EIU His 5000, Fall 2010, Newton Key
T 19:00-21:15, Coleman 2750
http://ux1.eiu.edu/~nekey/syllabi/historiography.htm
Syllabus as pdf (brief version)

Historiography (Quotes/Glossary for Reports/Quizzes)

Notes (AHR = American Historical Review; HJ = Historical Journal; H & T = History and Theory; JAH = Journal of American History; JMH = Journal of Modern History; P & P = Past & Present; TLS = Times Literary Supplement)

week 1.

  • diachronic, synchronic
  • cyclical, linear
  • teleology (relate to linear)
  • whig interpretation of history
  • objectivity, subjectivity
 "Man has been a hunter for thousands of years….
"The hunter would have been the first 'to tell a story' because he alone was able to read, in the silent, nearly imperceptible tracks left by his prey, a coherent sequence of events….
"What may be the oldest act in the intellectual history of the human race [is] the hunter squatting on the ground, studying the tracks of his quarry." Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980), 102-3, 105

week 2.

  • Arts and Sciences: Gaddis, Landscape of History
    • presentism
    • periodization/anachronism
    • particularization vs. generalization
    • continuities
    • structure and process
    • induction (moving from observation to rules) or deduction (moving from general rules to particular situations)
    • interdependency of variables
    • reductionism
    • continuities vs. contingency (relate to structure vs. agency)
 "Professor Trevor-Roper tells us that the historian 'ought to love the past.' This is a dubious injunction. To love the past may easily be an expression of the nostalgic romanticism of old men of old societies, a symptom of loss of faith and interest in the present or future." Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (1961), 29

week 3.

  • Message in the Medium: Wilson, History in Crisis?
    • teleology
    • philology
    • periodization
    • anachronism
    • Enlightenment
    • Positivism
    • historicism
    • von Ranke, wie es eigentlich gewesen
  • Evans, In Defense
    • philology, source criticism
    • prosopography (spelled incorrectly, p. 34)
    • whig interpretation vs. Namierization/Namierites
    • Wissenschaft vs.? science
    • fact vs. evidence?
    • the archive and primary sources

"It is part and parcel of the whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with reference to the present; and though there may be a sense in which this is unobjectionable if its implications are carefully considered, and there may be a sense in which it is inescapable, it has often been an obstruction to historical understanding because it has been taken to mean the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present. Through this system of immediate reference to the present day, historical personages can easily and irresistibly be classed into the men who furthered progress and the men who tried to hinder it; so that a handy rule of thumb exists by which the historian can select and reject, and can make his points of emphasis. On this system the historian is bound to construe his function as demanding him to be vigilant for likenesses between past and present, instead of being vigilant for unlikeness; so that he will find it easy to say that he has seen the present in the past, he will imagine that he has discovered a 'root' or an 'anticipation' of the twentieth century, when in reality he is in a world of different connotations altogether, and he has merely tumbled upon what could be shown to be a misleading analogy. Working upon the same system the whig historian can draw lines through certain events, some such line as that which leads through Martin Luther and a long succession of whigs to modern liberty; and if he is not careful he begins to forget that this line is merely a mental trick of his; he comes to imagine that it represents something like a line of causation." Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931)

week 4.

  • Towards Historicism
    • determinist
    • against the grain
    • master-narrative
    • mentalités
    • history from below
    • contingency
    • counterfactual history

Ch. IX. "[T]he preceding discussion has indicated that scientific revolutions are here taken to be those non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one. There is more to be said, however, [and the rest of the chapter focuses on explaining the answer to the following question].... Why should a change of paradigm be called a revolution?..."
Ch. XII. "What is the process by which a new candidate for paradigm replaces its predecessor? Any new interpretation of nature, whether a discovery or a theory, emerges first in the mind of one or a few individuals. It is they who first learn to see science and the world differently, and their ability to make the transition is facilitated by two circumstances that are not common to most other members of the profession. Invariably their attention has been intensely concentrated upon the crisis-provoking problems; usually, in addition, they are men so young or so new to the crisis-ridden field that practice has committed them less deeply than most of their contemporaries to the world view and rules determined by the old paradigm."
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), 92, 144

week 5.

  • Marx
    • objectification, alienation
    • (class) consciousness
    • dialectical method
    • superstructure
    • alienation, division/objectification of labor
    • eschatalogical
    • historicist, Whig School
    • histoire engagée
    • historical materialism
    • structurists, praxis

"The materialist conception of history has a lot of them ["dangerous friend(s)"] nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history. Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late [18]70s: 'All I know is that I am not a Marxist'." F. Engels in London to C. Schmidt in Berlin, 5 Aug. 1890

 

"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity." EPT, MEWC (1963)

week 6.

  • Frontier
    • Process
 "Those who insist that history is simply the effort to tell the thing exactly as it was, to state the facts, are confronted with the difficulty that the fact which they would represent is not planted on the solid ground of fixed conditions; it is in the midst and is itself a part of the changing currents, the interacting influences of the time, deriving its significance as a fact from its relations to the deeper-seated movements of the age, movements so gradual that often only the passing years can reveal the truth about the fact and its right to a place on the historian's page."  Frederick Jackson Turner, "Social Forces in American History," AHR 16, 2 (1911): 231

week 7.

  • Macro/Micro
    • Macrohistory
      • longue durée, conjoncture, histoire événementielle
      • histoire totale
      • mentalité
    • Microhistory
      • bricolage
      • thick description
      • clues


"'History that is not quantifiable,' remarked Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, one of the school's leading exponents, in 1979, 'cannot claim to be scientific.' 'Tomorrow's historian,' he added, 'will have to be able to programme a computer in order to survive.'" Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York, 1999), 33, quoting Ladurie's 1968 article reprinted in The Territory of the Historian (1979)

"The quantitative approach to history in general, and the quantitative approach to cultural history in particular, can obviously be criticized as reductionist. Generally speaking, what can be measured is not what matters." Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929-89 (Stanford, 1990), 79

week 8.

  • The Linguistic Turn
    • critical theory
    • poststructuralism
    • discursive
    • thick description
    • signifier, signified

"What passes for wisdom among my own colleagues is that science is a Western disease... that all descriptions of social life are fabrications; and that empirical research is nothing but a bourgeois dirty trick.” Marvin Harris, "No End of Messiahs," , New York Times, 26 Nov. 1971, p. E21

“Historians take unusual pains to erase the elements in their own work which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy—the unavoidable obstacles of their passions.... Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men. The traditional devices for constructing a comprehensive view of history and for retracing the past as a patient and continuous development must be systematically dismantled.” Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," (trans. 1977)

week 9.

  • Gender
    • patriarchy
    • women's history vs. gender history
    • gendered coding of terms
    • cultural imperatives, cultural (re)constructions
    • discursive wars

"According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the nature/culture distinction between sex and gender did not apply to ordinary usage: gender had become synonymous with sex or the difference between the sexes. The very language that needed to be analyzed was being used to reinscribe the biological body as the ground on which gender was constructed. The question was, and is, how can we disrupt that fixed association in the history we write?” Joan Scott, "Unanswered Questions," AHR Forum, AHR 113, 5 (2008): 1428

week 10.

  • Orientalism and the Postcolonial
    • exteriority
    • other, metropole
    • provincializing Europe/writing back/subaltern speaks
    • hegemony
    • stadial, world vs. global

"A reader of Orientalism might assume that Said is representing the unrepresented against the backdrop of real history.  Modern Orientalism is said to begin with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Surely Napoleon really existed. However, the point of Orientalism is to read that history only through texts. Said opens no unexplored mounds, measures no standing ruins, reconstructs no jumbles of ancient shards.  His discursive archaeology, attributed to historian Michel Foucalt rather than Egyptologist Sir Finders Petrie, is one that allows him to proceed unsoiled by the disturbed facticity in artifacts of the past and unsullied by contradictory facts.” Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the unsaid (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007): 239

 

week 11.

  • Culture and Resistance
    • thick description
    • hidden transcripts
    • infrapolitics

 

"The hustler, out there in the ghetto jungles, has less respect for the white power structure than any other Negro in North America.  The ghetto hustler is internally restrained by nothing.  He had no religion, no concept of morality, no civic responsibility, no fear - nothing." The Autobiography of Malcolm X, ed. Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine, 1974), 318.

"The movement between Mexican and American cultures is not so much a world of confusion, but rather a place of opportunity and innovation."George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican-American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 9

week 12.

  • Post-Modernism and the History of emotions
    • discourse
    • "techniques" of governing
    • Grub Street, production of texts
    • the Enlightenment
    • emotional regimes, emotional communities

"'File' in an anagram for 'life.'" Andrei Codrescu, "Adding to My Life" (1989), in The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans: And Other Essays (New York: Picador, 1993), 22


"There is nothing outside the text." Jacques Derrida, Of Gramatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976), 158

"To say that there is nothing outside the text is to say that there is nothing outside of textuality — there is no engagement with or inhabitance of the world which doesn't live off the mediation of signs. Thus, elsewhere he reformulates the claim as 'there is nothing outside of context' (Linc, 136), or 'there is nothing but context' (Taste, 19)." James K. A. Smith, Jacques Derrida: live theory (London: Continuum Books, 2005), 44


week 13.

  • Beyond the Cultural Turn?
    • the Enlightenment Project
    • totalizing descriptions
    • the cultural, the social, the political
    • meta-narrative, micro-narratives
    • empiricism
    • antiquarian
 "Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations in which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class consciousness is the way in which the experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class consciousness does not . . . [C]lass is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition." E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; Harmondsworth, 1968), 9-10.

week 14.

  • Reports from the front(s) I
 
 

week 15.

  • Reports from the front(s) II
    • Conclusion(s)
  

 

requirements, papers, and exams

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last modified on September 22, 2011