Trinity College, h 299, What is History? Historiography & Historical Method

Spring 2015, T & TH, 1:30-2:45pm

Classroom: LIB - MUS&MED

Instructor: Professor Darío A. Euraque

Office: Seabury N-45

Office Telephone: 297-2398

Office Hours: T , 3-4pm & Th 3-5pm, F, 4-5pm, and by appointment.
Course Description:
This is a course about the study of the character and range of activities undertaken by professional historians. Students will critically evaluate the way in which these historians treat evidence, make arguments, and draw conclusions. Topics considered will include an introduction of some of the sub disciplines within the field and an examination of a number of important exchanges on matters of substance and method currently under debate among historians. The course in different ways addresses the key learning goals of the History Department: Develop critical and analytic skills in reading primary and secondary sources; Construct a framework of knowledge about the past , learn to understand the past in its own terms, and develop an empathetic understanding of disparate histories and cultures as constituting common threads of human experience; Understand how historians construct arguments about the past and learn how to do the same; Craft well-developed essays that make arguments about the past based on effective use of evidence; Pursue independent research based on primary and secondary sources; and Engage in discussion about the past respectfully, mindfully, and knowledgeably. Finally, this course also outlines, in very broad terms, a kind of general history of historical conceptualization and writing as viewed by a specialist on Latin America and the Caribbean history and historiography.
Readings:
A Course Reader with selected essays from books and academic articles from scholarly journals. Students must purchase this Euraque Reader from the instructor.
Bibliography for H299: Readings Scheduled in the Syllabus and for Paper 3 Projects
Beverly Southgate, “Why history: Past answers,” in Beverly Southgate, History: What and Why? Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Perspectives (Routledge, 1996), pp. 28-57.

A. Marwick, “The Historian at Work: the Writing of History,” in Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History (Lyceum 1983), 3^rd edition, pp. 235-283.

Ron T. Robin, “Plagiarism and the Demise of the Gatekeepers,” in Ron Robin, Scandals and Scoundrels: Seven Cases that Shook the Academy (University of California Press, 2004), pp. 31-56.

Donald Kelley, “Greek Horizons” and “Roman Foundations,” in Donald Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (Yale, 1998), pp. 19-47 & 48-74.

Georg Iggers, “Classical Historicism as a Model of Historical Scholarship,” in Georg Iggers, Historiography in the 20^th Century (Wesleyan University Press, 1997), pp. 23-35.

Enrique Florescano, Memory, Myth and Time in Mexico (University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 65-99.

Robert Sharer, Daily Life in Maya Civilization (Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 175-194.

Masayuki Sato, "Comparative Ideas of Chronology," History and Theory (1991), pp. 275-301.

Nicola Miller, “History as Hieroglyphics,” in Nicola Miller, In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals & the Quest for National Identity in Spanish America (Verso, 1999), pp. 210-244.

John Tosh, “History by numbers”, in Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, methods and new directions in the study of modern history (Pearson Education, 2002), pp. 244-270.

Francois Furet, In the Workshop of History (Chicago University Press, 1984), pp. 40-53.

Loren Haskins & Kirk Jeffrey, Understanding Quantitative History (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 1-5.

Karl Marx, "The Communist Manifesto," in David McLelland ed. Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 219-247.

Georg Iggers, “Marxist Historical Science from Historical Materialism to Critical Anthropology,” in Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the 20th Century (Wesleyan, 1997), pp. 78-94.

Daniel Chirot, “The Social and Historical Landscape in Marc Bloch," in Theda Skocpol ed. Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 22-43.

Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Duree,” in Lynn Hunt ed., et al. Histories: French Constructions of the Past (New Press, 1995), pp. 115-145.

Rosalind Coward, “Structuralism” in Language and Materialism (Routledge, 1977), pp. 12-24, and “Semiotics”, pp. 25-29.

Claude Levi-Strauss, "Scientific Criteria in the Social and Human Disciplines," and Louis L. Althusser, "Reply to John Lewis,” Histories: French Constructions of the Past (New Press, 1995), pp. 191-201.

Michel Foucault, "Two Lectures," in Nicholas Dirks eds. et al., Culture/Power/History (Princeton U. Press, 1994), pp. 200-221.

Madan Sarup, "Foucault and the Social Sciences," in Madan Sarup, an Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism & Post-Modernism (University of Georgia, 1989), pp. 63-95.

Callum G. Brown, “Sign”,” in Brown, Postmodernism for Historians (Harlow, England; NY: Pearson, Longman 2005), pp. 32-58.

Sherry Ortner, "Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties," Nicholas B. Dirks eds. et al., in Culture/Power/History, (Princeton U. Press, 1994), pp. 372-411.

William Roseberry, "The Unbearable Lightness of Anthropology,” Radical History Review (1996), pp. 5-25.

Keith Jenkins, "On Hayden White," On `What is History?’ (Routledge, 1995), pp. 134-179.

Norman, "Telling It Like it Was: Historical Narratives on Their Terms," History and Theory (1991), pp. 119-135.

D. Stannard, “Prologue,” in David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. ix-xv.

Lawrence Osborne, “The Numbers Game,” Lingua Franca (September 1998), pp. 49-57.

D. Clark, “Middle Passage” from Darlene Clark Hine et al, African Americans: a Concise History, Vol. 1 (Prentice Hall, 2004), pp. 15-27.

Phillip C. Curtin et al., “How Many Were Enslaved?” in David Northrup, Editor, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 1st edition (D.C Heath, 1994), pp. 37-66.

Gerda Lerner, “Rethinking the Paradigm,” in Lerner, Why History Matters (Oxford U. Press, 1997), pp. 146-198;

Bryan Palmer, Descent into Discourse (Temple U. Press, 1990), pp. 145-186

Joan Scott, "Women's History," in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Pennsylvania State U., 1992), pp. 3-43.

Camile Paglia, “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art”, in Paglia, Sexual Personae (Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 1-39.

Merry E. Weisner-Hanks, “Sexuality” in Gender in History (London: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 207-235.

John Weeks, “Sexuality in History Revisited,” in Sexualities in History: A Reader eds. Kim M. Phillips & Barry Reay (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 27-41.

Nikki Craske, “Gender and Sexuality in Latin America,” in The Companion to Latin American Studies, Ed. Philip Swanson (Oxford U. Press, 2003), pp. 200- 221.

Kamala Kempadoo, “Past Studies, New Directions,” Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race and Sexual Labor (Routledge, 2004), pp. 15-51.

Matthew Frye Jacobson, “Introduction: the Fabrication of Race” and “Free White Persons in the Republic, 1790-1840,” in Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants & the Alchemy of Race, (Harvard, 1998), pp. 1-12 & 14-38.

Matthew Restall “Invisible Warrior: The Myth of the White Conquistador,” in Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford, 2003), pp. 44-63.

M. Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power & the Production of History (Beacon, 1995), pp. 70-107.

Dario A. Euraque, "The Threat of Blackness to the Mestizo Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Honduran Banana Economy, 1920s and 1930s," in Steven Striffler and Mark Moberg, Eds., Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 229-249.

Paul Costello, World Historians and their Goals (Northern Illinois University 1993), pp. 47-94.

M. Lewis and K. Wigen, "The Spatial Constructs of Orient and Occident, East and West,” in Martin W. Lewis & Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 47-72.
Evaluation:
The evaluation for this course originates in three papers and systematic evaluation of student participation in the various dimensions of the course. The student class participation component of the course will be worth 40% of the final grade. Keep in mind that class participation will be based on a rubric of criteria registered in a document on Class Participation that Prof. Euraque will distribute the first class day of the semester. Also, the first three papers will each count for different percentages of the final grade. Paper 1, 5- pages long, will count for 15% of the final grade; paper 2, 6-8 pages, will represent 20%; and paper 3, 12-15 pages long, representing the “final exam” for the course, will count for 25 percent of the final grade.

Tentative Schedule:

January

Tuesday, January 20: Introduction to the syllabus and course policies.

Tuesday, February 10, Discuss, Jonah Lehrer, “Marcel Proust: The Method of Memory,” in Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (New York: Miffling, 2007), pp. 75-95. Prof. Euraque will distribute this essay to H299 students electronically.

Thursday February 12. Discuss Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 1-40; Katharina Hering, “That Food of the Memory Which Gives the Clue to Profitable Research": Oral History as a Source for Local, Regional, and Family History in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century”, The Oral History Review, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer - Autumn, 2007), pp. 27-47. Prof. Euraque will circulate electronic versions of these articles.
Tuesday February 17. No Class. All students are required to attend the History Department sponsored Mead Lecture by Dr. Heather Cateau, "’Caribbean- Connecticut Connections’ - From the 18th Century to the 21st Century,” Smith House, 4:30pm. Dr. Cateau is a senior lecturer in Caribbean History at the University of the West Indies’ St. Augustine Campus in Trinidad & Tobago. She serves currently as its Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education.
Thursday February 19. Second First Hands-on session in the Library and consultation with Mr. Jeffrey Liszka, Instructional Librarian on published and on-line collections of primary documents associated with the genre of historical “Biography”. This session is very important for your third and final paper for this course due late in April! Plan accordingly.
Sunday February 22. Paper 1 due by mid-night, via email to Prof. Euraque, midnight. Failure to so means an “F”. Policies on late papers and related matters will have been discussed the first day of the course.
III. Towards A History of Historiography?
Tuesday February 24, “Ancient” History. Part I. Discuss “Greek Horizons” and “Roman Foundations,” in Donald Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (Yale, 1998), pp. 19-47 & 48-74, all in Euraque Reader.
Thursday February 26^th Trinity Day. No class.

March

Tuesday March 03. “Ancient” History. Part II. Discuss Enrique Florescano, Memory, Myth and Time in Mexico (University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 65-99, Robert Sharer, Daily Life in Maya Civilization (Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 175-194 & Masayuki Sato, "Comparative Ideas of Chronology," History and Theory (1991), pp. 275-301- all in Euraque Reader.

Tuesday March 24. Anthropology & the Rise of the “New Cultural” History. Discuss David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” Annual Review Anthropology, Vol. 41 (2012): pp. 461–80. Prof. Euraque will circulate electronic versions of this article.