History 6010

Historiography
Fall 2016
Syllabus

Dr. Eli Rubin

Western Michigan University

OFFICE: 4418 FRIEDMANN HALL

OFFICE HOURS: M 1-3 pm & W 1:30-2:30
OFFICE PHONE: 269-387-4646
E-MAIL: [Link]@[Link]

I. INTRODUCTION

Welcome to History 6010, Historiography. This seminar is required for all graduate
students in the history department. It is intended to introduce you to many of the most
important methodologies and philosophies that have developed over the last 100 years
in the field of history. It is also intended to introduce you to some of the most
influential new fields that have developed since the 1970s and 1980s, including cultural
history, gender history, environmental history, everyday life history, spatial history, and
world history, among others. At the end of this seminar, you should be able to
understand and use basic historiographical and methodological references such as
Marxism, Foucault, gender, Annales history, transnationality and borderlands, etc., with
proficiency in a wide range of scholarly environments, and to use this proficient
comprehension as a platform upon which to further build your historical and scholarly
career.

II. STRUCTURE OF SEMINAR

Each week we cover a distinct area of historiography. Seminar members are expected
to have the readings done and with them in each seminar. Each seminar, students will
be expected to write reaction papers to the reading which substantially comment on the
weeks’ readings and introduce a number of questions for consideration in the seminar.
These are due Sunday by 5 pm on the e-learning page
Participation in the seminar is crucial to your success in the seminar. You are expected
to come to each seminar prepared to comment extensively and intelligently on the
readings and the reaction papers, and you are expected to listen and engage with your
seminar mates actively. If there are aspects of the readings you do not understand, you
are expected to ask about these in seminar.

Your major assignment will be a substantial historiographical paper on which deals with
one or more of the weekly themes and readings. This should be at least 20 pages,
double spaced, and will be due in the dropbox on e-learning by Monday, Dec. 12 at
11:59 pm. Your paper will count for 50% of your grade; your seminar participation will
count for the other 50%.

III. REQUIRED READINGS

The following books have been ordered in the WMU bookstore and are required for the
seminar. Many of these are books that you will keep for the duration of your graduate
career and beyond, and will continue to be part of your library. Other readings are
excerpts, and have been scanned and posted to the e-learning page as pdf files. You are
required to bring these to seminar as well, either as print outs or on an electronic
format (laptop or tablet). Readings that are available on e-learning are denoted with an
asterisk in the weekly schedule below. Most weeks also have a “suggested readings”
component; these are provided for you to go deeper into a certain field in case you
choose that field for your final exam, or for future purposes.

Eli Rubin, Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany. New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Carolyn Steedman Labours Lost Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-1989. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.

David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2011.

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the West. New York and London:
W.W. Norton and Co., 1990.

Geoff Eley, The Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Michel Foucault: The History of Sexuality (Vol. I: An Introduction). New York: Vintage,
1990.

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

George Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the
Postmodern Challenge. Hanover, NH and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997.

Peter Novick, The Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical
Profession. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage, 1966.

Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and
American Plutonium Disasters. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2015.

IV. SCHEDULE OF READINGS

Week One (Sept. 12)

--------CROOKED LINES: AN INTRODUCTION---------

Iggers, Historiography: Intro- end of ch. 4.

Eley, The Crooked Line (Entire book)

Week Two (Sept. 19)

-----OBJECTIVITY AND NARRATIVE/DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES-----

Novick, That Noble Dream Intro, Part I, skim Parts II & III, Part IV

*Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History” Past &
Present, No. 85 (Nov., 1979), pp. 3-24
 Week Three (Sept. 26)
-------THE ANNALES-------

Iggers, Ch. 5

Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-1989. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1990.

Ferdinand Braudel, The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II (excerpt) 1-102.

Suggested:

Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie Times of Feast, Times of Famine: a History of Climate Since
the Year 1000. (Translated by Barbara Bray.) Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1971.

______________ The Mind and Method of the Historian. (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1981)

_______________. The Ancien Régime : a history of France, 1610-1774

Lucien Febvre, The problem of unbelief in the sixteenth century, the religion of Rabelais
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981)

Week Four (Oct. 3)

-------MARXISM-------

Iggers, Historiography Ch. 6

EP Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class

Suggested:
Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History,
1832-1932

Howard Zinn A People’s History of the United States

*Paul Gilroy There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack

Week Five (Oct. 10)

---------POSTMODERNITY---------

Iggers, Historiography Ch. 10

Readings on e-learning TBD*

Suggested:

Terry Eagleton, Introduction to Literary Criticism

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatari, Difference and Repetition

Hayden White, Metahistory

Frederic Jameson, The Postmodern Condition

Week Six (Oct. 17)

-------CULTURAL HISTORY & FOUCAULT--------

Burke: What is Cultural History (excerpt)*

Michel Foucault: History of Sexuality (Entire book)

Suggested:

Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences*

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (excerpt)*

Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Excerpt)*

Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1983)

Lynne Hunt (ed.) The New Cultural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1989)

Hunt and Victoria Bonnell, eds. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of
Society and Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999)

Glifford Geertz The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973)

Week Seven (Oct. 24)

.
------GENDER------

*Joan W. Scott, “’Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis AHR 91 (December

1986): 1053-75.

*Carolyn Steedman Labours Lost

Suggested:

*Isabel Hull, Sexuality and the State in Germany, 1700-1815

Natalie Zemon Davis: Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

INITIAL TOPICS DUE BY EMAIL

Week Eight (Oct. 31)

-------- ENVIRONMENTAL --------

Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (Entire book)

*Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie, “The History of Rain and Fine Weather” (1973) from
Histories : French constructions of the past / edited by Jacques Revel and Lynn
Hunt, 423-26
Suggested:

Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2002)

Lynne Heasley A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo
Valley (Wisconsin, 2005)

Week Nine (Nov. 7)

----------URBAN SPACE-----------

Eli Rubin, Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016)

Suggested:

Scott, Seeing Like a State (Entire book)

*Eli Rubin, Marion Gray, Barry Jackisch and Kristin Poling, “From the Grüne Wiesen to
Urban Space: Berlin, Expansion, and the longue durée” Special issue of Central
European History June 2014 (Vol. 47, n 2).

Matthew Gandy: Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press, 2003)

Dorothee Brantz and Sonja Dümpelmann, eds., Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in
the Twentieth Century (Charlottesville, Va: University of Virginia Press, 2011)

*Brantz, with Sasha Disko and Georg Wagner-Kyora, eds., Thick Space: Approaches to
Metropolitanism, (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012).

David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers)

Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw, In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political
Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (New York: Routledge, 2006),
 Week Ten (Nov. 14)
---------EVERYDAY LIFE HISTORY----------

Iggers, Historiography, Ch. 9

*Crew: “Alltagsgeschichte: A New Social History "From below"?” Central European

History, Vol. 22, No. 3/4, German Histories: Challenges in Theory, Practice,
Technique (Sep. - Dec., 1989), pp. 394-407

Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (entire book)

Recommended:

*Alf Lüdtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing historical experiences and
ways of life. (Princeton: 1995)

Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean, eds., Interest and Emotion : Essays on the Study
of Family and Kinship (Cambridge: 1984)

David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early
Modern Germany (Cambridge: 1984)

Week Eleven (Nov. 21)

--------HISTORY AND MEMORY---------

*Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” Representations, No. 26,
Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory. (Spring, 1989), pp. 7-24.

*Alon Confino “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method”

The American Historical Review, Vol. 102, No. 5. (Dec., 1997), pp. 1386-1403.

Suggested

Pierre Nora, Les lieux des mémoire (English: Realms of Memory) (Paris, 1984), Vol. I

Jay Winter: Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural
History (Oxford, 1997)
Rudy Koshar: From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990
(Berkeley: California, 2000)

“AHR Forum: History and Memory,” AHR 102 (December 1997):

1371-1412.

David Glassberg, “Public History and the Study of Memory,” The Public
Historian 18 (Spring 1996): 7-23.

“Roundtable: Responses to David Glassberg’s ‘Public History and the

Study of Memory,’” The Public Historian 19 (Spring 1997): 30-
72.

Week Twelve (Nov. 28)

-------TRANSNATIONALITY-------

Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa (Entire book)

Suggested

Annemarie Sammartino: The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914-1922
(Cornell, 2010)

Caitlin Murdock, Changing Places: Society, Culture, and Territory in the Saxon-Bohemian
Borderlands, 1870-1946 (Michigan, 2010)

Holly Case Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during
World War II (Stanford: 2009)

DETAILED OUTLINE OF PAPER DUE

Week Thirteen (Dec. 5)

------BIG HISTORY, WORLD HISTORY, AND DEEP TIME-------

Christian, Maps of Time (entire book)

Suggested
*Patrick Manning, "The Problem of Interaction in World History," American Historical
Review 101 (June 1996): 771-82.

*Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis”

Geographical Review, Vol. 89, No. 2, Oceans Connect. (Apr., 1999), pp. 215-224.

FINAL PAPERS DUE MONDAY DECEMBER 12 ON E-LEARNING