews, “Perspectives on the Old History and the New,” American Historical Review, 94 (1989), pp.671-98.
Fred Matthews, “The Attack on ‘Historicism’: Allen Bloom’s Indictment of Contemporary American Historical Scholarship,” American Historical Review, 95 (1990), pp.429-47.
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
Roy Porter, “History of the Body,” in Burke, New Perspectives
Marilyn Yalom, History of the Breast (New York: Knopf, 1997).
Susan Pedersen, “National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy-Making,” Journal of Modern History 63 (1991), pp.647-80.
John D’Emilio, “Gay History: A New Field of Study,” in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York : Routledge, 1992), pp.96-113.
Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in H. Abelove et al., The Gay and Lesbian Reader, (1993), pp.3-44.
Week 6 (3/9/06): Women’s History
Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes : Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Joan Scott, “Women’s History,” in Burke, New Perspectives
Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History, 75 (1988), pp.9-39.
Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review, 91 (1986), pp.1053-75.
Louis Tilly, Gay Gullickson, and Judith Bennett, “Comment and Debate: Gender, Women’s History, and Social History,” Social Science History, 13 (1989), pp.439-80.
Elizabeth Fox Genovese, “The Struggle for Feminist History,” in Elizabeth Fox Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions, (1991), pp.139-65.
Virginia Scharff, “Else Sure We Shall all Hang Separately: The Politics of Western Women’s History,” Pacific Historical Review LXI (1992), pp.535-55.
William Sewell, “Review Essay: Gender and the Politics of History,” History and Theory, XXIX (1990), pp.71-82.
Browning, Ordinary Men
Richard Tuck, “History of Political Thought,” in Burke, New Perspectives
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Robert Darnton, “The Great Cat Massacre” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
“What is the History of Art?” in Gardiner, What is History Today? (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1988), pp.96-104.
Peter Burke, “The Origins of Cultural History,” in Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp.1-22.
Peter Burke, “Unity and Variety in Cultural History,” in Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp.183-212.
Week 9 (3/30/06): Historical Memory
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford, 2000).
Reports:
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Lewis A. Coser, ed., trans. (Chicago: 1992).
Daniel J. Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000) ISBN: 0618082328
Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Reprint edition (1998) ISBN: 0674929772
Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan
New York: Penguin, 1995) ISBN: 0452011566
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat (New York: Metropolitan, 2001).
Paul Boyer, “Whose History is it Anyway? Memory, Politics, and Historical Scholarship,” in Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Englehardt, eds., History Wars (New York : Metropolitan Books, 1996), pp.115-139.
“History as Social Memory,” in Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp.43-59.
Willie Thompson, Postmodernism and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). ISBN 0333963385
Richard Evans, “Objectivity and Its Limits,” in In Defense of History (New York: Norton, 1999), pp.193-251.
Keith Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader (New York: Routledge 1997). ISBN: 041513904X
Joyce Appleby, “One Good Turn Deserves Another: Moving Beyond the Linguistic,” American Historical Review, 94 (1989), pp.1326-32.
John Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review, 92 (1987), pp.879-907.
David Harlan, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature,” American Historical Review, 94 (1989), pp.581-609.
Frank Ninkovich, “No Post-Mortems for Postmodernism, Please,” Diplomatic History, 22 (1998), pp.451-75.
“What is Social History?” in Gardiner, What is History Today? (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1988), pp.42-57.
“What is the History of Popular Culture?” in Gardiner, What is History Today? (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1988), pp.120-130.
Jim Sharpe, “History from Below,” in Burke, New Perspectives
Reports
Peter Stearns, “Coming of Age,” Journal of Social History, 10 (1976), pp.246-55.
Peter Stearns, “Social History and History: A Progress Report,” Journal of Social History, 19 (1985), pp.319-34.
Charles Tilly, “Retrieving European Lives,” in Olivier Zunz, ed., Reliving the Past, (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp.11-52.
Olivier Zunz, “The Synthesis of Social Change,” in Zunz, ed., Reliving the Past, pp.53-114.
Andrew Abbott, “History and Sociology: The Lost Synthesis,” Social Science History, 15 (1991), pp.201-238.
Tony Judt, “A Clown in Regal Purple,” History Workshop 7 (1979), pp.66-93.
Novick, That Noble Dream
“What is Intellectual History?” in Gardiner, What is History Today? (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1988), pp.105-119.
Reports
Robert Darnton, “Intellectual and Cultural History,” in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, (1980), pp.327-54.
Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory, 8 (1969), pp.3-53.
Donald Kelley, “What is Happening to the History of Ideas?” Journal of the History of Ideas, 51 (1990), pp.3-25.
Dominick La Capra, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” in La Capra and Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History, pp.47-85.
Peter Paret, “The History of War and the New Military History,“ in Peter Paret, Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp.209-226.
“What is Military History?” in Gardiner, What is History Today? (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1988), pp.4-17.
Introduction of Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and counterfactuals (New York: Basic Books, 1999. D210 .V57 1998
John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1994).
Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001); ISBN: 0385500521
Robert Cowley, ed., What If? The World’s Foremost Historians Imagine What Might have Been (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1999). D25.5 .W44 1999
Brief Book Reviews
Each student will write five brief book reviews (approximately 1,000 words in length, typed, double-spaced), a longer review essays (3,000-4,000 words), and will be responsible for one classroom presentation (15-20 minutes). The five brief book reviews will be on Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (due February 16th), Laqueur’s Making Sex, (due March 2nd), Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes (due March 23rd), Anderson’s Imagined Communities, (due April 13th), Fussell’s Great War and Modern Memory (due April 20th). The long review will cover Novick’s That Noble Dream (due May 18th).
Begin your review with the author, title, and facts of publication, using a standard bibliographical form, e.g.,
Keegan, John. A History of Warfare. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Here are seven questions the answers to which should form the substance of your review. You might want to organize your essay around them, answering each of them in the order given. Devote a paragraph to each question.
1. What is the author’s purpose in writing the book?
2. What is the author’s thesis? How does this thesis confirm or deny the prevailing historiographical wisdom of the field?
3. How does the author organize his or her material? What is the logic behind the topics of the chapters and how do the chapters go together to make a book? You should be aware that there is almost always a “fit” between the thesis of the book and its organizational logic. Each points to the other. Thus if you are in doubt about the thesis, pay attention to the organizational logic, and vice versa.
4. What concepts and what theories guide the author’s work? Sometimes you will have to dig out the answers to these questions, but they are very often presented in the introduction of the book. For example, is the author a Marxist, or a Weberian, or something else? Answers to these questions might take you to reference books such as The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Raymond Williams’s Keywords, or the Dictionary of the History of Ideas. This section can include a brief summary of the book, as well as the material describing theories and concepts. But make sure that the summary is tied into the primary issue of concepts and theories.
5. What sources does the author use to develop the thesis of the book and why are they used? Do not give a laundry-list of sources. Discuss such tings as types of sources used and the reasons for turning to some kinds of sources rather than others.
6. How well is the author’s purpose accomplished? In this section, you will have an opportunity to make an original, critical evaluation of the book. You will want to address the issues of what is well done, poorly done, and originally done.
7. Relate the book to the subject of the course. How does it fit in with the issues raised and discussed in the course to the date of writing? In cases where specific material has been assigned along with the book, you should place the book on the spectrum of the sub-field as this has been outlined in this material.
Review Essay
Your review essay should follow the same format used in the short book reviews, and in addition: 1) For the long review you must devote part 7 to an explicit analysis of how the book relates to the discussion of the field of history as described in the book by Wilson, History in Crisis? 2). You must also include an eighth section. In section 8 you must refer explicitly to how the work relates to previous scholarship on the subject and describe how other historians have evaluated the work. You are expected to use all relevant materials in the syllabus in preparing the long book reviews, including the collateral readings. You should use library reference resources to locate book reviews and review essays for section 8. All references must be cited in footnotes and should follow standard footnoting practice. (See Kate L. Turabian, A Manual of Style.)
The long review essay will be on intellectual history, and will be due on May 18th.
Oral Reports
This is designed to afford students an opportunity to prepare and deliver a presentation to your fellow students regarding an article, book, or series of articles regarding a particular topic. Please note the following guidelines for your oral presentation.
1. Address the following questions explicitly: A) what is the author’s purpose? B) How does the author develop the thesis or theses? C) What insights can be derived from this article that help us to understand the practice of this particular kind of historical research and writing? (Refer explicitly to assigned readings.) D) What insights about history as a field of knowledge generally can be derived from this article?
2. Prepare and rehearse your report. Rehearsing will improve your presentation. If you do not rehearse, you will probably have trouble keeping your report within the time prescribed. Rehearsal will also help you keep eye contact with the audience. It is important that you do not read your report. Be prepared to answers questions from the class and from the instructor; think ahead about the kinds of questions that relate your work to the theme of the class meeting and to the course generally. Do not rush through your presentation.
Class Participation
The quality of your class participation is more important than the quantity, but frequent participation of high quality would be an ideal. We will be guided by the questions of critical reading and analysis mentioned above and outlined below, and the following points tend to characterize effective participation.
1. Are the points made substantive and relevant to the discussion? Are they linked to the comments of others?
2. Do comments show that the participant has been listening carefully?
3. Do comments clarify and highlight the important aspects of earlier comments and lead to a clearer statement of the concepts being covered?
4. Is the participant willing to interact with other class members?
5. Do comments show evidence of analysis?
6. Do comments add to our understanding?
7. Does the participant distinguish between facts, opinions, beliefs, and between positive and normative analysis?
8. Is there a willingness to test new ideas?
Constructive class participation is an essential part of this seminar. I shall take note of student discussion during each class period; if I come to believe that a particular student is not participating as actively as he or she should I will make a point of calling on the student in hopes of getting them more involved.
Please note that most of the journal articles listed are available on-line via the database JSTOR. Log onto the SFSU library web site, and follow the link to electronic databases.