HIST 612

Fall 2008

Historical Methods and Writing

Instructor: Carlos Aguirre

Office and phone number: 369 McKenzie Hall, 346-5905

Office hours: Wed, 11-12, Thurs, 12-1

E-mail address: caguirre@uoregon.edu

Course Description

This colloquium is intended to provide a comprehensive introduction to the most relevant fields of study, theoretical debates, and methodological trends in the discipline of history. It is the first of a three-part sequence that will offer graduate students the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the process of conceiving, researching, and producing historically-informed work. The goal is to set a solid foundation for our students to master current historiographical trends and help them define/refine their own research agenda.

Course Requirements:

1) Oral presentation (20%). Each student will be in charge of introducing one of the sessions (a 15-20 minute presentation), offering a critical summary of the readings, highlighting the main contributions of the assigned materials, and suggesting issues for discussion.

2) A historian’s critical profile (30%). Each student will choose a prominent historian in his/her field and will prepare a 5-page historiographical profile (main contributions, controversies and debates s/he was involved in, theoretical influences, career evolution, etc.). This exercise will be due on week 9 and will be circulated to all other students. We will discuss them during our final meeting.

3) Two book reviews (15% each). Each student will write two book reviews (2-3 pages each). The books will be chosen among those being assigned for the seminar. Students must submit their first book review NO LATER than week 5. The second will be due on or before week 9.

4) Participation (20%). Attendance is mandatory and participation in discussions is expected. The quality of the class is greatly dependent on the students’ ability to raise questions and contribute to our discussions. More than one unjustified absence will result in a grade penalty.

Schedule of topics and readings

Week 1: Introduction to the seminar

Week 2: Recent trends in US Historiography

Readings:

Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line. From Cultural History to the History of Society (University of Michigan Press, 2005).

Forum in the American Historical Review, April 2008 (articles by Sewell, Spiegel, Goswami, and Eley).

Suggested:

F. R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

Joyce Appleby et al. Telling the Truth About History (New York: Norton, 1994).

Joyce Appleby, A Restless Past. History and the American Public (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).

Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds. Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

Peter Burke, ed. New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park: Penn State Press, 1991).

Frederick Cooper, et al. Confronting Historical Paradigms. Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Arif Dirlik et al, History after the Three Worlds: Post-Eurocentric Historiographies (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997).

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, eds. Reconstructing History. The Emergence of a New Historical Society (New York: Routledge, 1999).

Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1999).

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

Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002)

Keith Jenkins, The Postmodern History Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997).

Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds. Histories. French Constructions of the Past (New York: The New Press, 1995).

Week 3: The Archive

Reading: Antoinette Burton ed. Archive Stories. Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

Suggested:

Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

Rebecca Comay, ed. Lost in the Archives (Toronto: Alphabet City Media, 2002)

Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz, “Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance,” Archival Science, 2, 1-2, 2002.

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Peter Fritzche, “The Archive,” History and Memory, 17, 1-2, 2005, 15-44.

Carolyn Hamilton et al. eds., Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002).

Verne Harris, Exploring Archives: An Introduction to Archival Ideas and Practice in South Africa (Pretoria: National Archives of South Africa, 2000)

Patrick Joyce, “The Politics of the Liberal Archive,” History of the Human Sciences, 12, 2, 1999, 35-49.

Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993)

Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

Ana Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science, 2, 2002, 87-109

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past. Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

Week 4: Class

Readings:

Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)

“Preface” and Chapter VI, “Exploitation,” from E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966)

William H. Sewell, Jr., “How Classes are Made: Critical Reflections on E.P. Thompson’s Theory of Working-Class Formation,” in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, eds. E.P. Thompson. Critical Perspectives (Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 50-77.

Suggested:

Vinay Bahl, The Making of the Indian Working Class. A Case of the Tata Iron and Steel Company, 1880-1946 (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995).

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History. Bengal 1890-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)

Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, The Future of Class in History. What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007)

Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People. Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Patrick Joyce, ed. Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)

Elias Mandala, Work and Control in a Peasant Economy: A History of the Lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, 1859-1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)

Elizabeth Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses. Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939-1958 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2005)

William H. Sewell, Jr. “How Classes are made: Critical Reflections on E.P. Thompson’s Theory of Working-Class Formation,” in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, eds. E. P. Thompson, Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class. Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983)

Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics. Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution. The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Week 5: The State

Reading: James Scott, Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Peter Evans et al eds. Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 3-37.

Suggested:

Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt. War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002).

Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch. English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).

Julian Go and Anne L. Foster, eds. The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives. (Durham: Duke University Press. 2003).

Jim Jones, ed. The Culture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and the Political Imagination (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003).

Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds. Everyday Forms of State Formation. Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).

Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico (New York: Zone Books, 2005).

Kenneth Pomeranz, “An Empire in Transition: Law, Society, Commercialization and State-Formation in Late Imperial China,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35, 2, 2002, pp. 305-309.

Week 6: Gender and Nationalism

Reading: Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman. Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1991), pp. 1-46.

Suggested:

Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

Daniel James and John D. French, The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

Steve Stern, The Secret History of Gender. Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (University of North Carolina Press, 1995)

Sarah Radcliffe and Sallie Westwood, Remaking the Nation. Place, Identity and Politics in Latin America (Routledge, 1996).

Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux, eds. Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2000).

Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation. Questioning Narratives of Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 1995)

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995).

Gopal Balakrishnan, ed. Mapping the Nation (Verso, 1996)

Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis, eds. The Eagle and the Virgin. Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940 (Duke University Press, 2006)

Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the nation : the family politics of modernizing, colonizing and liberating Egypt (1805/1923) (University of California Press, 2005).

Francesca Morgan, Women and patriotism in Jim Crow America (University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and its Fragments. Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

Mary N. Layoun, Wedded to the Land? Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

Elizabeth Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses. Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939-1958 (Heinemann, 2005).

Week 7: Subaltern Studies

Readings:

Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, eds. Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counterinsurgency,” in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, eds. Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography,” Nepantla, 1, 1, 2000.

Vinay Bahl, “Situating and Rethinking Subaltern Studies for Writing Working Class History,” in Arif Dirlik, Vinay Bahl, and Peter Gran eds. History after the Three Worlds: Post-Eurocentric Historiographies (Maryland: Rowland and Littlefield Publishers, 2000).

Suggested:

Swati Chattopadhyay and Bhaskar Sarkar, eds. “The Subaltern and the Popular,” Special Issue, Postcolonial Studies, 8, 4, 2005.

Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (New York: Verso, 2000).

Joseph Fraccia, “Subaltern Studies and Collective Memories in Piana degli Albanesi: Methodological Reflections on a Historiographical Encounter,” Asian Journal of Social Sciences, 32, 2, 2004.

Vinay Lal, “Subaltern Studies and its Critics: Debates Over Indian History,” History and Theory, 40, February 2001, 135-148.

Christopher Lee, “Subaltern Studies and African Studies,” History Compass, 3, 2005, 1-13.

Florencia Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History,” American Historical Review, 99, 5, 1994.

Gyan Prakash, “The Impossibility of Subaltern History,” Nepantla, 1, 2, 2000.

Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” American Historical Review, 99, 5, 1994.

Ileana Rodríguez, ed. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

Ricardo Salvatore, Wandering Paysanos. State Order and Subaltern Experience in Buenos Aires during the Rosas Era (Durkan: Duke University Press, 2003).

Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice,” Wedge, 7/8, 1985.

Week 8: Slavery and Emancipation and Comparative Perspective

Readings:

Rebecca Scott, Degrees of Freedom. Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

Frederick Cooper, et al, “Introduction,” Beyond Slavery. Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (University of North Carolina, 2000), pp. 1-32.

Suggested:

Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed. Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra. Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World. The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2004).

Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens. Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past. Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995)

Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, eds. Slavery, freedom and the law in the Atlantic world: a brief history with documents (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007).

Peabody, Sue, "There are no slaves in France”: the political culture of race and slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford University Press, 1996).

Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution. Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Louisiana State University Press, 1979).

Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, eds. Slave Revolution in the Caribbean 1789-1804 (Bedfort/St. Martin’s, 2006).

Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds. Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2005).

Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood. The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (Oxford University Press, 1994).

Frederick Cooper, et. al. Beyond Slavery. Explorarions of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

David P. Geggus, ed. The impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic world (University of South Carolina, 2001).

Week 9: Immigration and Whiteness

Reading: David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness. How America’s Immigrants Become White (New York: Basic Books, 2005)

Andrew Hartman, “The Rise and Fall of Whiteness Studies,” Race and Class, 46, 2, 2004, pp. 22-38.

Suggested:

Nancy P. Appelbaum et al., eds. Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire. Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Frank Dikotter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (London: Hurst, 1992)

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

Anthony W. Marx, Making Race and Nation. A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).

Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival. Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, eds. The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991).

Lilia M. Schwarcz, The Spectacle of the Races. Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870-1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999).

Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (London: Pluto Press, 1997)

Week 10: Wrap-up session and discussion of historians’ profiles