Week I Wednesday September 1: What Historians Have Done



Andrew Shankman History 550

Rutgers University Fall 2012 Office: 209 in 429 Cooper phone: 6477

Email: shankman@camden.rutgers.edu

Office hours: M noon-1 p.m.\ W 3:30-4:45 p.m.

History 550, Craft is unique in the History Graduate curriculum. Other graduate courses ask you to master the historiography of a period or a significant issue or theme, or to produce your own historiography through research and writing. Craft requires you to consider what historians are doing when they go about making claims to explain past events. In Craft we will examine how and why historians can claim to provide explanations about the past and what assumptions (explicit and implicit—at times conscious, semi-conscious and even unconscious) historians make when they assert such claims.

We examine the issue of imposing order and explanation on past events at an exciting (but often confusing) period in intellectual life. Since at least the 1960s, for a variety of reasons the class will consider, claims that the past is stable and fixed, that truth is available and discernable, that degrees of importance can be assigned regarding past events, past perspectives of events, and past actors in those events, these claims—claims which for so long were central to the production of scholarship—have been questioned and, by some, rejected. Indeed, many historians and scholars from other disciplines now see the past, at the very least, as fluid and contested, perhaps beyond any one person’s capacity to impose certitude. Authors’ intentions are treated as less important (and perhaps are even thoroughly opaque) than are readers’ interpretations of them. The linear setting out of step by step cause and effect appears to many scholars to be merely a self-interested perspective, special pleading, and even an act of aggression—an effort to impose one’s identity and point of view on others. At their most extreme, some scholars equate offering explanations with violent impositions of power. In short, ours is a heady, charged, exciting, and often bewildering time to be in the humanities.

By examining some (though by no means all) of the recent and fairly recent approaches to explaining the past, we shall come to a better understanding of our epoch in the humanities. There will be three writing assignments. The first two will be evaluation and reaction papers that treat a week of assigned readings. These papers will treat a week’s readings from weeks II through VIII. The first paper must choose one week from weeks II through IV and is due October 3rd. If you choose to write about week V, Postmodernism, your paper will be due October 10th. The second paper must treat a week from week V through VIII and is due on November 7th.

Your third paper will consider the complexities of distinguishing valid from invalid historical claims by discussing the scholarly, pseudo-scholarly, and non-scholarly ways that various people we will be reading and reading about in the third unit of the class have gone about making claims about the past.

Each paper is worth 20% of the final grade and the remaining 40% will come from active and constructive participation in seminar discussion. The seminar is a venerable tradition in graduate study and allowing others to shoulder the burden of discussion for you is simply not an option. Note on Attendance: We are all well past the taking of attendance. Each student is expected to attend each class on time prepared to discuss the assigned readings. Though it is far from ideal, at times absence may be unavoidable. There is no need to tell me if you will be absent. But you are required to write a five to seven page paper discussing the assigned readings for the class that you missed. That paper is due at the next class meeting. Too many absences will result in a lowered grade at the discretion of the professor.

Books to Purchase:

1. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession

2. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

3. Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made

4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism

5. Edward Said, Orientalism

6. Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust

7. Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?

8. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life

9. David Blight, Race and Reunion

10. Richard Evans, In Defense of History

NOTE WELL: There will be numerous additional readings on online course reserve

Week I Wednesday September 5:

What Historians Have Done: Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession whole book

Unit I: Historians’ Approaches

Week II Wednesday September 12

Marxism and Class Formation:

ON RESERVE:

1) Dennis Dworkin, Class Struggles pp. 15-30 and 45-58

2) Karl Marx, Capital volume I pp. 671-715

3) Raymond Williams, Base and Superstructure

4) Eric Hobsbawm, On History pp. 141-156

5) Ellen Meiskins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism

6) E.P. Thompson “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?”

Week III Wednesday September 19:

Thinking about Thinking: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions whole book

Week IV Wednesday September 26:

The Postmodern Challenge:

ON RESERVE

1) Dennis Dworkin, Class Struggles pp. 63-105

2) Geoff Danaher et al., Understanding Foucault

3)Michel Foucault, “Excerpts from the History of Sexuality” in Postmodern Reader

4) Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra” in Postmodern Reader

5) Zygmunt Bauman, “Postmodernity, Or Living with Ambivalence” in Postmodern Reader

6) John Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,”

7) Catherine Belsey, “Towards Cultural History” in Postmodern Reader

8) Hayden White, “Postmodernism and Textual Anxieties”

9) Gertrude Himmlefarb, “ Postmodernist History,”

10) Joyce Appleby et al., “Postmodernism and the Crisis of Modernity” in Telling the Truth About History pp. 198-237

Week V Wednesday October 3:

FIRST PAPER DUE AT BEGINNING OF CLASS

Women’s History and Gender:

ON RESERVE

1) Dennis Dworkin, Class Struggles pp. 137-161

2) Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History

3) Emily Rosenberg “Gender”

4) Kathleen Brown, “Brave New Worlds: Women’s and Gender History”

5) Carolyn Dean, “The Productive Hypothesis, Foucault, Gender, and the History of Sexuality”

6) Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Gender, Class and Power: Some Theoretical Considerations”

7) Linda Gordon “U.S. Women’s History” in The New American History

8) Linda Kerber “Separate Spheres: Female Worlds, Woman’s Pace”

9) Jane Sherron De Hart and Linda Kerber, “Gender and the New Women’s History”

Week VI Wednesday October 10:

Slavery and Hegemony: Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordon Roll: The World the Slaves Made pp. preface, 3-158, 585-660

ON RESERVE

1) Dennis Dworkin, Class Struggles, pp. 162-188

2) Raymond Williams “Hegemony” from his Marxism and Literature

3) T.J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities” 4) George Orwell “Shooting an Elephant”

Week VII Wednesday October 17:

Nationalism: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities whole book

ON RESERVE

1) Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History

2) Ernest Gellner, “Nationalism and Modernity”

3) Eric Hobsbawm, “The Nation as Invented Tradition”

Week VIII Wednesday October 24

Postcolonialism: Edward Said, Orientalism pp. 1-110,

ON RESERVE

1) Dennis Dworkin, Class Struggles pp. 189-222

2) Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Post Colonial Criticism,”

3) Partha Chatterjee “Whose Imagined Community?”

4) D.A. Washbrook, “Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse and the Historiography of the British Empire” in Oxford History of the British Empire v. 5 pp. 596-611

Unit II: The Instability of Historical Knowledge

The Holocaust as a Case Study

Week IX Wednesday October 31:

History: Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust preface, introduction, and entire book

Week X Wednesday November 7:

SEONOND PAPER DUE AT BEGINNING OF CLASS

Denying History: Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust never Happened and Why Do They Say It? preface, introduction, and entire book

Problems in the Academy: The Bellesiles Incident

Week XI Wednesday November 14:

ON RESERVE

1) Michael Bellesiles, “The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760-1865”

2) Joyce Lee Malcolm, “Response to Bellesiles’s Review of To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right.

3) Michael Bellesiles, “Reply to Malcolm”

4) Robert Gross, “Introduction to William and Mary Quarterly Forum”

5) Jack Rakove, “Words, Deeds, and Guns: Armin America and the Second Amendment”

6) Gloria Main, “Many Things Forgotten: The Use of Probate Records in Arming America”

7) Ira Gruber,” Of Arms and Men: Arming America and Military History”

8) Randolph Roth, “Guns, Gun Culture, and Homicide: The Relationship Between Firearms, the Uses of Firearms, and Interpersonal Violence”

9) Michael Bellesiles, “Exploring America’s Gun Culture”

10) James Lindgren, “Fall from Grace: Armin America and the Bellesiles Scandal”

11) Jerome Sternstein, “Pulped Fiction: Michael Mellesiles and His Yellow Note Pads”

12) Stanley Katz, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Hannah Holborn Gray, “Summary of Emory Report on Michael Bellesiles”

13) Peter Charles Hoffer, “Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, and Fraud—American History from Bancroft to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin pp. 141-171

Week XII: Wednesday November 21 Thanksgiving Break: No Class Meeting

Unit III History, Memory, and the Construction of Meaning

Week XIII Wednesday November 28:

Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life

Week XIV Wednesday December 5:

David Blight, Race and Reunion

Week XV Wednesday December 12:

Richard Evans, In Defense of History

Final Paper Due Wednesday December 17 at 5 p.m.

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