His 5400 Goals ->
|
- Understand the choices involved (arguments being advanced) in early modern periodization and in pursuing social and/or cultural history; be able to develop one’s own rationale for your own choices.
- Understand how overarching narratives based on political, religious, economic, or demographic arguments relate to early modern microhistories and other studies by social and cultural historians; be able to argue your own set of significant intersections in the early modern period between grand narrative and socio-cultural study.
- Understand the theoretical language and method (approach to primary sources) of early modern social and cultural historians; be able to use some of that language and method in your own work (and/or to critique some theory/method meaningfully).
- Know how to locate, “read” (analyze/use), and reference (cite) multiple types of primary print sources for study of the Anglophone early modern world.
- Be aware of specific strengths and weaknesses of print sources to plumb non-elite early modern culture(s); be able to use at least some of these sources “against the grain” to do just that.
- Understand the relation between ephemera and history; be able to find/use/cite ephemera historically.
|
For this course you should: ->
|
- Write three brief (two-to-three page, 600 words each max) responses (one for each section) to a quote (to be provided) in which you position yourself and at least one historian read for that section (that is, how you and that historians would react to the quote and why), use (quote from/analyze) a contemporary source or data to prove your point, suggest specific additional types of material that might help prove your point (20%);
- Review three additional articles or chapters (450-word max each, one from each of three sections) in which you point out the/an hypothesis, quote it, relate it to the relevant theme, and compare and contrast the article with a required reading (15%); for weeks in which you are reading an additional article you should initiate the D2L discussion by posting by Sunday a thought/question relating your additional reading to the assigned readings
- 1. or 2. can be re-written (1-2) but must be submitted before the end of the next section.
- Research and write a longer paper on one aspect of print/popular culture and society (employing the method and views of the historians read), focusing on seventeenth-century English pamphlets, ballads, broadsides, and newspapers, in which you critique both the type of source and the methodologies, and in which you also point out what can be learned from such an interaction (10-12 pp., 40%)
- Participate in discussion and occasional in-class/D2L writings, presentations, including D2L discussion (25%). This is a graduate course; participation, not attendance counts. Each week you should come to class having completed the main readings, able to identify the purpose and thesis of each chapter or article assigned, able to describe the types of evidence used, and ready to evaluate/analyze the authors’ findings/arguments in seminar. You must contribute at least once to online discussion by Tuesday evening (9 pm) before that week’s seminar. You should also listen and respond to other views. In order to use your final research paper to “test” other historians’ findings, in order to prepare for comprehensive MA exams, and in order to clarify your own thinking process, take notes during and outside the seminar itself.
- Present on one Primary Source Database, including its scope, tricks on how to use it, and how it relates to the subject(s) of this course.
|